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Urban Chinese are embracing the Internet. One especially popular site is Ninth City, which provides an imaginary world. Men and women can plan weddings, invite guests, set up registries and tie the knot -- multiple times. There are half-a-million bloggers now. But a digital divide remains between wired city dwellers and poor, often illiterate country peasants.

Cawker City, Kans., boasts one of America's great roadside attractions: the world's largest ball of sisal twine. Is the claim really true? NPR's Steve Inskeep investigates in a conversation with Kay Thull of the Cawker City Community Club.

White-and-middle-class black flight to the suburbs has left Detroit's landscape pockmarked with abandoned homes and buildings. The city has demolished some of these structures. But not everyone agrees bulldozing is the best solution.

NPR's Ivan Watson reports that U.S. forces are working hard to win public support in Mosul -- the city where American troops have met their greatest resistance. Tensions are running high in this northern Iraqi city, long a bastion of Arab nationalism and considerable support for Saddam Hussein. The influx of Kurds has the Arab majority edgy, and they're taking out their frustrations on U.S. troops.

The Italian city of Turin is about to take the world stage as the host of the 2006 Winter Olympics, but its citizens seem rather blasé about the event. This northern Italian city is a complex mixture of the old and the modern, and it has seen enough history to be unfazed by a single sporting or media event.

Bright lights, big cities and neon... The signs that illuminate the landscape of many American cities were first seen in Los Angeles. Alex Cohen of member station KQED rides along on a tour that spotlights the neon landmarks of Los Angeles -- kicking off a Day to Day series featuring summer tours around America.

The mayor said the two intruders were making a mockery of the city. The tourists were fined and their surfboards confiscated — then they were expelled from the city of canals.

Author Joshua Olsen talks about Better Places, Better Lives. It's a biography of James Rouse, the renowned city planner behind the shopping mall. Rouse planned Columbia, Md., one of the best-planned communities in America, but some of his other ideas for saving America's cities and controlling urban sprawl didn't meet his expectations.

The U.S. Bowling Congress is considering moving its headquarters out of Milwaukee, a city where bowling is as popular as beer. The group says the cost of doing business in Milwaukee is too high. If it moves, it would be another blow to a city that has lost much of its blue-collar industrial heritage, from manufacturing to brewing.

U.S. Marines have reportedly halted street-to-street battles with insurgents in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. But despite a unilateral U.S. call for a truce, skirmishes continue there and in several other Iraqi cities on the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. NPR's Philip Reeves reports.