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http://english.cri.cn/7146/2014/12/08/2582s855629.htm
This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Yun Feng in Beijing. Here is the news.
China, the world's leading coal producer and consumer, has begun levying resource tax on coal on the basis of sales instead of production, in a move to shore up the dim industry and improve the deteriorating environment.
The key to the reform, however, is to clear out charging fees involving coal. Due to historical reasons, Chinese coal producers pay taxes as well as fees under various names, such as coal price adjustment funds, compensation fees for native minerals, and fees for local economic development.
The State Council, China's cabinet, decided to clear off these fees before implementing the resource tax reform on coal at an executive meeting in September.
According to a circular issued by the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission in October, the reform plan bans local governments from setting up funds that charge coal producers.
The circular stipulated that no more administrative charges or governmental funds involving coal, crude oil, and natural gas, are allowed to initiate by any local government, department or unit, except with permission from laws, rules and State Council regulations.
The authorities warned that there must be accountability for any violations, setting a deadline for local governments to report their cleanup campaign and the list of fees to be canceled and to be kept.
China's top coal producers had sped up actions to meet the deadline. North China's Shanxi province has cut almost 11 billion yuan, roughly 1.8 billion US dollars of fees coal producers have been charged since a massive cleanup in June.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
China's revised Workplace Safety Law has taken effect. The law imposes harsher punishment on offenders.
Adopted in August, the amendment stipulates fines ranging from 200,000 yuan, roughly 32,000 U.S. dollars, to 20 million yuan, or more than 3 million dollars, for enterprises involved in serious workplace accidents, depending on the resultant losses.
Under the old law, fines for enterprises violating the law were no more than 100,000 yuan or less than five times the income earned from the illegal operations.
Managers of such enterprises who are found to have failed in their duty to ensure safety can be fined between 30 and 80 percent of their annual income corresponding to losses.
A judicial interpretation mapped by the Supreme People's Court has also taken effect, stipulating harsher punishment for the production and sale of fake and substandard pharmaceuticals.
According to the document, those who produce or sell fake or substandard drugs for pregnant women, infants, children and patients in critical condition will be given particularly heavier penalties.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
New regulations on family foster care in China have taken effect, allowing each foster family to take in a maximum of two children, instead of three in the past, provided that the family does not have a child of its own aged below six.
The formal qualifications required of foster parents are also being raised. Prospective parents should have completed at least nine years of formal education and their financial status should be at least average for their region.
Foster families are already an anomaly in China, and social workers are worried that while the new regime may better protect children, it may make the rare foster families even rarer.
You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Yun Feng in Beijing.
Twitter is trying to make it easier for victims and witnesses of online harassment to report it.
The short messaging service said that the new tools will roll out to users over the coming weeks. It is available now for a small group of Twitter's almost 300 million members. Among other changes, the updates streamline the process for reporting abuse, especially on mobile devices.
Twitter says it also made "behind-the-scenes improvements" that speed up response times to reported tweets and accounts.
Harassment and bullying on Twitter is not new. Recently, an online campaign dubbed "Gamer Gate" has led to the harassment of women in the video game industry for criticizing the lack of diversity and how women are portrayed in gaming.
A director of user safety at Twitter says that in the coming months, people can expect to see additional user controls, further improvements to reporting and new enforcement procedures for abusive accounts.
It is unlikely that the improvements will put an end to harassment on Twitter. While users can block accounts, and Twitter can delete them, there is nothing stopping bullies from setting up new accounts under different names.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that almost three-quarters of American adults who use the Internet have witnessed online harassment. Forty percent have experienced it themselves. The types of harassment ranged from name-calling to physical threats, sexual harassment and stalking. Half of those who were harassed said they didn't know the person who had most recently attacked them.
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