14 years old mom post her pregnancy pictures on website

A 14 years old girl from Hongkong post her pregnancy pircures on a website. She said she has been pregnanted for about 8 months and she will give birth to the baby in MARY hospital.

Man crosses Eurasia on horseback

Li Jing rides a horse along the road in Changping, Beijing's north suburb, March 10, 2009. Li, 46, finished his 9,000-kilometer journey Tuesday on horseback from Russia to China in one year, and will soon set off again for London with a 59-year-old British female rider to promote the 2012 Olympic Games.

College student kills boy for being called a 'thief'

Police arrested a college student in Zhenxiong county, Yunnan province, after he kidnapped and killed an 8-year-old boy.
Shen Chaoqun, 25, of Jiangxi Science and Technology University, kidnapped a boy after the boy's father called him a thief. Five minutes after he kidnapped the boy, Shen killed him.
Two days later, police found Shen at his elder brother's home and he confessed.

Conjoined twins wait for separation surgery

The conjoined twins are treated at the provincial children's hospital in Changsha, central China's Hunan province, March 19, 2009. The twin girls are conjoined by their bellies, sharing one umbilical cord when they were born three days ago in the Xinhua county of Loudi city, Hunan province, but they are in stable condition. The hospital will give them a thorough examination before a separation surgery.

Young couple gets first prize in kissing contest

A young couple won a kissing competition on Sunday in Haikou, capital of Hainan province.

Huang and his girlfriend, Tuo, beat out other kissing couples after they locked lips for 1 hour and 15 minutes. And they were awarded 2,009 yuan ($294) for their effort.

More than 10 couples participated in the competition. Participants were required to stand in fixed positions and place their hands behind their back while kissing.

Fake money trading gang in E. China held

Police in Fuzhou, Fujian province, announced on Wednesday that they had busted a gang dealing in fake Chinese money, confiscating currency with a face value of 1.03 million yuan ($151,000).

This was the largest fake money trading gang the police smashed in Fujian this year, said Liu Yidi, a police officer with the Fuzhou municipal bureau of public security.


Police officers with the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou, Fujian province, count a big stash of counterfeit money, March 18, 2009. The haul, with a face value of 1.03 million yuan ($151,000), was seized from the largest counterfeit ring in the province.


The confiscated fake money had a par value of 100, 50, 20 and 10 yuan. Most of the 100-yuan banknotes had serial numbers starting with CE86 and CH31 and were of a superior quality than the fake 100-yuan banknotes starting with the serial number HD, found earlier, he said.

On January 20, Fuzhou police found a man surnamed Zheng from Tingping township in Minhou county, Fujian, possessing fake money with a face value of 90,000 yuan. A month-long investigation showed a gang from the township was involved in fake money transactions.

On Feb 23, Chen, who carried fake money with a face value of 580,000 yuan, was arrested in the southern suburb of Fuzhou. Six other members of the gang were caught the same day.

They had purchased fake money with a face value of 1.265 million yuan from Shanwei, Guangdong province, on six occasions since 2002.

They would buy a 100-yuan banknote with 1.5 yuan and sell it for 3 yuan to the next buyer in Fuzhou who would then sell it to the third buyer for 5 or 6 yuan and so on.

A small amount of the fake money the seven criminal suspects bought were already in social circulation before they were nabbed, Liu said.

Elaborating on how fake money found its way into society, Liu said, massage girls with access to their client's pockets often replaced true money with fake currency. Second, gamblers exchange true money with fake ones in casinos. Third, taxi drivers often return fake money to passengers. Fourth, criminal suspects use fake money with a big face value in restaurants, farm produce markets and supermarkets and get true money as change.

Fake 100-yuan notes, mostly starting with the serial number "HD90", were reported in more than 10 Chinese provinces and cities since last year.

Reports say that sometimes even counterfeit detectors, which would not pass low-quality fakes, get hoodwinked by forgery of a higher standard.

Although the fake money confiscated in Fuzhou bore the watermark and magnetic security line and was believed to look more genuine than those with the serial number "HD90", Liu said that people with a sharp eye and counterfeit detectors in banks would know better.

Early in 2009, officials from the People's Bank of China denied the sharp rise of fake banknotes, claiming that the number of fakes detected by the financial institutions and police was not substantially higher than usual.

Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, claimed that the technology used in the bank could easily detect fake banknotes.

Under Chinese law, people who knowingly hold or use counterfeit currency can face up to 10 years in prison. A 34-year-old Chinese farmer was sentenced to 10 months in prison and fined 15,000 yuan in January for using 55 counterfeit notes with a 100-yuan face value in a Shanghai shop.

Pretty women soldier

Study: "Peking Man" 300,000 years older than usually thought

The iconic ancient human fossils from China known as the Peking Man are about 300,000 years older than usually thought, an archaeologist said Thursday.

Using a new dating method, a group of Beijing archaeologists concluded in the British journal Nature that the "Peking Man" fossils are about 770,000 years old, beating the previous estimates of 230,000-500,000 years.

The new date indicates that "this early human ancestor prospered in an earlier colder climate," Xing Gao, one of the archaeologists from Beijing-based Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Pale anthropology, told Xinhua by telephone.

"It will lead us to rethink how these early hominins could adapt to the colder environment," Gao said. "Probably it provides further evidence that the early hominins used fire regularly."

In an accompanying article in Nature, Russell Ciochon at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the research, said the study "prompts a rethink of the species' distribution in both the temperate north and equatorial south of east Asia."

The Beijing archaeologists said that the study applied an aluminium and beryllium based method to measure quartz samples from Zhoukoudian in the southwestern suburb of Beijing, where the "Peking Man" fossils were discovered in the 1920s.

The method works for samples up to at least 3 million years older. The archaeologists highlighted its importance and said they planned to use it to re-measure other Chinese pale anthropology sites.

"This is a catalyst for a new era of re-dating," Ciochon said.

China Telecom starts 3G trials

China Telecom, the country's largest fixed-line operator, started trials of the third-generation (3G) mobile services in Shanghai on Monday, and plans to extend the same nationwide next month.

Shanghai Telecom, China Telecom's subsidiary, said it would invest 6 billion yuan on various projects including the 2010 Expo, 3G-network construction, and enterprise services this year. About one-third of the total capital would be used for 3G network construction, said Zhang Weihua, general manger of the Shanghai-based company.

According to the operator, the speed of its code division multiple access (CDMA) 2000-based network is 3.1 megabits per second, 20 times faster than the 2G network.

"China Telecom's operations in Shanghai is more solid when compared to other cities, hence the decision to chose the city first for 3G trials," said Zhang Yanling, analyst, iResearch Consulting Group.

Shanghai Telecom said its 3G signals have already covered the area within the city's outer ring, and a total of more than 2,000 3G base stations will be built by the end of this year.

In addition, as of March 15, about 4,000 public areas in the city have been deployed with WiFi hotspots. The network will be extended to over 5,000 units before 2010.

China Telecom's president Shang Bin said last month that the company planned to have 35 million new CDMA network users this year, and to extend the number to 100 million over three years.

"China Telecom can offset its weakness in mobile operations by strengthening its 3G services to compete with its rivals China Mobile and China Unicom. However, user's reception of 3G services is still pending given the incomplete CDMA network and the absence of multinational mobile phone makers like Nokia in CDMA2000, " Zhang said.

The central government awarded the long-anticipated 3G licenses to the country's three incumbent operators, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom this January.

China Mobile, the largest domestic cellphone operator, launched the pre-commercial 3G services based on homegrown TD-SCDMA last April in eight cities including Shanghai. By the end of 2008, the standard had attracted 75,600 subscribers in Shanghai.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has forecast that the total investment in 3G would touch 170 billion yuan this year. It has also estimated that the 3G services would attract nearly 400 billion yuan worth of investment over the next three years.

China says 60,000 alternative-energy vehicles to hit roads by 2012

About 60,000 alternative-fuel vehicles are expected to be on China's roads by 2012 as part of the efforts to save energy and reduce emissions, Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang said Thursday.

Most of these new vehicles would be used for public transport, Wan told an international forum on energy conservation and new energy development.

Also, large-scale use of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting would be promoted in dozens of big Chinese cities and the use of solar and wind energy would be accelerated, Wang said.

He said that China, as a large developing country undergoing rapid industrialization, faced the pressures of promoting growth while saving resources and protecting the environment. He said China had made saving energy, reducing emissions and using renewable energy sources a strategic plan to achieve sustainable development.

China would use various means to provide financial support to small and medium-sized companies involved in energy conservation and environmental protection. It would also give tax benefits and direct subsidies to the production, sale and use of alternative-energy vehicles and "green" home appliances, he said.