A week and a half after Chinese search engine Baidu (BIDU) beat Q2 sales and profit estimates, and forecast above consensus, UBS Securities analyst Wenlin Li today raised the stock’s rating to “Neutral” from “Sell” and more than doubled its price target on the stock to $380 from $150.

Li’s upgrade follows numerous price target increases, with the highest I’ve seen being Asia-based brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets’s $430 price target.

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Baidu (BIDU) shares have spiked today, after Goldman Sachs analyst James Mitchell raised his rating on the stock to “Conviction Buy” from Neutral, while maintaining his recently reduced $145 price target.

Mitchell offers a variety of reasons for his more bullish posture on the Chinese search engine:

• He observes in his research note that the stock now trades at just under 20x 2009 estimated non-GAAP earnings.
• He notes that paid search is just two basis points of GDP in China, versus 9-12 basis points in developed search markets.
• Mitchell sees search spending climbing at about 30 percent a year in China for several years and believes Baidu can maintain query share–with government help and consumer loyalty–giving the company 30 percent revenue and EPS growth.

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The MacBook Brick is a block of high-quality, aircraft-grade aluminum. It is the beginning.

The beginning of what?

It is the beginning of the new Apple manufacturing process to make MacBooks. It is totally revolutionary, a game changer. One of the biggest Apple innovations in a decade.

The MacBook manufacturing process up to this point has been outsourced to Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn. Now Apple is in charge. The company has spent the last few years building an entirely new manufacturing process that uses lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum.

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There seems to be some grassroots support for the idea of an emergency broadcast system on the micro-messaging service Twitter, at least from people who have emergencies to broadcast. The latest cry for help: A Chinese journalist nabbed by security forces during the Olympics and forced to go to a village far from the event.

You can see Zhou “Zuola” Shuguang’s Twitter stream here, but it won’t do you much good if you can’t read Chinese. A translation of his Tweets is on Global Voices Online. According to the article, Zuola–a childless 27-year-old–was ordered to meet with police over accusations of having two children, one more than the local limit. On meeting the police, he was placed in a car, driven to a mining town, and placed under house arrest.

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