Farmers of Longjing Village in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province, prepare fresh-cut Longjing Tea in woks. To curb fake Longjing Tea that made its ways into shops around the country, tea farmers in Longjing Village have joined in cutting, preparing and selling the authentic tea under a unified trademark to designated tea dealers.

SHANGHAI

Chinese welcomed

PATRICK Harker, dean of University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said during his Shanghai trip last week that the business school wants to attract more Chinese students. He said the high price of tuition in the US ought not to be a deterrent, as loans are available. The school wants to co-operate more with local universities and to develop its distance education programmes, he said.

Fake-ticket seller

INDONESIAN national Wang Xiufang (Madarin spelling) is in court over illegal sales of airline tickets and a 110-million-yuan ($13.25 million) fraud. Wang is accused of selling tickets in the name of an unregistered firm and without Civil Aviation Bureau approval between 1999 and 2000. Some of the tickets were invalid, causing losses of some 5 million yuan ($600,000) to 13 companies. Eight local firms who provided Wang with the invalid tickets have been fined and closed.

Harassing snakes

SNAKES have been harassing living quarters on Xiangyang Nanlu, and residents are demanding that the nest be found and removed. One of the snakes, 40 centimetres long and 1 centimetre in diametre, is reported to have emerged from the kitchen sink. The residents said they had sighted a total of seven snakes, one of which was one metre long. Although poisonous, experts say these city snakes are not life-threatening. They are often to be found in old buildings.

Police-attackers sentenced

SIX men convicted of assaulting two policemen at a restaurant have been sentenced to between 10 months and three and a half years. The men, employees of the Hongcheng Hot Pot Restaurant, launched the attack after the policemen tried to intervene in a quarrel with occupants of neighbouring private houses, who had complained about the noise.

Kids' day at Seasons Villas

SOME 400 expats and their children were treated to a children's acrobatics show and a Chinese folk art display at Seasons Villas in Pudong last week.

Fake auto parts

ONE of the city's biggest ever operations involving the production and sale of counterfeit auto parts has been broken up by the Jing'an Industrial and Commercial Bureau. During a surprise check on the basement storage area of Shanghai Kangchen Automobile Fittings Co Ltd, some one thousand bogus Volkswagen car parts were discovered. Volkswagen Automobile Co Ltd confirmed that all the parts were fake. Officials also ferreted out over 11,400 illegally produced Santana marks and some 500 product certificates and metal markings stored by director Kang Linen, who was planning to attach them to the parts before selling them.

Plastic food containers

ABOUT 10 million disposable plastic food containers have been recycled in the city during the past two months. The city began collecting environmentally unfriendly food containers in early April, and in the first month some 3 million were retrieved by the sanitation bureau. To encourage recycling, the bureau buys back containers. Of some 10 million containers, 70 per cent were purchased at the rate of two fen each. Other plastic materials go for as much as two yuan per kilo. It is hoped that fully half of all disposable plastic food containers used will have been collected by the end of the year.

NANCHANG

14 kids dead in fire

THE fire at a kindergarten in East China's Jiangxi Province on Tuesday morning was caused by mosquito-repellent incense which was burning under beds in the children's dormitory, investigations have shown. The fire killed 14 children, largely due to suffocation. Four children in the dorm escaped the fire, one getting out by himself and three saved by rescuers, sources said. When the fire occurred, no teachers were on duty. Three teachers held responsible for the fire have been detained. When the fire broke out at the Jiangxi Radio and TV Arts Kindergarten, 304 people, including teachers, caretakers on internship and a chef were staying in the building.

GUANGZHOU

Wildlife eaters

SOUTH China's Guangdong Province, whose inhabitants have a tradition of eating wildlife, will impose severe penalties on hunters and consumers of wildlife that are on the state protection list, as of July 1. A restaurant customer who knows that the dish he or she is eating contains ingredients from protected wildlife will be fined 10,000 yuan ($1,200), a sum about three times the average local monthly income. Those who are found to be responsible for hunting, processing, purchasing or slaughtering such wildlife will be fined up to 100,000 yuan ($12,000), according to the regulation. Many Chinese believe that wild game has high nutritional and tonic value.

KUNMING

Ancient city in the lake

CHINESE television broadcast live Monday morning the investigation by a team of archaeologists of a group of ancient buildings in an area of 2.4 sq km at the bottom of Fuxian Lake in southwest China's Yunnan Province. According to carbon dating, the site dates back 1,750 years, to the Eastern Han Dynasty. This was China's first such underwater archaeological probe. The 212-sq-km lake is the deepest plateau freshwater lake in China, with a maximum depth of 157 metres. Sonar surveying has verified that the buildings stretch 1,200 metres from east to west and 2,000 metres from north to south. Experts said official records of the Han Dynasty say that a city named Yunyuan was located by the side of the lake. It disappeared from the official records after the Han Dynasty.

XIAN

One-off chopsticks banned

SHAANXI Province in Northwest China has become the first province in the country to ban the production, sale and use of disposable wood chopsticks. The ban that started last Friday is meant to protect local forest resources. Those who continue to produce, sell and use disposable chopsticks after the issue of the ban will be punished severely. Usually, more than one million pairs of these chopsticks are used daily at nearly 10,000 restaurants in Xi'an, and most of them are not recycled. Statistics show that a total of 25 million trees are cut in China for making 45 billion pairs of one-off chopsticks every year.

URUMQI

Underground reservoir

CHINESE geologists have discovered a huge underground water source in the northwestern part of the Turpan-Shanshan-Toksun Basin in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Northwest China. It was initially determined that the water source is located in an area of 140 square kilometres in Kerjian, which is described as the "extreme dry place" in China, because it has rainfall of only 0.8 mm, but an evaporation capacity of more than 5,800 mm on yearly basis. Three wells dug in the area produce some 290 cubic metres of potable water per hour.

BEIJING

3 Gorges construction

CHINESE Premier Zhu Rongji stressed that construction quality is of life-and-death importance to the Three Gorges Project. Zhu, also head of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, added that the resettlement of local people from the area of China's largest hydro-power project to other provinces and cities should be further encouraged, while efforts should still be made to upgrade the industries relocated from the dam area. So far, some 320,000 people living near the dam area have been resettled, and 18.19 million square metres of housing have been built for them.

Severe drought

A SEVERE drought has been spreading throughout North China since March, threatening the summer harvest and limiting the supply of water to an increasing number of people and livestock. The capital encountered severe drought this year due to a sharp decrease in rainfall. Beijing has a per capita availability of water resources of only 300 cubic metres, which is one-eighth of the national average and one-thirtieth of the world's average.

Construction corruption

CHINA plans to intensify its fight against corruption relating to construction projects, according to an urgent notice issued by the Ministry of Supervision. The notice says that working personnel, especially government officials, involved in corrupt activities will be investigated and punished accordingly. The ministry called on supervision departments at various levels to help local governments standardize the construction market, and to strengthen the supervision of the process of public bidding. The notice also stressed that supervision departments across the country should co-operate with other government departments to eliminate fake and inferior products, particularly those which cause major accidents, and the officials responsible will be turned over to judicial organs for further investigation if they have broken the law.

CHONGQING

Film of bombings

FILM footage shot by Chinese and foreign journalists of Japanese bombings of this municipality in Southwest China about 60 years ago has been discovered here. A documentary running for 40 minutes has been edited from the original film, and was shown to the public Tuesday. The newly discovered film, which runs for six hours, is the most detailed film record of the Japanese bombings of the city during the 1930s and 1940s. From 1938 to August 1943, the Japanese air force flew more than 6,800 sorties, bombing Chongqing night and day, causing huge life and property losses to the local people. Photographers from China, Germany, France, the United States and some other countries filmed major scenes of the bombings. Japanese photographers also filmed the bombings to flaunt their victories. (Star news)