China Chronicles January 24, 2013
- 3 cops suspended amid woman's multi-hukou property scandal
Three police officers in a rural county in northwest Shaanxi Province have been suspended after a local woman was exposed to own 20-plus apartments in Beijing and several permanent residence permits, the China News Service reported.
Gong Aiai, former deputy chief of a rural bank in Shenmu County and a local legislator, was suddenly in media spotlight after someone revealed on the Internet that she owned more than 20 apartments in Beijing, worth about 1 billion yuan.
She also has two citizen ID cards and four permanent residence permits, an obvious violation of the Chinese law, which forbids Chinese citizens to have more than one ID card and residence permit to prevent people from evading taxes and restrictions on housing purchase.
The three suspended officers included a deputy director of Shenmu County Public Security Bureau. They are accused of helping the woman to obtain multiple residence permits, according to government investigators.
Earlier this month, online whistleblowers revealed that Gong accumulated over 20 properties in Beijing using her fake IDs.
Following the online exposure, Gong explained that she quit her job with the Shenmu County Commercial Bank and started helping her family with their family businesses, which include mining. The houses were purchased with her legal income, and she did not use her position at the bank to acquire them, she said.
Yu Qingcai, chairman of the bank, said Gong tendered her resignation letter last year and has not contacted the bank since. The bank approved her resignation request early this month.
Details of their investigation were not released yet. - Beijing sets stricter emission limit
BEIJING will enforce an equivalent of Euro V standard on new cars next month as the government is hard-pressed to improve the worsening air quality.
Once the new standard comes into effect on February 1, it is expected to reduce nitrogen oxide emission by 40 percent.
Beijing was choked by a hazardous smog from January 10 to 16 before a cold front brought some relief to the residents. However, the city's reading of PM2.5 - airborne particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter - rebounded to serious levels yesterday because of dense smog. The severe pollution has led to complaints that the city's air quality only depends on wind and rain.
While tightening the emission standard on new cars, the Beijing government also said that gasoline and diesel that meets the new standard will be available in local gas stations from May 31.
The new standard will apply to new cars that have yet to receive license plates, Xinhua news agency reported, citing Fang Li, vice director of the city's environment protection bureau. Vehicles currently in use will be exempted.
The sale and registration of diesel vehicles that do not meet the new standard will be halted, Fang said.
Sales of substandard gasoline cars are to be stopped as of March 1, Fang added.
The city also plans to offer more incentives to help eliminate old cars from the roads. The city has already dumped 377,000 old cars. It has a target to ease a further 180,000 this year, according to Fang.
Beijing has a permanent population of around 20 million and some 5.2 million vehicles, with the number of private cars still on the rise.
That number will reach 6 million by 2015, Li Kunsheng, director of the bureau's vehicles management department, said.
The Beijing weather bureau yesterday issued yellow alerts for both fog and smog, the third-highest level in China's four-tier weather warning system.
At 9am, PM2.5 readings at most of the downtown monitoring stations exceeded 300 micrograms per c! ubic meter, far exceeding the national limit of 75 micrograms, according to the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center.
By mid-afternoon, air quality indices at most of the monitoring stations ranged from 311 to 400, a serious level.
A thick cloud of airborne particles was spotted moving from the southeast into Beijing on Tuesday afternoon and covered the whole city yesterday morning.
A resident of south Beijing, Wu Xiao, told Xinhua that she had bought a special mask from abroad for her son.
Wu said the smog had sickened nearly her entire family. "My child has red eyes, my mother-in-law suffers from asthma and I also caught the 'Beijing cough,'" she said.
- Melamine in bowls seep into bodies
Melamine, a chemical that sickened and killed babies in China when it tainted baby formula, can also leach off tableware and into food, according to a study.
But researchers, whose results appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine, warned that their findings don't prove that melamine is harmful to people in the amounts detected when study participants ate hot soup from melamine bowls.
Large doses of melamine, which is used in some types of fertilizer and in resin used to make tableware, killed six babies in China and sent thousands more to the hospital with kidney damage in 2008. In high enough quantities, melamine can cause kidney stones and other kidney problems in adults.
"Melamine tableware may release large amounts of melamine when used to serve high-temperature foods," wrote lead researcher Chia-Fang Wu from Kaohsiung Medical University.
Monitored urine
For the study, six people in their 20s ate hot soup for breakfast out of melamine bowls, while another six ate soup from ceramic bowls. Then, the researchers monitored participants' urine for the next 12 hours. Three weeks later, the two groups were reversed.
For the rest of the day, the total melamine excreted in urine was 8.35 micrograms following a melamine bowl breakfast, compared to 1.31 micrograms after breakfast from a ceramic bowl.
The study didn't measure any health effects possibly related to melamine, and it's not clear if those urine levels would lead to any long-term medical problems.
Craig Langman, who studies kidney diseases in Chicago's Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said that while the study raises interesting questions and concerns, it didn't prove anything. But he also said that research into the chemical's long-term biological effects should continue.
"The babies who were poisoned because of their being young had very low kidney function to begin with," he said. "Clearly, poisoning acutely with this massive overload is different than long-term exposur! e.
Melamine is approved in the US for use in the manufacturing of some cooking utensils, tableware, plastics and industrial coatings.
- Xi calls for calm
CHINESE leader Xi Jinping yesterday called for easing of tensions on the Korean Peninsula after meeting with Kim Moo-sung, the special envoy of South Korean President-elect Park Geun-hye.
Xi said that maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula was in the fundamental interests of China and South Korea.
He added that the problems have to be resolved by addressing both the symptoms and its root causes.
- Liaoning feels the jolt but no casualties
AN earthquake measuring 5.1 in magnitude jolted the border region of Liaoyang and Shenyang, in Liaoning Provonce at 12:18pm yesterday, the China Earthquake Networks Center said.
The epicenter, with a depth of about 7 kilometer, was located near Liaoyang's county-level city of Dengta and Sujiatun District in Shenyang, provincial capital of Liaoning.
Dengta Mayor Liu Wenlong said the government had not received any reports of casualties or house collapses. But cracks were spotted in some houses in few townships.
There were also no casualties reported in Sujiatun either.
Residents in Shenyang said they felt the quake, which lasted around 20 seconds.
Netizens have uploaded photos and videos taken during and after the quake.
"The furniture moved several centimeters to the corner of the room," posted a netizen called "Jianjiankangkang 2143273614" at weibo.com, with a photo of the table. An 11-second video captured the tremor of the quake.
According to the China Earthquake Administration, people in Shenyang and its surrounding areas felt the strongest tremor.
Other cities which reported tremors are Liaoyang, Jinzhou, Panjin, Tieling, Yingkou, Benxi, Fuxin and Chaoyang in Liaoning Province as well as the neighboring Jilin Province's Siping, Liaoyuan and Changchun cities.
Mobile communication in areas around the epicenter were also affected.
According to the local telecommunications company in the Wujiatun District, communication system, which had been disrupted due to the quake and the sudden jump among people making calls, was restored around 1pm after repairs.
"No casualties have been reported so far. Haozitun Village was the hardest-hit area," said Duan Youwei, Party secretary of Liutiaozhai Township.
Experts at the Liaoning Provincial Earthquake Bureau said quake-hit areas are unlikely to suffer a bigger earthquake in the short term.
- Man admits killing girl to get 'revenge on society'
A 19-YEAR-OLD man who was caught by police in the southern city of Shenzhen for allegedly robbing and killing a 16-year-old girl told officers he did it to "take revenge on society."
The death of the girl, Laiceng Yutong, has attracted wide public attention on the microblog weibo.com as she was reported missing on January 12, hours after she had posted details of where she would be.
Many netizens believed her habit of posting her whereabouts may have led to her death as the killer could have known where she was going and ambushed her.
Shenzhen police said they caught suspect Meng Shuai on Sunday. Meng told police he saw Laiceng walking home alone on January 12, and he grabbed her and took her to an empty shop to rob her, according to Shenzhen Television.
But Meng told police he chose his target randomly and denied he found Laiceng based on her microblog, the TV report said.
Meng told police he had been cheated in a pyramid scam and had a tense relationship with his family. He decided to rob others to make a living and strangled the girl to death after she resisted, the report said.
Meng told police he killed Laiceng as a way to "take revenge on society" for all the "unfair treatment" he had received in life.
Laiceng's relatives told Shenzhen Television that a woman had witnessed a man grabbing Laiceng. The woman rushed to a factory to get help from a security guard.
The guard told her it was none of his business and no one called the police, the relatives told the TV station.
- 'Dead' woman returns to life on day of funeral
A 101-YEAR-OLD "dead" woman came back to life last Sunday, the day of her funeral, shocking her daughters and others in Guangdong Province, Southern Metropolis Daily reported yesterday.
Peng Xiuhua, a widow living in Lianjiang City, fell nearly two weeks ago and became bed-ridden since then. Her two daughters returned home to take care of her.
At around 10:30pm last Saturday, Peng's daughters found her body had turned stiff and they could not detect any breathing or heartbeat. They believed she had died, the newspaper said. They cried and called relatives and friends to attend the funeral the next day.
After villagers cleaned the body before she was put into the coffin the next afternoon, the centenarian opened her eyes, smiled and said, "Here you come," her usual greeting, the paper reported.
The villagers were shocked after Peng came to life. They then decided to throw a banquet by using the food prepared for her funeral.
Peng's younger daughter Liu Meijuan told the newspaper that her mother lived alone and was able to take care of herself after her father died 11 years ago at the age of 101.
Warm-hearted neighbors also frequently visited to do some housekeeping and cooking, said the 67-year-old Liu.
- Report: Firm set sex traps to lure officials
A COMPANY in Chongqing Municipality has been accused of setting sex traps for senior government officials to gain engineering contracts worth millions of yuan.
Chongqing Yonghuang Group videotaped at least six officials, including the sacked Beibei District Party Secretary Lei Zhengfu, having sex with the same woman, Zhao Hongmei, Southern Metropolis Daily reported yesterday.
Unnamed insiders told the paper that Lei, who feared being disclosed by others, chose to confess his love affair to police. This led to an investigation into Yonghuang, Zhao's employer, in November 2009, the report said.
However, Chongqing police tried to sweep the case under the rug as an insider told the newspaper the sex tapes were concealed and Xiao Ye, one of Yonghuang's founders, was only detained for about six months for disturbing public order.
Five other officials implicated by sex tapes were not disciplined while some were even promoted until investigative reporter Zhu Ruifeng uploaded a sex video online in November 2012 that led to Lei's downfall.
Zhu has said that since the case returned to the headlines, police had once again detained Xiao and then transferred him to prosecutors.
Authorities haven't confirmed Zhu's story or said whether the other five officials involved, including a district head and a city government office chief, had been punished.
The report said Xiao, Yan Peng and Wang Jianjun orchestrated love traps to extort lucrative engineering contracts.
Yonghuang had hired at least three pretty women, including Zhao, 31, to entice senior officials.
The women used a pinhole video camera hidden in their handbag to record the sex acts and Zhao had taken the most footage, sources told the paper.
Xiao, Wang, Yan and other men would then break into the room and confront the official, insiders said.
Yonghuang gained several engineering projects worth tens of millions of yuan by threatening to publish the sex tapes, the paper revealed.
T! he report said it was unknown whether Yonghuang had been punished. But documents showed it just won two renovation projects worth a combined 3.15 million yuan in November, the paper said.
The paper also said Zhao was paid 40,000 yuan (US$6,427) after every "assignment." She met Xiao in 2007 and was once his mistress, the report said.
- 又碰到你 你是我的一号男模
- Running
Shanghai 2007 has added a photo to the pool:
- Empty
Shanghai 2007 has added a photo to the pool:
- Work 3
Shanghai 2007 has added a photo to the pool:
- Domestic violence occurs in 1/4 Chinese homes
DESPITE their rise in social status, nearly one-fourth of Chinese women say they still experience domestic violence, according to a survey released by All China Women's Federation today.
The survey says 24.7 percent of the respondents have been abused or beaten to various degrees in marriage. Some are even deprived of freedom, controlled economically or forced to live a kind of life against their will.
About 5.5 percent of the women respondents say they have been beaten by their husbands. The number of rural women suffering beating more than doubles that in cities, the survey says.
However, 85.2 percent of the respondents say they are satisfied with their family status. Women's health, education and earnings all have improved significantly in the past 10 years, the survey says.
About three-fourths of the women say they are involved in family decision making for issues like buying property, making investment and taking loans.
- Broom as bus stop signpost ridiculed on Internet
"HOGWARTS School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Chengdu!" "This is not just a broom, it's a private vehicle. Harry Potter is here!"
Recently, someone tweeted that a broom was used as a signpost at a bus stop on the Second Ring Road in Chengdu. The microblog immediately drew heated discussion, www.scol.com.cn reported.
As the original booth was taken down to make room for construction, a worker improvised with a broom to show the bus stop name. Many passengers said they gathered around the broom to wait for buses. Some complained about the neglect of the Chengdu Bus Company because other bus stops on the road also lacked proper signs.
They said some signposts had already fallen to the ground and some signboards were attached to nearby walls or bridge handrails.
In response to online criticism, the bus company said it has sent workers to repair bus stop signposts and other facilities.
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