介绍:
鲍俞哲：
China remained top global exporter in 2016
China remained the world's largest exporter in 2016, shipping 13.84 trillion yuan ($2.1 trillion) worth of goods and accounting for 13.2 percent of worldwide exports, the Ministry of Commerce said on Thursday.
This is the eighth straight year that China held the top spot, ministry spokesman Sun Jiwen said.
Last year, the value of imports reached 10.49 trillion yuan and overall trade volume for 2016 reached 24.33 trillion yuan.
China's foreign trade volume during the first quarter of 2017 also experienced strong growth to 6.2 trillion yuan, an increase of 21.8 percent year-on-year, according the General Administration of Customs. Exports increased by 14.8 percent to 3.33 trillion yuan and imports grew by 31.1 percent to 2.87 trillion yuan.
Trade with the US and economies related to the Belt and Road Initiative registered solid growth, Customs spokesman Huang Songping said on Thursday.
From January to March, China's first-quarter trade volume with Russia increased by 37 percent, Pakistan by 18.7 percent, Poland by 19 percent, Kazakhstan by 69.3 percent and India by 27.7 percent.
Over the same period, trade with the EU rose by 16.9 percent and that with the US and ASEAN countries by 21.3 percent and 25 percent, respectively, together accounting for 41.4 percent of China's total import and export value, he said.
China's foreign trade remains sound and steady, Huang said. Trade has seen through positive changes since June of last year.
While many complicated, unstable and uncertain factors affect foreign trade, positive conditions continue, so the economic prospects remained sound, according to Customs.
Experts said China's overseas shipment increases and strong trading during the first quarter were the result of it's efforts to upgrade manufacturing, supply-side reforms and intensified research and development efforts.
"A series of positive changes have taken place in China's foreign trade," said Sang Baichuan, director of the Institute of International Business at the University of International Business and Economics.
"In the past, China's exports were mostly low-end, labor-intensive products, while now the proportion of large-sized complete sets of equipment, high-tech products and self-owned brands are climbing."
Sang said the structure of Chinese-made commodities has been optimized, and China is transforming from just earning commissions to profiting from processing and assembling procedures and independent marketing.
High-speed rail to adjust ticket prices
Ticket prices for some bullet trains traveling in China's southeastern coastal area will be adjusted from April 21, according to China Railway Corp.
The move will affect trains running at 200 to 250 kilometers per hour between Shanghai and Shenzhen, Guangdong province, two major economic hubs along the eastern coast, the State-owned railway operator said.
The 1,623-km Shanghai-Shenzhen link consists of three sections－Shanghai to Hangzhou; Hangzhou to Ningbo; and Ningbo to Shenzhen.
After the adjustment, some prices will increase, while others will be lowered, depending on the route and train a passenger takes, China Railway said.
Prices for most first-class seats will go up by more than 50 percent on bullet trains traveling on the 1,309-km section from Ningbo to Shenzhen;
▶ Prices for second-class seats on the above route will climb by 16 to 20 percent.
▶ Prices for second-class seats from Shanghai to Hangzhou and from Hangzhou to Ningbo will rise by more than 10 percent.
For example, a second-class ticket between Shenzhen and Chaoshan now costs just under 90 yuan ($13). After the adjustment, tickets for this route will sell for 107, 102, 85 or 73 yuan, depending on the schedule.
Mitigate transport peaks
Industry observers said the changes are aimed at using price adjustments to compensate the high construction and operational costs of China's vast high-speed railway network and to help mitigate rail transport peaks, as some price-sensitive passengers are expected to avoid some trains at peak periods because they will have the highest increase.
Last year, 818,000 journeys a day were made on the Shanghai-Shenzhen railway. On a typical day, there were 622 bullet trains operating at more than 80 percent occupancy on the route.
Reduce the deficit
Despite the high-speed railway's popularity, many routes are still generating deficits, experts said, adding that this is because of the large infrastructure investment, high operational and maintenance costs, and the old regulations governing prices.
Currently, ticket prices for high-speed trains in the southeast coastal area follow the government regulation adopted in 1997, according to a railway industry source.
Sun Zhang, a professor at Tongji University's Institute of Rail Transit in Shanghai, said that it is feasible for the southeast coastal region to test the price changes because the region is more economically developed, while high-income travelers and businesspeople from the region usually make fast and comfortable service their priority, and are less sensitive to price changes.
胡晨璇：
US drops largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan
The US military has dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan on an Islamic State target, the Pentagon said Thursday.
US President Donald Trump on Thursday gave the order for the US military to drop a GBU-43 or Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb on an IS cave complex in Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan, the first time such a bomb has been used in combat.
"Mother of all bombs"
MOAB is also nicknamed as the "mother of all bombs".
It is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US in a conflict, and is capable of destroying an area equivalent to nine city blocks, according to CNN.
It is 30 feet (about 9.14 meters) in length and 21,600 pounds (9,795 kilograms) in weight, and was developed in 2002.
A local resident living around two kilometers from the blast told CNN he heard an "extremely loud boom that smashed the windows of our house."
It was dropped by plane in Achin district on Thursday evening local time, the Pentagon said.
"The strike was designed to minimize the risk to Afghan and US Forces conducting clearing operations in the area while maximizing the destruction of ISIS-K fighters and facilities," the Pentagon said in a statement.
ISIS-K refers to ISIS-Khorasan, the terror group's affiliate in Afghanistan.
Public hospitals told to end drug markups
All public hospitals have been told to end the longtime practice of drug price markups by the end of September as part of the ongoing healthcare reform, the top economic planner said on Wednesday.
Public hospitals' loss of revenue will be offset for the most part by an increase in the prices of patient services, and more government investment is expected, a National Development and Reform Commission statement said.
The markups, a key source of income for public hospitals, are a major but thorny issue in healthcare reform, which aims for universal coverage of basic healthcare services, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission.
Since the 1950s, public hospitals have been selling drugs at a markup. The maximum is 15 percent. Although the policy helped make up for a lack of adequate government healthcare funding, "gradually it evolved into a way to reap profits, contributing to worsening problems like overprescribing, an excessive use of antibiotics by hospitals, and rising medical expenses", said Wang Hesheng, vice-minister of the health and family planning agency.
With the expected drop in revenues from drug sales, authorities will adjust the fees for medical services, the NDRC said on Wednesday
Charges related to the expertise of medical staff, like those for diagnosis, surgery and rehabilitation, will rise, while those for tests requiring major medical equipment will drop, the commission said.
The commission also is requiring local price regulators to carry out other necessary reforms following the measure, including changing medical insurance payments so rising service fees are covered by insurance reimbursement. Also, attention must be given to meeting the basic healthcare needs of low-income people.
Many public hospitals in China had already abolished drug price markups before Wednesday's announcement.
In Beijing, more than 3,600 medical institutions, including all public ones, had abolished the practice starting Saturday.
The measure is expected to lower the cost of outpatient treatment by about 5 percent, but the cost for inpatient treatment, including surgery, will rise by about 2.5 percent, said Li Sufang, deputy director of the Beijing Commission of Development and Reform.
Drug sales accounted for a third of the income of public hospitals last year, according to the Beijing Commission for Health and Family Planning.
Washington Post, NY Times win Pulitzer Prizes
The Pulitzer Prizes on Monday honored The Washington Post for hard-hitting reporting on Donald Trump's presidential campaign and The New York Times for revealing Vladimir Putin's covert power grab, praising their probing of powerful people despite a hostile climate for the news media.
The Daily News of New York and ProPublica, a web-based platform specializing in investigative journalism, won the prizefor public service journalism for coverage of New York police abuses that forced mostly poor minorities from their homes.
Other winners included an international consortium of more than 300 reporters on six continents that exposed the so-called Panama Papers detailing the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens used by the high and mighty.
The Pulitzers, the most prestigious honors in American journalism, have been awarded since 1917, often going to famed publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
But they are also won by smaller, lesser known publications across the country whose work does not always gain national attention when it is published.
Reporter Eric Eyre of Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia took the prize for investigative reporting for exposing a flood of opioids in depressed West Virginia counties with the country's highest overdose death rates.
The staff of the East Bay Times of Oakland, California, won the breaking news award for coverage of the "Ghost Ship" fire that killed 36 people at a warehouse party, exposing the city's failure to take actions that might have prevented the disaster.
While the Pulitzer ceremony highlighted the news media's importance to democracy, it has been challenged by so-called fake news, which once referred to fabricated stories meant to influence the US election but has become a term used by Trump to dismiss factual reporting that is critical. Trump has frequently excoriated the media and in February called it "the enemy of the American people."
Operating in the glare of the 2016 presidential campaign, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post took the national reporting award. The judges said he "created a model for transparent journalism in political campaign coverage while casting doubt on Donald Trump's assertions of generosity toward charities."
Fahrenthold found that Trump's charitable giving had not always matched his public statements. He also broke perhaps the biggest scoop of the campaign, revealing Trump had been captured on videotape making crude remarks about women and bragging about kissing and grabbing them without their permission.
The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, a longtime Republican, took the commentary prize for a series of critical pieces about Trump during the real estate magnate's successful run for the White House.
The New York Times staff won the international reporting prize for articles on Russian President Vladimir Putin's efforts to project Russia's power abroad, a particularly pertinent story given US intelligence conclusions that Putin's government
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