Shangai man changes suicide plan after receiving 2,000 yuan from firefighters

September 22nd, 2009 SHANGHAI - Two young couples from a South Asian country have been arrested in connection with the robberies, which netted cash and goods worth about 100,000 yuan,or 14,600 dollars, local media reported Monday. The city's local procuratorate said that on July 22, one of the female suspects began talking with a man from the Netherlands at a bar in the city.

September 21st, 2009 ISLAMABAD - A suicide attack on the Education Minister of Pakistan's North Western Frontier Province was thwarted by police on Monday. Four militants attempted to assassinate Sardar Hussain Babak.

September 6th, 2009 URUMQI - Life gradually returned to normalcy Sunday in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang region Sunday, where police have eased traffic restrictions imposed in the wake of public protests. The city had witnessed widespread protests in the past several days after many people were stabbed by syringes.

September 6th, 2009 BEIJING - China has spent nearly 1 trillion yuan ($146 billion) on ecological conservation and environmental protection over the past decade, a senior official said Sunday. Of the total expenditure, more than 700 billion yuan went to projects to reforest cultivated land, return grazing land to protected grassland, protect natural forests and conserve river sources on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau and for the south-to-north water diversion programme, according to Du Ying, vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission.

September 1st, 2009 NEW DELHI - A Beijing resident has come up with an unusual way of selling off an apartment. The 26-year-old man is looking for some 1,500 Internet users to invest in an apartment, and the owner will be chosen on the basis of a lucky draw, reports the China Daily.

August 22nd, 2009 BEIJING - The ratio of home price to income in Beijing is now 27 to 1, five times the international average, according to a real estate agency, which made the calculation based on government statistics. Data from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics indicates that if a family has two wage earners both making the city's average income of 28,289 Yuan (4,142 dollars) in the first half of the year, their annual household income would be 113,000 Yuan.

August 7th, 2009 JINAN - The former chairman and general manager of the Capital Airports Holding Company (CAH) Li Peiying, who was convicted for taking bribes and embezzlement of state funds, was executed on Friday in Jinan, China. Earlier, the Shandong Provincial Higher People's Court had upheld Li's death sentence.

August 1st, 2009 NEW DELHI - A Shanghai-based woman recently prepaid her cell phone bill worth a staggering 15,000 yuan by mistake. Considering that she never makes more than 20 yuan worth of calls from her phone each month, Zhang may not have to recharge her phone for about 63 years.

July 30th, 2009 SHANGHAI - There are 51,000 people in China who are qualified to be called "new aristocrats". That's according to the latest research by Hurun Report, which specializes in tracking the wealthy, reports the China Daily.

July 25th, 2009 NEW DELHI - A court recently ordered a Japanese businessman to publicly apologise to one of the woman employee he had wrongly accused of stealing his trousers in Wuhan, Hubei province.. The businessman has also been ordered to pay "spiritual damages" to the tune of 1,000 yuan to the woman.

July 22nd, 2009 Some IMF members say China's currency undervaluedWASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund is welcoming China's progress in letting the market determine the value of its currency, the yuan, but says some countries believe it remains "substantially undervalued." The IMF says many members believe further strengthening the yuan should be part of a comprehensive Chinese strategy to rebalance the economy, but others say it would play only a supporting role toward promoting changes. In its annual report on the Chinese economy, the IMF did not name individual countries' positions on the yuan.

July 15th, 2009 BEIJING - China's foreign exchange reserves topped $2.13 trillion by the end of June, up 17.84 percent year-on-year, the People's Bank of China said Wednesday. About $185.6 billion were added to the world's largest official foreign exchange reserves in the first half of the year, but that figure is about $95 billion less than the same period a year ago, said the central bank.

May 9th, 2009 NEW DELHI - A traineed engineer with a power distribution company of the capital commited suicide in her hostel room here Saturday evening, police said. The body of Prerna Kumari, a graduate engineer trainee with North Delhi Power Limited (NDPL), was found hanging in her hostel room at the training centre in Rohini Sector 11, they said.

April 27th, 2009 NEW DELHI - A Chinese man is seeking 1 yuan in damages after accusing the Commercial Press for printing more than 20,000 mistakes in its Xinhua Dictionary. Chen, from Beijing, alleged he could site 22,638 errors in the 10th edition of the most popular dictionary in China, which was first published in 1957.

April 24th, 2009 NEW DELHI - A Chinese restaurant became an instant success after issuing a noodle eating challenge to its customers. The restaurant has told customers in Dongguan, Guangdong province that it will give 5,000 yuan to any person who can gobble down 20 bowls of hand-pulled noodles within 70 minutes, reports the China Daily.