Chinese media admits Tiananmen massacre ... for a few hours

A few heads are probably rolling at China Daily this week. That's because the state-run paper ever-so-briefly deemed the 1989 incident at Tiananmen Square as a massacre on August 8. China Daily's Web site picked up a Reuters story about the 2008 Olympics, and for several hours, the newspaper's online, English-language readers learned that "[s]ecurity was tight around Tiananmen Square, where troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 with huge loss of life, as crowds gathered for the celebrations." Here's Google's cached version of the piece with the sentence (pictured above).

Twelve hours later, the sentence was gone.

(Hat tip: Far Eastern Economic Review's Travellers' Tales blog)