介绍:
This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
A cross-departmental team will investigate the recent case of improper vaccines trading.
The group has been established by the State Council and will be led by the China Food and Drug Administration, the public health watchdog. Senior officials from the National Health and Family Planning Commission, the Ministry of Public Security, and the Ministry of Supervision are deputy heads.
Officials from other departments including the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Cyberspace Administration are also at the team.
The State Council, China's Cabinet, has also formed a supervision team to oversee the investigation.
Large quantities of improperly stored and expired vaccines have allegedly been sold across the country since 2011. Twenty-nine pharmaceutical companies have been implicated in sales, and 16 institutions in purchases. More than 130 people have been questioned and 69 criminal cases have been filed.
Bernhard Schwartlander, World Health Organization representative in China, has called the national immunization system "one of the best in the world" in an interview with Xinhua News Agency recently.
The World Health Organization has confidence in all Chinese vaccine manufacturers, based on over 15 years of working closely with the national vaccine regulators.
Dr. Schwartlander points out that the biggest risk is that parents might avoid routine vaccination of their children as a result of diminished confidence in the system. He calls for urgent action to restore public trust.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
A 3-year-old toddler has been inoculated against hand-foot-and-mouth disease in Kunming City in southwest China's Yunnan Province. This is the first the province has received the vaccination.
The human diploid cell vaccine developed in China is the first against enterovirus 71, or EV71, a primary cause of the disease.
In tests, the vaccine prevented 97 percent of test subjects from contracting EV71.
The vaccine was developed by the Institute of Medical Biology attach of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
Hand-foot-and-mouth disease is caused by a group of enterovirus including EV71, which causes heart and lung complications that can lead to death.
It has become one of the most ubiquitous infectious diseases in China due to a lack of vaccines. Infants and children under five years old are most vulnerable.
From May 2008 to December 2015, China reported almost 14 million HFMD cases, of which 3,391 resulted in fatalities.
China's food and drug watchdog approved production of the vaccine in December.
The first batch of 360,000 shots of vaccine have been transported nationwide with vaccination beginning in Beijing, Guangxi and Yunnan.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
Beijing police have stepped up efforts to mobilize the masses and fight terrorism in the capital.
Two whistle-blowers were rewarded with 3,000 yuan, roughly 460 U.S. dollars, and 2,000 yuan, for providing information on terrorism and reporting hazardous items on the subway.
The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau says one of them reported a foreigner suspected of being involved in terrorist activities, but no detailed information was available on the case.
More than 500 people have been rewarded with upward of 600,000 yuan by Beijing police since the city announced rewards for terror informants in March 2014.
According to the incentive program, whistle-blowers are awarded between 1,000 yuan and 40,000 yuan for reporting information on terrorism.
To better cope with the risk posed by terrorist activities, the bureau has organized six rounds of anti-terror drills and provided professional training to more than 2,500 personnel over the past year.
You are listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Female employees in Beijing who give birth to a second child have their maternity leave extended by up to three months. That is according to a revised regulation on family planning adopted by the city recently.
The regulation was based on the revised national Law on Population and Family Planning adopted on Jan 1. The law allows all Chinese couples to have two children, putting an end to the national policy that allowed only one child for most couples living in urban areas.
Under the new policy, the female employees' husband can also have 15 days leave after the child is born.
The regulation gives female employees maternal leave for as long as 218 days, including 98 days mandated by national law and 30 days offered by local regulation. In addition, they are allowed to have extra leave of between one and three months, with the consent of their employers.
The new amendments also include allowing some people, including those with one disabled child, to have a third baby.
Local authorities say allowing female employees to have additional leave was brought in to maintain the physical and psychological health of mothers and children, considering the burden on the social security fund and employers.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
Chinese search engine giant Baidu has developed a machine-learning algorithm that predicts whether crowds are likely to form at certain locations within two hours, which could be used to prevent stampedes.
The algorithm uses data from Baidu's map app. Baidu's Big Data Lab published a research report studying the number of map queries and the number of users in an area.
The company's user statistics show that its map app accounts for over 70 per cent of China's mapping services market. Users search for ideal travel routes using Baidu Maps.
The lab began to concentrate on how to predict crowds in certain areas following the Shanghai stampede on New Year's Eve in Dec 2014, when 36 people were killed during celebrations on the Bund riverfront.
Using the map data, the researchers found a way to determine the numbers in real time and trigger warnings 30 minutes to two hours ahead of time if unusually large crowds were expected to gather. This occurs when the number of queries for a specific location crosses a set threshold.
Machine learning is applied so that the algorithm can learn from search queries and better predict future crowds.
You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
One physics teacher made almost 19,000 yuan, roughly 3,000 U.S. dollars, in an hour for his online course, but educational authorities are calling for a ban on this teaching model.
A total of 2,600 students have signed up for Wang Yu's tutoring course on high school physics, which is carried out online at a cost of 9 yuan for each participant. The seven classes have attracted almost 10,000 students in total.
An online portal hosting the course charges 20 percent of Wang's income as a fee.
A college English teacher also using an online teaching platform says she earns around 50,000 yuan in two months, with the largest class attracting 1,700 online students.
Online education services are mushrooming in China. One tutoring site offering eight middle and high school courses boasts 15 million registered student users. Online teachers are generally happy with the extra income. Wang says the Internet has greatly reduced travel costs and allows more flexible instruction.
Low costs and high efficiency of online classes have also attracted various parents. One parent explained that compared to traditional after-class lectures that cost one or two hundred yuan per hour, online equivalents are available for less than 10 yuan.
However, it has raised eyebrows among local educational authorities. An official from the Education Bureau in Nanjing, the capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, said the city bans teachers from offering paid tutoring to students including online services.
You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging onto NEWSPlusRadio.cn. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by e-mailing us at mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. That's mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. Now the news continues.
An ancient town in southwest China's Yunnan Province is struggling to restore its status as a popular tourist site after it lost many of its traditional wooden buildings in a fire two years ago.
Populated largely by ethnic Tibetans, Dukezong was made famous by British writer James Hilton's 1933 novel "Lost Horizon".
In January 2014, a blaze started by an electric heater destroyed more than 340 houses in the town, or almost 20 percent of the total.
Around 15 percent of the homes and shops have reopened so far.
By mid-March, more than 900 million yuan, roughly 140 million U.S. dollars, had been spent on renovation work, with a total budget of 1.2 billion yuan.
Though Dukezong declared its reopening earlier in January, rebuilding work is continuing and the number of visitors has been restricted.
Huang Guoying, a shopkeeper who settled in Dukezong in 2005, gets around 10 percent of the customers she did before the fire.
As it is a low season for tourism, only 2,000 people visit the ancient town each day on average.
Officials and shopkeepers say they don't expect a significant increase in tourist numbers over the summer.
This is Special English.
After his giant Yellow Duck debuted in Hong Kong three years ago, Florentijn Hofman has made a giant pink Floating Fish for Wuzhen, an ancient water town in Zhejiang province.
It is the first time the Dutch artist has made an animal-related work on the Chinese mainland.
The 15-meter-long, 7-meter-high fish is made from thousands of swimming kickboards for children. It floats on a pond at a theater in Wuzhen.
It was shown to the public recently as part of the Wuzhen International Contemporary Art Exhibition.
Hofman said he got inspiration from Wuzhen and from a Chinese folk story about a fish jumping the "dragon gate" bringing luck and wealth to the local people.
Six months ago, he was invited by a local cultural company to create a work for the art show, which features work by influential artists.
Hofman then visited Wuzhen, one of the country's most popular tourist towns, where he saw windows of wooden houses with fish sculptures and carp swimming in rivers. He says that was where his inspiration came from.
He says the theater looks like a sea world and the dolphin-shaped water area fits well with the fish installation. He chose pink for his fish so that it would stand out from its surroundings. The houses in Wuzhen have white walls and gray tiles.
This is Special English.
A rare Assam macaque has been returned to a nature reserve after being kept as a pet by a local villager for 14 years. The animal is now living in a nature reserve in southwest China's Yunnan Province.
The local nature reserve bureau received a call from a villager saying that he wanted to free a monkey he had raised. Staff members went to his home and found an Assam macaque, a protected animal, but the villager did not seem to be aware of that.
The macaque is around 15 years old and weighs 30 kilograms.
There are only around 8,000 Assam macaques in China.
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