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2017-07-03 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
Chinese scientists have announced that they have realized the real-time transmission of deep-sea data for more than 190 straight days, setting a new world record.
During an expedition to the west Pacific at the end of last year, researchers with the Institute of Oceanology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized the real-time transmission of deep-sea data after improving the subsurface buoy observation network.
They put a floating body on the sea, which was connected to a submersible buoy. The submersible buoy transmits data to the floating body, which then sends it to a satellite. Researchers then receive the data through the satellite.
The real-time deep-sea data includes the condition of the subsurface buoy, the flow speed, direction and pressure of seawater.
Real-time transmission of deep-sea data provides important technical support for research on the ocean environment and global climate. The data could enhance the precision in ocean climate and environment forecasts.
The previous world record for the real-time transmission of deep water data was around 90 days.
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China's supercomputers remain the world's fastest and second fastest machines, but America's Titan was squeezed into fourth place by an upgraded Swiss system.
The latest edition of the semiannual T0P500 list of supercomputers was released recently. China's supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight has been described by the T0P500 list as "far and away the most powerful number-cruncher on the planet. It maintained the lead since last June, when it dethroned Tianhe-2, the former champion for the previous three consecutive years.
This means that a Chinese supercomputer has topped the rankings maintained by researchers in the United States and Germany nine times in a row.
What's more, the Sunway TaihuLight was built entirely using processors designed and produced in China.
Officials say it highlights China's ability to conduct independent research in the supercomputing field.
In the latest rankings, the new number three supercomputer is the upgraded Piz Daint, a system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center.
Its current performance pushed Titan, a machine installed at the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, into fourth place. Titan's performance of 17.6 petaflops has remained constant since it was installed in 2012.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The European Union has reaffirmed its support for Paris agreement on climate change when its Foreign Affairs Council convened in Luxembourg.
The Council said in a statement that the Paris Agreement is fit for purpose and cannot be renegotiated.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on June 1 that he has decided to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a landmark global pact to fight climate change.
The Council said it deeply regretted the unilateral decision by the United States administration to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, while it welcomed the statements of commitment to the Agreement from other countries.
The Council said the EU will lead in the global fight against climate change through its climate policies and through continued support to those which are particularly vulnerable.
Besides this, the EU is strengthening its existing global partnerships and will continue to seek new alliances, from the world's largest economies to the most vulnerable island states.
The Paris Agreement was agreed on by almost every country in the world in 2015. It aims to tackle climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions and sets a global target of keeping the rise in the average temperature no higher than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
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It's possible for the European Union and Britain to strike a fair Brexit deal which is "far better than no deal".
EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier told reporters that for both the EU and the UK, a fair deal is possible, and far better than no deal. He made the remarks at a joint press conference with his British counterpart David Davis, after wrapping up the opening salvo of the Brexit talks in Brussels.
His remarks obviously alluded to British Prime Minister Theresa May's catchphrase "no deal is better than a bad deal".
Barnier said the first session was "important, open and useful indeed to start off on the right foot as the clock is ticking".
He outlined a two-step negotiation, saying they agreed on dates, organization, and priorities for the negotiation.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China is achieving landmarks in science and technology at breakneck speed.
The country's Tianzhou-1 cargo spacecraft completed its second docking with the Tiangong-2 space lab recently. Chinese scientists have announced that they have realized the satellite-based distribution of entangled photon pairs over a record distance of more than 1,200 kilometers, a major breakthrough that could be used to deliver secure messages. China has successfully launched its first X-ray space telescope to study black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, receiving its first package of data.
Officials say such a string of achievements shows China's innovation-driven development strategy is paying off.
The latest Global Innovation Index showed that China rose three spots to 22nd place on the list of the world's most innovative nations this year, becoming the only middle-income country to join the top 25 innovative economies.
However, China stepping closer to becoming an innovative power has aroused skepticism, with some arguing that its progress poses a threat to other countries.
Chinese observers refuted the claim, saying China's science and technology innovation has injected fresh energy to the world's sluggish economy and brought a new opportunity to global industrial restructuring and sustainable development.
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Chinese bicycle-sharing giant Mobike says it has 100 million users worldwide.
Mobike started its business in Shanghai in April last year, before expanding into major Chinese cities and branching out abroad. Users access a Mobike account and unlock the bicycles by scanning a QR code on the bicycles.
It has over 5 million bicycles in 100 cities worldwide.
Average daily orders top 25 million.
The company says it is trying to expand its business in the European and Asian markets.
Since April last year, Mobike users have logged 2.5 billion kilometers, equivalent to cutting the emissions of 170,000 cars for a whole year.
Mobike's chief competitor is Ofo bike.
According to the China E-Commerce Research Center, there were almost 19 million users of shared bicycles nationwide at the end of last year. The number is expected to hit 50 million by the end of this year.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Five British secondary school students have won a free trip to Hong Kong to attend university summer courses after topping a design competition.
The competition was organized earlier this year by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London. It invited British students to design a 48-hour travel itinerary for youth travelers visiting Hong Kong, with the aim of showing how the city is unique and attractive to youth travelers. The contestants were also expected to compare travel experiences between Hong Kong and a British city.
The organizers say many British students presented their submissions through a variety of means, including an essay, a video clip on Youtube, a blog post, from which five best entries were selected.
Carmen Truong was the winner from the Royal Latin School who impressed the judges with a beautiful scratch book. She will spend two weeks at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, learning Chinese and engineering.
As a Chinese girl born in London, Truong says she likes to collect information and pictures about Hong Kong; and this competition was a good chance for her to explore more about her background.
The annual competition is now in its sixth year. It seeks to encourage British students to consider going to universities in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China.
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A "Chinese Ambassador Scholarship" has been launched at the Chinese Embassy in Romania.
The Chinese Ambassador to Romania says the main goal of the scholarship is to encourage Romanian students to learn Chinese. It also aims to welcome as many young people as possible to jointly push forward Sino-Romanian friendly relations.
The ambassador says learning Chinese enjoys great popularity in Romania, where over 8,000 people are studying Chinese in Confucius institutes, Confucius classrooms and other places.
At the scholarship launching ceremony, around 20 students and four teachers were awarded with mobile phones and cash prizes to honor their efforts in learning and teaching Chinese.
Romania is one of the countries along the ancient Silk Road. It is part of the Belt and Road initiative for common development. The official says this will bring about increasing demand for talents in Romania, including Romanians can speak Chinese.
The ambassador says he hopes that more and more young people in Romania can play an active role in various fields including economic and trade cooperation and cultural exchanges between the two countries.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The National Museum of China has opened an exhibition featuring the work of Dutch painter Rembrandt and other famous artists of the 17th century.
The show includes more than 70 paintings, and is the largest exhibit featuring the prime age of Dutch painting ever staged in China.
The items on display include 11 paintings by Rembrandt including Minerva in Her Study and The Unconscious Patient. The exhibition also features works by Vermeer and Rembrandt's students.
The exhibition will last until September. It is organized jointly by the National Museum of China and the Leiden Collection.
The Leiden Collection was founded in 2003 by American collector Thomas Kaplan and his wife. It has the largest collection of 17th century Dutch paintings in the world.
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The influential Committee for Melbourne has called for a "mega-region" to be formed along Australia's eastern coast.
The chief of the committee Martine Letts said a rapid transport link between Melbourne and Sydney could see the "mega-region" become reality within a decade.
She said the region can also include other regional centers, and it could rival others in the world including the San Francisco-Los Angeles area in the United States.
The proposal by Letts came after the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University announced that it believed a hyper loop could provide the link between Melbourne and Sydney.
The hyper loop works by propelling a pod-like vehicle through a reduced-pressure tube at the speed of sound.
A local company in Melbourne says the technology already exists to make hyper loop a reality, and it just needed to be supported by the governments. It says a hyper loop project will take three to five years to complete.
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A 12th century castle which played a part in seeing the first female queen gain the throne of England has re-opened after a 1.6-million-U.S.-dollar conservation project.
Framlington Castle in the southern county of Suffolk was used over centuries as the center of a vast network of power and influence to a 17th century home for the poor.
It has reopened its doors, giving visitors a chance to explore its rich history spanning 900 years.
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2017-06-26 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
China has established its highest military award, the Order of August 1. The selection process for the first batch of winners has begun.
The award will honor those who have made outstanding contributions to safeguarding the country's sovereignty, security and development interests, and advancing the modernization of national defense and the armed forces.
A list of 17 candidates nominated by the People's Liberation Army, the armed police force and public security force has been made public to receive comments both from the military and the general public.
Chinese astronaut Jing Haipeng, commander of the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft, is among the 17 candidates.
August 1 is the founding anniversary of the Chinese military, the People's Liberation Army.
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A two-day ministerial meeting of the Group of Seven nations has ended in the Italy, confirming the split between the United States and its six major allies on climate change.
The U.S. refused to endorse the summit's final statement in the part concerning climate, following President Donald Trump's recent decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on cutting global carbon emissions.
Only six countries in the G7, namely, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan, restated their pledge to implement the accord, which has been signed by 195 parties and ratified by 148 countries and regions so far.
In point 7 of the 15-page final communique, they "reaffirm strong commitment to the swift and effective implementation of the Paris Agreement, which remains the global instrument for effectively and urgently tackling climate change, and adapting to its effects".
The U.S. representative did not agree on the point. The communique says the United States will continue to engage with key international partners in a manner that is consistent with its domestic priorities.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Beijing has pledged to closely cooperate and fully support the development of the Xiongan New Area and encourage people to move there as needed.
Officials from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei development group said the New Area, south of Beijing, will be the central location for non-capital functions.
Therefore, Beijing will actively strengthen cooperation with the area on construction and services, accelerating the relocation of industries that suit the new super economic zone.
Beijing will support whatever the New Area needs during its construction and development. Beijing will assist in the planning and policy cohesion in sectors including infrastructure construction, transportation integration and public service sharing.
Beijing will also support innovative companies to set up in the area.
China announced plans to establish the New Area in April this year as part of measures to integrate the region's development and cure "urban ills" including traffic congestion and air pollution.
Located 100 kilometers southwest of downtown Beijing, the New Area mainly covers three counties in Hebei province.
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China will set up a community governance system led by grassroots Communist Party of China organizations by 2020.
Local governments will play a guiding role in the community governance system which also features public participation.
Governance capacity in both urban and rural communities will improve significantly by that time, as public services, management and security will be effectively ensured.
A government document says that within another five to ten years, a more mature and comprehensive community governance system will offer strong support for the party at a grassroots level, while consolidating local governments.
Issues including the basic role of autonomous organizations, the participation of social groups and the functions of communities are also included in the document.
According to the document, on major issues relating to community public interests as well as those that matter to the residents' immediate interests, the community residents' role in the decision making and dispute resolution processes should be enhanced.
Meanwhile, community services that are closely related to the residents' interests, including employment, social security, health, education, housing, public security as well as legal and arbitration services, should be made more widely available.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The Precise Service System of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite has been used in creating 317 smart cities in China.
The system provides precise positioning services for household gas and heat, power grid, water supplies, drainage and smart transportation.
Scientists say the satellite has a wide range of applications; and its precise positioning services should be developed practically. Its precise positioning services have been used in Beijing Gas Group to detect and locate gas leaks in pipelines.
Scientists say that with the development of the internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence, there will be an increasing need for precise positioning in industries like unmanned vehicles, drones and robots.
The value of the satellite's industrial chain could reach 240 billion yuan by 2020.
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The principle of minimum intervention was highlighted at a forum on the protection and restoration of the Great Wall.
Cultural officials in Beijing have called for ensuring the principle of replacing bad practice, at the forum in north China's Hebei Province. The officials warned that too much restoration would damage preservation. They urged preventative protection.
The Great Wall, a symbol of China, is actually not just one wall, but many interconnected walls built between the third century B.C. and the Ming Dynasty which ended in the mid-17th century.
The existing sections are mainly the Ming Dynasty wall, which stretches over 8,800 kilometers. It was listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
The United States' best-known farm in China, Kimberley Farms in Iowa, has received a group of leading think tank researchers from Beijing for the first time, after becoming an attraction for Chinese visitors since President Xi Jinping's visit five years ago.
Almost 20 members of top Chinese think tanks, including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and China Center for International Economic Exchanges, retraced the roads that Xi traveled in 2012 as a visiting vice-president.
They ended the tour with a field trip to patches of the 1,600-hectare corn and soybean farm operated by Rick Kimberley in Maxwell, Iowa, around 60 kilometers northeast of the state capital Des Moines.
The strong wind and scorching sun on the weekend seemed not to dent their enthusiasm for learning more about agricultural trade between China and the United States. They also learned how farming is done in a safe and sustainable way in one of the top food exporters to China.
Kimberley said only three or four people work in the 1,600-hectare-farm, and these people are now helping China's Hebei province to develop a demonstration farm. The 1,200-hectare-project will use new technology that is being used in Iowa. An agreement on developing the project was signed at the end of May.
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More than two billion children and adults, or one third of the world's population, are now overweight or obese.
In a new study, researchers assembled data from 195 countries and territories to model trends in overweight or obese and related health problems and deaths. The study showed that the prevalence of obesity has doubled since 1980 in more than 70 countries and has continuously increased in most other nations.
Of the four million deaths attributed to excess body weight in 2015, almost 40 percent occurred among people whose body mass index, or BMI, fell below the threshold considered "obese".
The paper was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Authors of the paper say the findings represent "a growing and disturbing global public health crisis".
The results of the study are based on data from the most recent Global Burden of Disease study, a systematic, scientific effort to quantify the magnitude of health loss from all major diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and population.
It found excess weight affected 2 billion children and adults worldwide in 2015, including almost 108 million children and more than 600 million adults with BMI, or body mass indes, exceeding 30, the threshold for obesity.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Hotspots of established alien plant and animal species were found mainly in island and coastal mainland regions.
A study is carried out by an international team, led by Dr. Wayne Dawson from the Durham University in the UK. The team analyzed existing data of eight groups of animals including amphibians, birds and plants across 190 islands and 420 mainland regions.
The top three hotspots with the highest numbers of established alien species were the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand's North Island and the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia.
High numbers of alien species in every one of the eight groups studied could be found in the Hawaiian Islands. They include guppies among fish, now globally widespread, and feral pigs among mammals.
Florida in the U.S. is the top hotspot among coastal mainland regions, with the Burmese python, a well-known example of an invasive species among reptiles. The state is also home to a large number of less well-known non-native ant species.
The study says the reason that islands and mainland coastal regions contain higher numbers of established alien plants and animals may be that these areas have major points of entry like ports.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A total of 243 precious items from Russia's Peterhof State Museum are being exhibited in southwest China's Sichuan Province.
The items on display at the Chengdu Museum include oil paintings, porcelain, sculptures, clothes and furniture.
The exhibition also features activities including a Russian fashion show and a Tetris game.
The exhibition is among those the Chengdu Museum has held with countries along the ancient silk road to strengthen cultural exchange.
A curator of the Russian museum said the display is expected to help people in Chengdu learn more about the history of Russia.
The Peterhof State Museum is one of the most important museums that stores and displays cultural artifacts of the Russian Romanov Dynasty between 1613 and 1917. Peter the Great was the fourth tsar of the dynasty.
The display is free to the public and will be open until the end of August.
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The birth of a giant panda cub at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo has been toasted in Japan.
The 11-year-old Shin Shin, which means "truth", was removed from public viewing in mid-May after she began showing signs of pregnancy, including loss of appetite and increased lethargy.
The Tokyo Governor has congratulated Shin Shin on her successful delivery.
Shin Shin and her partner have been on loan from China since February 2011. They were ready for display shortly after the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, bringing some much-needed joy to Japanese fans.
In 2012, Shin Shin had a cub, the first panda born at the zoo in 24 years. It was greeted with widespread excitement. But the cub died from pneumonia six days after birth.
Shin Shin showed signs of pregnancy again in 2013, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
Panda pregnancies are relatively rare in captivity and outside China.
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2017-06-19 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
President Xi Jinping says expanded economic cooperation among members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will benefit the region.
Speaking at the annual summit of the organization in Astana, Kazakhstan, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for deepening practical cooperation, as regional integration and economic globalization are the trends of the time, and it is important for them to bring benefits to all countries and peoples.
To mobilize more resources and the driving force for practical cooperation under the organization framework, China supports the establishment of a mechanism for sub-national cooperation and has vigorously promoted small and medium-sized enterprises cooperation by its initiatives of economic think-tanks alliance and e-commerce alliance of the organization.
Bilateral trade relations have grown closer between China and other member countries, as trade facilitation has improved, with China becoming the largest trading partner of Russia and Kyrgyzstan.
Meanwhile, mutual investment has grown steadily, with China's non-financial direct investment in other members as of April 2017 amounting to 74 billion U.S. dollars and investment in the opposite direction totaling 1 billion U.S. dollars.
Senior Chinese officials highlighted achievements in establishing economic and trade cooperation zones, noting that China has built a total of 21 such cooperation zones within other countries, helping to expand local employment and increase tax revenue.
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Europe has found itself at the frontline in the fight against terrorism. The sight of armed soldiers on the streets of European cities has become all too familiar.
The spotlight has swung to Britain this time, but no-one in France, a country that has experienced several attacks in the past few years, is under the illusion that their country is completely safe.
Squads of soldiers with automatic weapons at the ready are a regular sight on the streets of Paris. Despite their presence, the French were reminded of the threat when police shot a man outside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this month.
The suspect, a 40-year-old Algerian doctoral student, attacked an officer with a hammer while shouting "This is for Syria."
One worrying trend to emerge from the British attacks is that in all three attacks, at least one of the perpetrators was known to the authorities. The three attacks included the Westminster Bridge and London Bridge killings in London and the attack in Manchester which also targeted children.
As radicalization become ever more complex and multifaceted, many now agree that it is necessary to move beyond a mere cause-effect analysis and look at the problem from different angles.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China is making preliminary preparations for a manned lunar landing mission. That's according to Yang Liwei, deputy director general of the China Manned Space Agency.
Yang said it will not take long for the project to get official approval and funding. He made the remarks during a group conference at the Global Space Exploration Conference.
Yang is China's first astronaut. When asked whether he has any plan to step onto the Moon, he showed great excitement, saying that if he is given the opportunity, there is no problem!
A senior official from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation also said China is working on a manned lunar landing plan.
The mission will consist of a manned spaceship, a propulsion vehicle and a lunar lander. The manned spaceship and the lunar lander will be sent into circumlunar orbit separately.
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SpaceX's uncrewed Dragon cargo ship has arrived at the International Space Station, carrying for the first time an experiment independently designed by China and also supplies for the astronauts living in the orbiting laboratory.
NASA astronauts Jack Fischer reached out with the space station's robotic arm and grappled the spacecraft, as the space station was flying over the South Atlantic Ocean, just east off the coast of Argentina.
Dragon carried almost 6,000 pounds, roughly 2,700 kilograms of cargo for its 11th commercial resupply mission for NASA, including solar panels, tools for Earth-observation and equipment to study neutron stars.
Among the cargo is a 3.5-kilogram device from the Beijing Institute of Technology that aims to investigate how the space radiation and microgravity environment affect DNA.
The deal for the delivery was reached in 2015 with NanoRacks, a Houston-based company that offers services for the commercial utilization of the space station.
U.S. legislation known as the Wolf amendment bans cooperation between NASA and Chinese government entities, but the deal is purely commercial and therefore considered legal.
Dragon, launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on 4th of June, was expected to remain docked with the space station until early July.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A new undersea telecommunications cable known as MAREA that aims to improve connections between Europe and the United States is scheduled to reach the Spanish coast on July 12.
Deployment of the cable, which is being jointly laid by Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica, along with Microsoft and Facebook, began from the east coast of the United States on May 24. It reached the French city of Calais on June 9, before continuing to a town in northern Spain.
Microsoft described MAREA as the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic. It features eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160 TeraBits per Second. That rate is 16 million times faster than a standard home internet connection.
Scientists say it's routing south of other trans-Atlantic cables means it will become "the first to connect the United States to southern Europe: from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao in Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
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Eight computer science professors at Oregon State University have been tasked to make systems based on artificial intelligence, including autonomous vehicles and robots, more trustworthy.
Recent advances in autonomous systems that can perceive, learn, decide and act on their own stem from success of the deep neural networks branch of artificial intelligence, with deep-learning software mimicking the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the part of the brain where thinking occurs.
The problem, however, is that the neural networks function as a black box. Instead of humans explicitly coding system behavior using traditional programming, in deep learning the computer program learns on its own from many examples.
Potential dangers arise from depending on a system that not even the system developers fully understand.
With a 6.5 million U.S. dollars grant over the next four years from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, under its Explainable Artificial Intelligence program, a news release from Oregon State University said its researchers will develop a paradigm to look inside that black box, by getting the program to explain to humans how decisions were reached.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Experts predict that the United States, China and India are considered to be the most prospective destinations for foreign direct investment. The statement was made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in its annual report on investment.
According to the World Investment Report 2017: Investment and the Digital Economy, global foreign direct investment flows retreated marginally in 2016 by 2 percent to 1.75 trillion U.S. dollars, amid weak economic growth and significant policy risks perceived by multinational enterprises.
Flows to developing countries were especially hard hit, with a decline of 14 percent, while foreign direct investment outflows from developed countries decreased by 11 percent, mainly owing to a slump in investments from European multinational enterprises.
The United States remained the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, attracting 391 billion U.S. dollars in inflows, followed by Britain with 254 billion dollars, and China with inflows of 134 billion dollars.
According to the report, with a surge of outflows, China also became last year the second largest investing country.
In 2017, global foreign direct investment is expected to rise by 5 percent, to almost 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars.
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An international research team has evaluated 145 peer-reviewed studies and concluded that "highly protected" marine reserves can help mitigate the effects of climate change.
Jane Lubchenco is a professor in the College of Science at Oregon State University and co-author on a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She said marine reserves cannot halt or completely offset the growing impacts of climate change. But they can make marine ecosystems more resilient to changes and, in some cases, help slow down the rate of climate change.
Around the world, coastal nations have committed to protecting 10 percent of their waters by 2020, but thus far only 3.5 percent of the ocean has been set aside for protection, and 1.6 percent, or less than half of that, is strongly protected from exploitation. Some researchers have argued that as much as 30 percent of the ocean should be set aside as reserves to safeguard marine ecosystems in the long-term.
The professor says protecting a portion of our oceans and coastal wetlands will help sequester carbon, limit the consequences of poor management, protect habitats and biodiversity that are key to healthy oceans of the future, and buffer coastal populations from extreme events. She says marine reserves are climate reserves.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Plant embryos have cells that function as a brain. That's according a study published recently by scientists at the University of Birmingham. The study has revealed that the group of brain cells can assess environmental conditions and dictate when seeds will germinate.
The researchers say that a plant's decision about when to germinate is one of the most important it will make during its life. Too soon, and the plant may be damaged by harsh winter conditions; too late, and it may be outcompeted by other more precocious plants.
The Birmingham scientists have shown that this trade-off between speed and accuracy is controlled by a small group of cells within the plant embryo that operate in similar way to the human brain.
The "decision-making center" in a plant contains two types of cell, one that promotes seed dormancy, and one that promotes germination.
The two groups of cells communicate with each other by moving hormones, an analogous mechanism to that employed by our own brains when we decide whether or not to move.
The scientists used mathematical modelling to show that communication between the separated elements controls the plant's sensitivity to its environment.
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Fossils of a complete crocodile and bones belonging to at least six different dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, 145 to 66 million years ago, have been excavated in northeast China's Jilin Province.
After a year of preparation, paleontologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a local fossil center began the excavation in late May, following the discovery of dinosaur fossils in a nearby city in May 2016.
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2017-06-20 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
A Chinese envoy to the United Nations has called on the international community to adapt to the new trends and features of terrorist groups and enhance cooperation in fighting terrorism.
Recently, multiple terrorist attacks occurred in Egypt, Afghanistan, Britain, France, Iran and other places, causing severe casualties and property losses. Chinese's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations made the remarks at a Security Council meeting which focused on the threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.
He stressed that terrorism is the common enemy of mankind and its impact goes beyond borders; and no country can address terrorism by itself or keep itself from terrorism.
The Chinese envoy called for measures to reach international consensus, deal with the root causes of terrorism, stem the transnational movement of terrorists, cut off their financing channels and fight against their propaganda.
He said the international community should put solving regional hot-spot issues as a top priority, and work to promote political dialogues to address regional conflicts and maintain regional peace, stability and development, so as to eradicate the root cause of terrorism.
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China is working on reusable launch vehicles and has achieved progress in some key areas.
A carrier rocket official says the processes under development include parachute-landing and propulsion-landing.
Reusable lift-body launchers will be developed in three stages, namely, rocket-engine partial reusable vehicle, rocket-engine full reusable vehicle and combined cycle-engine reusable vehicle.
The official said the Long March carrier rockets still have room for improvement, adding that China is developing a heavy-lift launch vehicle with a payload of 140 tonnes to low Earth orbit and 50 tonnes to lunar transfer orbit.
The heavy-lift carrier rocket is currently called the Long March-9, and it should be sent into space by 2030.
A low-cost commercial medium launch vehicle, the Long March-8, is under development, and based on the Long March-8, a new high-orbit medium launch vehicle should be designed to improve the Long March series and enhance competitiveness.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
China's Food and Drug Administration has approved a new-generation of heart valve replacement product, which greatly reduces surgery time and increases survival rate.
The developers announced recently that the J-Valve has passed clinical tests and will be put into use across China.
Traditional solutions require doctors to make a big incision on the patients' chests and open their hearts to put the prosthetic valve inside manually. The process takes about four hours and poses risks of wrong positioning of the valve and loss of blood.
The J-Valve system features minimally invasive surgery. It is easier to implant and provides automatic positioning of the valve. Doctors only watch an electronic screen and operate outside the patients' bodies. The whole procedure lasts about 10 minutes.
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The World Health Organization has started a "smoke-free generation" media campaign in Beijing targeting young people in China.
A World Health Organization representative says China is in the grip of a national tobacco epidemic, and children are most susceptible with cigarettes portrayed as fashionable and alluring in popular culture.
According to World Health Organization, over half of Chinese adult men smoke, two thirds of whom started as young adults. By 2014, 73 percent Chinese students had been exposed to secondhand smoke.
The official says there is nothing cool about smoking, but there is something empowering about choosing to live a healthy, smoke-free life.
Since China ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2005, the country has made a number of tobacco control efforts, including banning tobacco advertisements, increasing tobacco taxes and putting forward regional smoking bans.
As of 2016, 18 cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, had implemented regional smoking bans.
China has set a target to reduce the smoking rate among people aged 15 and older to 20 percent by 2030 from the current 28 percent. That's according to the "Healthy China 2030" blueprint issued by the central authorities last October.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
One in 20 pregnant women in the U.S. territories with confirmed Zika virus infection had a baby or fetus with Zika virus-associated birth defects.
Among the women with confirmed Zika infection during the first trimester, eight percent, or nearly one in 12, had a baby or fetus with Zika virus-associated birth defects.
A government report, the first from the U.S. territories, represents the largest number of completed pregnancies with laboratory confirmation of Zika virus infection to date.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says as these latest findings illustrate, Zika virus poses a serious threat to pregnant women and their babies, regardless of when the infection occurs during the pregnancy.
It says women in the U.S. territories and elsewhere who have continued exposure to mosquitoes carrying Zika are at risk of infection. The government must remain vigilant and committed to preventing new Zika infections.
The new analysis reviewed the cases of 2,550 women with possible Zika virus infections who completed their pregnancies, of which 1,508 had confirmed Zika virus infections.
In this report, more than 120 pregnancies resulted in Zika-associated birth defects.
This is Special English.
Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco have found that older people with persistent pain show quicker declines in memory as they age and are more likely to have dementia years later.
Findings from their study, which appears to be the first to make this association, indicate that chronic pain could somehow be related to changes in the brain that contribute to dementia.
The researchers analyzed data from 10,000 participants aged 60 and up over a 12-year period.
The participants who said they were persistently troubled by moderate or severe pain in both years 1998 and 2000 declined 9 percent faster in tests of memory function over the next 10 years than those who said they were not troubled by pain.
Those who complained about persistent pain also had a small but significantly increased likelihood of developing dementia overall.
Researchers say the findings point toward new ways of thinking about how to protect older people from the cognitive insults of aging.
Elderly people need to maintain their cognition to stay independent. Up to one in three older people suffer from chronic pain, so understanding the relationship between pain and cognitive decline is an important first step toward finding ways to help this population.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
U.S. researchers studying autism say they were now able to use brain scans to detect functional changes in high-risk babies as young as six months of age and then predict who would be diagnosed with the condition at age two.
Autism affects roughly one out of every 68 children in the United States. Siblings of children diagnosed with autism are at higher risk of developing the disorder.
Although early diagnosis and intervention can help improve outcomes for children with autism, there currently is no method to diagnose the disease before children show symptoms.
The current study is conducted by a research team led by investigators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The study focused on the brain's functional connectivity, or how regions of the brain work together during different tasks and during rest.
Using an imaging technique called functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers have scanned 59 high-risk, six-month-old infants while they slept naturally.
The children were deemed high-risk because they have older siblings with autism. At the age of two, 11 of the 59 infants in this group were diagnosed with autism, and nine of the 11 infants would go on to have autism.
This is Special English.
The Australian State of New South Wales' health department has announced that it will ban sugary soft drinks in all hospitals and care facilities by the end of this year, in order to combat the growing problem of obesity.
The move comes as part of its "Make Healthy Normal" campaign, which aims to achieve a five percent reduction in overweight and obesity rates in adults by 2020.
Chief health officer Kerry Chant said there's no better way to start than right here on our own doorstep. He said it is important that NSW Health provides healthy food and drink choices for all the staff and visitors.
Chant said that by establishing this model, they hope it shows how a workable strategy can be successfully implemented across any organization to assist healthier choices in any staffing environment.
According to the NSW Heart Foundation, a health advocacy and charity group, "one in two adults and more than one in five children in NSW are overweight or obese. It dramatically heightens the risk of a wide range of chronic health conditions including "type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke and some cancers.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
A new study by University of Washington transportation engineers indicates that delivering packages with drones can reduce carbon dioxide emissions in certain circumstances as compared to truck deliveries.
The study suggests that drones tend to have carbon dioxide emissions advantages over trucks when the drones don't have to fly very far to their destinations or when a delivery route has few recipients; and they compete especially well for small, light packages, such as a bottle of medicine or a kid's bathing suit.
However, the carbon benefits erode as the weight of a package increases, since unmanned aerial vehicles have to use additional energy to stay aloft with a heavy load.
The study compares carbon dioxide emissions and vehicle miles traveled from drone and truck deliveries in 10 different, real-world scenarios in Los Angeles, Southern California.
The study noted that it's unlikely that drones will be used for all delivery applications but that there are some contexts in which they appear to make sense, such as shorter trips in less densely developed communities, or in controlled places like a military base or campus.
This is Special English.
"Wonder Woman" of Warner Bros. topped the box office in North America with an estimated 100 million U.S. dollars on its debut weekend, making the Patty Jenkins-directed superhero film the biggest ever opening weekend for a female director.
The latest DC Comics superhero movie is the first big-budget superhero movie with a female lead to be directed by a woman. The previous record-holder for top opening for a female director was Sam Taylor-Johnson's "Fifty Shades of Grey" which debuted with an 85 million U.S. dollars on its debut weekend in 2015.
And overseas, "Wonder Woman" also won the weekend with 122.5 million U.S. dollars from 55 markets for a global sum of 223 million U.S. dollars.
Film analysts say the movie helps to get a lackluster summer so far heading in the right direction. A perfectly cast Gal Gadot in the lead role coupled with a great release date, killer marketing campaign and above all a great movie that has both critics and audiences buzzing on social media, contributed to this better than expected result.
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2017-06-13 Special English
This is Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
China&`&s new cyber security law, which went into effect recently, is not aimed at limiting foreign companies&`& access to the Chinese market.
China&`&s Internet regulator said the law is designed to safeguard China&`&s cyberspace sovereignty, national security, public interest, as well as the rights and interests of citizens, legal persons and other organizations.
The Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement that it does not restrict foreign companies or their technology and products from entering the Chinese market, nor does it limit the orderly, free flow of data. The document said China is entitled to make laws and rules to regulate its cyberspace sovereignty following international practice.
The law was passed in November 2016 at a bimonthly session of the National People&`&s Congress Standing Committee after a third reading.
A regulation requiring Internet products and services that may affect national security to undergo a security review will go into effect on the same day as the cyber security law.
Reviews focus on whether the products or services are secure and sufficiently managed, and on assessing the risk of an illegal control, disruption or interruption.
They also evaluate the risk of providers using their products or services to illegally gather, store, process or make use of user information.
This is Special English.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has called on Germany to help China-developed large passenger plane the C919 get an airworthiness certificate from the European Union.
Li made the call during his talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. He was on an official visit to Germany for an annual meeting between the two heads of government, a mechanism that has been in place since 2004.
The twin-engine C919 made a maiden flight on May 5 in Shanghai with five crew members on board but no passengers. The success makes China the fourth jumbo jet producer after the United States, Western Europe and Russia.
With a standard range of 4,075 kilometers, the narrow-body jet is comparable with updated Airbus 320 and Boeing&`&s new generation 737 planes, signaling the country&`&s entry into the global aviation market.
China has taken pride in developing the homegrown jumbo jet, regarding it as a symbol of national strength.
In 2007, the State Council approved plans to develop a large passenger jet. In November 2015, the first C919 jet rolled off assembly lines. More than 200,000 technicians worked on the project.
A total of 23 foreign and domestic customers, including China&`&s national carrier Air China, had placed orders for 570 aircraft as of May 5.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said that the world would know his decision on the Paris climate agreement over the next few days.
Trump tweeted recently that he would be announcing his decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Citing senior U.S. officials familiar with Trump&`&s plan, several U.S. mainstream media reported that Trump is expected to withdraw from the Paris Accord adopted by 196 nations in 2015.
However, CNN quoted U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity as saying that Trump&`&s position on the Paris Accord could still change until he makes his decision public.
The Trump administration was initially planning to make a final decision on the Paris Accord early this month. However, the decision was delayed till the G7 meeting in Sicily, Italy.
However, Trump left the G7 summit without agreeing to endorse the Paris Accord to cut global carbon emissions, raising eyebrows among leaders of U.S. key allies in the group.
This is Special English.
U.S. space firm SpaceX has launched supplies to the International Space Station, including an experiment from a Chinese university that will test the effects of space environments on DNA.
The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft lifted off on the company&`&s Falcon 9 rocket at 5:07 p.m. local time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Around 10 minutes later, the rocket&`&s first stage achieved a successful landing at SpaceX&`&s Landing Zone 1, just south of the launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
On this trip, the Dragon will deliver almost 2,700 kilograms of supplies, including solar panels, tools for Earth-observation and equipment to study neutron stars.
Among the cargo is a 3.5-kilogram device from the Beijing Institute of Technology that sought to answer questions like this: "Does the space radiation and microgravity cause mutations among antibody-encoding genes and how does it happen."
There is a U.S. law in place, known as the Wolf amendment, that bans cooperation between the U.S. space agency NASA and the Chinese government entities, but this deal is purely commercial and therefore considered legal.
NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton confirmed to China&`&s Xinhua News Agency that there is a Chinese experiment that is launched on this mission, known as SpaceX CRS-11.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
China&`&s manned submarine Jiaolong conducted its first dive of the year in the Yap Trench.
Jiaolong began diving at 8:43 a.m. local time on a rainy day on 4th of June, reaching a depth of 4,177 meters.
A staff member on board said Jiaolong was not afraid of the bad weather, but the rain did make it a bit more difficult for the dive. He said they cannot hear each other clearly due to the rain, so they have to be extra careful during the operation.
There will be five dives for Jiaolong in the Yap Trench, and the last dive is planned for June 12.
According to scientists on the ship, the dives will focus on research in deep-sea biotic communities and gene resources.
Jiaolong completed a series of dives in the Mariana Trench on June 1 and was transferred aboard its support ship to the Yap Trench afterward.
The Mariana and Yap trenches are located in the west Pacific Ocean. The Yap Trench has a depth of 8,527 meters, and the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point of Earth&`&s oceans, has a depth of 11,034 meters.
Named after a mythical dragon, Jiaolong reached its deepest point of 7,062 meters in the Mariana Trench in June 2012.
This is Special English.
A network of remote sensing satellite ground stations that cover all of China&`&s territory and 70 percent of Asia has passed its final acceptance examination.
The network is headquartered in Beijing and features three ground stations in a suburb in Beijing, Kashgar in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Sanya in Hainan Province, respectively.
According to the examination committee, it will be used to support various remote-sensing systems, especially for the western part of the country and the South China Sea.
The project began in 2007.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
India has launched its heaviest rocket, along with a satellite, that is believed to be able to send humans into space in the future.
The home-made rocket, named Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle or Mark III, lifted off from the southern spaceport in Andhra Pradesh state at 5:28 p.m. local time.
State-owned Indian Space Research Organisation said the communication satellite that the rocket carried weighs more than three tonnes.
The countdown for the launch of the 640-tonne rocket began Sunday.
In another development, India has successfully test fired its first all weather tracked-chassis Quick Reaction Surface-to-Air Missile.
India&`&s state-run broadcaster All India Radio said the missile was launched from a mobile launcher in the Integrated Test Range off Odisha coast at Chandipur at around 12:39 p.m. local time.
The broadcaster reported that the test was carried out for validating various parameters of the sophisticated weapon system to further strengthen its air defence system.
This is Special English.
The Federal Agency for Nature Conservation has raised concerns that meadows and pastures are becoming increasingly endangered in Germany and has released a new red list to German press agencies.
The new red list of endangered biotypes, serves as a handbook for future conservation plans and is an update from the previous 2006 red list.
Federal Minister for the Environment Barbara Hendrick from the Social Democratic Party of Germany, presented the findings that indicated almost two-thirds of the 863 species present in habitats in Germany are under severe threat from intensive agriculture, among other causes. The threat has particularly worsened in pastures or grasslands; meadows are also under increasing pressure.
The Federal Office for Nature Conservation has reported some positive developments in coastal regions as well as next to rivers and streams which are benefiting from restoration or environmental protection plans as well as better sewage treatment plants. However, figures are much less positive for groundwater due to high nitrogen pollution caused by fertilizers from intensive farming. Many stagnant water volumes are also affected.
There are many types of natural habitats in Germany including 46 types of water environments.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
A study on young female mice reveals how puberty hormones might trigger changes in neural communication in the frontal cortices and impede some aspects of flexible youthful learning.
Scientists have found that the onset of puberty hits something like a "switch" in the brain&`&s frontal cortex that can reduce flexibility in some forms of learning.
The study was led by Linda Wilbrecht, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and the senior author of the study published in the journal Current Biology.
The changes occurred in a region of the frontal brain that is associated with learning, attention and behavioral regulation.
Overall, children have been found to have greater brain flexibility or "plasticity" than adults, enabling them to more easily master multiple languages and other elementary scholastic pursuits.
While they continue to learn after puberty, their cognitive focus in adolescence is often redirected to peer relationships and more social learning.
The study noted that if hormonal changes start as early as the second or third grade, when children are tasked with learning basic skills, a shift in brain function could be problematic.
Puberty onset is occurring earlier and earlier in girls in modern urban settings, driven by such factors as stress and the obesity epidemic, and has been associated with worse outcomes in terms of school and mental health.
This is Special English.
America&`&s first Nutella Cafe opened recently in downtown Chicago, with more than 400 customers lining for their favorite treat.
This is the first standalone Nutella Cafe owned by parent company Ferrero. Its menu items include grilled baguettes, fresh-roasted hazelnut, gelato and some Italian specialties.
Nutella&`&s head of marketing in North America says there&`&s an incredible dining culture in this city, and Nutella is all about the idea of sharing good food with friends and family; and they thought that Chicago would be the perfect place to do that.
The first 400 people in line were let in this two-level cafe and they received special Nutella Cafe Chicago jars, along with croissants. Some Nutella fans even arrived as early as 5 a.m. for the opening of the door.
Nutella was created in Italy and debuted in the United States in 1983. The spread is available in about 160 countries.
That is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I&`&m going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
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2017-06-12 Special English
This is Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
China&`&s new cyber security law, which went into effect recently, is not aimed at limiting foreign companies&`& access to the Chinese market.
China&`&s Internet regulator said the law is designed to safeguard China&`&s cyberspace sovereignty, national security, public interest, as well as the rights and interests of citizens, legal persons and other organizations.
The Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement that it does not restrict foreign companies or their technology and products from entering the Chinese market, nor does it limit the orderly, free flow of data. The document said China is entitled to make laws and rules to regulate its cyberspace sovereignty following international practice.
The law was passed in November 2016 at a bimonthly session of the National People&`&s Congress Standing Committee after a third reading.
A regulation requiring Internet products and services that may affect national security to undergo a security review will go into effect on the same day as the cyber security law.
Reviews focus on whether the products or services are secure and sufficiently managed, and on assessing the risk of illegal control, disruption or interruption.
They also evaluate the risk of providers using their products or services to illegally gather, store, process or make use of user information.
This is Special English.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has called on Germany to help China-developed large passenger plane C919 get an airworthiness certificate from the European Union.
Li made the call during his talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. He was on an official visit to Germany for an annual meeting between the two heads of government, a mechanism that has been in place since 2004.
The twin-engine C919 made its maiden flight on May 5 in Shanghai with five crew members on board but no passengers. The success makes China the fourth jumbo jet producer after the United States, Western Europe and Russia.
With a standard range of 4,075 kilometers, the narrow-bodied jet is comparable with the updated Airbus 320 and Boeing&`&s new generation 737 planes, signaling the country&`&s entry into the global aviation market.
China has taken pride in developing the homegrown jumbo jet, regarding it as a symbol of national strength.
In 2007, the State Council approved plans to develop a large passenger jet. In November 2015, the first C919 jet rolled off the assembly line. More than 200,000 technicians worked on the project.
A total of 23 foreign and domestic customers, including China&`&s national carrier Air China, had placed orders for 570 aircraft as of May 5.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
U.S. space firm SpaceX has launched supplies to the International Space Station, including an experiment from a Chinese university that will test the effects of space environments on DNA.
The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft lifted off on the company&`&s Falcon 9 rocket at 5:07 p.m. local time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Around 10 minutes later, the rocket&`&s first stage achieved a successful landing at SpaceX&`&s Landing Zone 1, just south of the launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
On this trip, the Dragon will deliver almost 2,700 kilograms of supplies, including solar panels, tools for Earth-observation and equipment to study neutron stars.
Among the cargo is a 3.5-kilogram device from the Beijing Institute of Technology that seeks to answer questions including "Does space radiation and microgravity cause mutations among antibody-encoding genes and if so, how does it happen."
There is a U.S. law in place, known as the Wolf amendment, that bans cooperation between the U.S. space agency NASA and Chinese government entities, but this deal is purely commercial and therefore considered legal.
NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton confirmed to China&`&s Xinhua News Agency that there is a Chinese experiment that has been launched on this mission, known as SpaceX CRS-11.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China&`&s manned submarine Jiaolong has conducted its first dive of the year in the Yap Trench.
Jiaolong began diving at 8:43 a.m. local time on a rainy day on 4th of June, reaching a depth of 4,177 meters.
A staff member on board said Jiaolong was not afraid of the bad weather, but the rain did make it a bit more difficult for the dive. He said they cannot hear each other clearly due to the rain, so they have to be extra careful during the operation.
There will be five dives for Jiaolong in the Yap Trench, with the last dive being planned for June 12.
According to scientists on the ship, the dives will focus on research in deep-sea biotic communities and gene resources.
Jiaolong completed a series of dives in the Mariana Trench on June 1 and was transferred aboard its support ship to the Yap Trench afterwards.
The Mariana and Yap trenches are located in the west Pacific Ocean. The Yap Trench has a depth of 8,527 meters, and the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point of Earth&`&s oceans, has a depth of 11,034 meters.
Named after a mythical dragon, Jiaolong reached its deepest point of 7,062 meters in the Mariana Trench in June 2012.
This is Special English.
A network of remote sensing satellite ground stations that cover all of China&`&s territory and 70 percent of Asia has passed its final acceptance examination.
The network is headquartered in Beijing and features three ground stations in a suburb in Beijing, in Kashgar in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Sanya in Hainan Province.
According to the examination committee, it will be used to support various remote-sensing systems, especially for the western part of the country and the South China Sea.
The project began in 2007.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
India has launched its heaviest rocket, along with a satellite, that is now believed to be able to send humans into space in the future.
The domestically-produced rocket, named Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle or Mark III, lifted off from the southern spaceport in Andhra Pradesh state at 5:28 p.m. local time.
The state-owned Indian Space Research Organisation said the communication satellite that the rocket carried weighs more than three tonnes.
The countdown for the launch of the 640-tonne rocket began on Sunday.
In another development, India has successfully test fired its first all-weather tracked-chassis Quick Reaction Surface-to-Air Missile.
India&`&s state-run broadcaster All India Radio said the missile was launched from a mobile launcher in the Integrated Test Range off the Odisha coast at Chandipur at around 12:39 p.m. local time.
The broadcaster reported that the test was carried out for validating various parameters of the sophisticated weapon system to further strengthen its air defence system.
This is Special English.
A survey of the California Current System along the U.S. West Coast of the United States found persistent, highly acidified water throughout the ecologically critical nearshore habitat.
Led by Francis Chan, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, researchers participating in the survey said conditions will continue to worsen because the atmospheric carbon dioxide primarily to blame for the increase in acidification has been rising substantially in recent years.
While the findings of the study, which was published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, identified "hotspots" of pH, or the potential of hydrogen, measurements as low as any oceanic surface waters in the world, there were "refuges" of more moderate pH environments that could become havens for some marine organisms to escape more highly acidified waters.
The threat of ocean acidification is global and though it sometimes seems far away, it is happening on the West Coast of the United States and those waters are already hitting the beaches. Chan said that ten years ago, they were focusing on the tropics with their coral reefs as the place most likely to be affected by ocean acidification. But the California Current System is getting hit with acidification earlier and more drastically than other locations around the world.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The Federal Agency for Nature Conservation has raised concerns that meadows and pastures are becoming increasingly endangered in Germany and has released a new red list to the German Press Agency.
The new red list of endangered biotypes, serves as a handbook for future conservation plans and is an update from the previous 2006 red list.
Federal Minister for the Environment Barbara Hendrick from the Social Democratic Party of Germany, presented the findings that indicated almost two-thirds of the 863 species present in habitats in Germany are under severe threat from intensive agriculture, among other causes. The threat has particularly worsened in pastures or grasslands; meadows are also under increasing pressure.
The Federal Office for Nature Conservation has reported some positive developments in coastal regions as well as next to rivers and streams which are benefiting from restoration or environmental protection plans as well as better sewage treatment plants. However, figures are much less positive for groundwater due to high nitrogen pollution caused by fertilizers from intensive farming. Many stagnant water volumes are also affected.
There are many types of natural habitats in Germany including 46 types of water environments and 20 types of arable and fallow arable land.
This is Special English.
A study on young female mice reveals how puberty hormones might trigger changes in neural communication in the frontal cortices and impede some aspects of flexible youthful learning.
Scientists have found that the onset of puberty hits something like a "switch" in the brain&`&s frontal cortex that can reduce flexibility in some forms of learning.
The study was led by Linda Wilbrecht, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and the senior author of the study published in the journal Current Biology.
The changes occurred in a region of the frontal brain that is associated with learning, attention and behavioral regulation.
Overall, children have been found to have greater brain flexibility or "plasticity" than adults, enabling them to more easily master multiple languages and other elementary scholastic pursuits.
While they continue to learn after puberty, their cognitive focus in adolescence is often redirected to peer relationships and more social learning.
The study noted that if hormonal changes start as early as second or third grade, when children are tasked with learning basic skills, a shift in brain function could be problematic.
Puberty onset is occurring earlier and earlier in girls in modern urban settings, driven by such factors as stress and the obesity epidemic, and has been associated with worse outcomes in terms of school and mental health.
This is Special English.
America&`&s first Nutella Cafe opened recently in downtown Chicago, with more than 400 customers lining up for their favorite treat.
This is the first standalone Nutella Cafe owned by parent company Ferrero. Its menu items include grilled baguettes, fresh-roasted hazelnut, gelato and some Italian specialties.
Noah Szporn, head of marketing at Nutella North America says there&`&s an incredible dining culture in the city, and Nutella is all about the idea of sharing good food with friends and family; and they thought that Chicago would be the perfect place to do that.
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This is Special English. I’m Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
The United States Senate has voted 82-13 to approve the Iowa Governor Terry Branstad to be the new U.S. Ambassador to China.
In a statement after the confirmation, Branstad said he looks forward to working with leaders of both countries for the mutual benefit of the rest of the world.
He said that never in his wildest dreams did he think that a boy from a small farm in Leland, Iowa, would one day have the opportunity to represent his country on the world stage, working closely with one of the world&`&s most influential countries and one of America&`&s largest trading partners.
Seventy-year-old Branstad is the longest-serving governor in the United States. He has nurtured a close relationship with China and has visited China multiple times.
He served as the governor of Iowa from 1983 to 1999, and again since 2011. He was nominated by U.S. President Donald Trump to be the next U.S. ambassador to China in December last year.
During his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Branstad said that if confirmed, he would work to "positively influence" the U.S.-China relationship.
He said that as Governor of Iowa, he saw first-hand the importance of a positive and healthy trade relationship between the two countries.
This is Special English.
With housing prices and sales stagnating in China&`&s major cities following tough property controls, smaller cities are starting to join in.
Property sales were restricted in several second and third-tier cities, as speculators shift their attention to these areas. Around 30 cities have introduced sales restrictions to different extents.
In Baoding city in north China&`&s Hebei Province, certain properties are subject to a 10-year lock-up before they can be resold.
In Jiaxing city in east China&`&s Zhejiang Province, non-residents will not be able to resell houses within two years of buying them.
With such restrictions, speculators who use to borrow money to invest may have to reconsider, as it now takes much longer for the houses to generate returns and pay back the loans.
Analysts say smaller cities have become the main battleground as China strives to contain housing price as they rises through restrictions on purchases and increased minimum down payments.
In Beijing, the down payment ratio for second homes has raised to 60 percent in mid-March, a measure considered "unprecedented".
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
A new study has found that the rare but spectacular eruptions of super volcanoes can cause massive destruction and affect climate patterns on a global scale for decades.
In addition, the super eruption sites may experience ongoing, albeit smaller eruptions for tens of thousands of years after.
In the study published recently in the journal Nature Communications, Oregon State University researchers said they were able to link recent eruptions at Mt. Sinabung in northern Sumatra in Indonesia, to the last eruption on Earth of a super volcano 74,000 years ago at the Toba Caldera some 40 kilometers away.
This is the first time that researchers have been able to pinpoint what happens following the eruption of a super volcano. To qualify as a super volcano, the eruption must reach at least magnitude 8, which means the measured deposits for that eruption are greater than 1,000 cubic kilometers.
When Toba erupted, it emitted a volume of magma 28,000 times greater than that of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It was so massive, it is thought to have created a volcanic winter on Earth lasting years, and possibly triggering a bottleneck in human evolution.
This is Special English.
A study led by the University of Washington indicates that neighborhoods with greater poverty and disorganization may play a greater role in the problem of drinking in the availability of bars and stores that sell hard liquor.
The findings were based on local neighborhood data and published online in the Journal of Urban Health. It suggests that while socioeconomics are more powerful environmental factors than even access to the substance itself, improving a neighborhood&`&s quality of life can yield a range of benefits.
In examining the combination of multiple neighborhood factors on alcohol use, researchers turned to an ongoing study the university has followed for decades, by interviewing more than 500 of the adult participants.
The researchers found that residents of neighborhoods primarily characterized by high poverty and disorganization tended to drink twice as much in a typical week as those in other types of neighborhoods. Binge-drinking, generally defined as more than four drinks at a time for women, five for men, occurred in these high-poverty, highly disorganized communities about four times as frequently as in other types of neighborhoods.
These findings are consistent with previous research indicating that people in lower income neighborhoods may be at greater risk for alcohol-related problems.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
Russian Security Council said Russia&`&s crucial information infrastructure suffered no severe damage caused by the global WannaCry melware attack thanks to an effective anti-cyberattack state system.
Russia has been creating a system to detect, prevent and eliminate the consequences of computer attacks on the information resources of the Russian Federation. The program was previously approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a decree.
The Security Council said Russia has managed to avoid serious damage due to the mentioned state system. The critical information infrastructure was ready to resist a massive spread of this virus.
Russia&`&s critical information infrastructure includes the information systems in these sectors of defense, healthcare, energy, transport, communications, banking and finance.
A massive number of organizations across the globe have been targeted by the WannaCry malware. Hackers used the Trojan encryptor to lock computers and demand a payment for the decryption. So far, the WabbaCry ransom ware attacked has spread to 150 countries, crippling hospitals, schools, governments and businesses.
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Nepal has hosted the "Chinese Bridge" language proficiency competition for college students in Kathmandu, the nation’s capital.
This is the fourth Nepali edition of the global contest.
This year&`&s competition was organized by the Confucius Institute at Kathmandu University and the Chinese embassy in Nepal.
According to the organizers, over 50 students had taken part in the initial round and 14 students were selected from three educational institutions in Nepal.
Chinese Ambassador to Nepal Yu Hong attended the ceremony to present awards to the winners. She said she was happy to see the increasing interest of Nepali students in Chinese language and culture.
In the preliminary round of the competition, 14 college students went through rounds of tests and demonstrated their language skills.
Two Bachelor students representing Kathmandu University were declared winners, who will travel to China to represent Nepal at the finals to be held later this year.
The Chinese proficiency competition is held annually in different countries for non-Chinese students to encourage them to learn about China.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
The Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, has rolled out an app in which users can learn about the museum through building their own imperial residence.
In this app, users choose a vacant site for their imperial palace and upgrade it by publishing and reading articles or completing tasks.
The museum says the app makes news and information more accessible to the public. Users are no longer mere visitors, but also architects of the museum.
The Forbidden City will release high-definition images of its cultural relics, making them available to more people worldwide.
Established in 1925, the Palace Museum is located in the imperial palace of the consecutive dynasties from the 13th century to 1911. The complex&`&s architecture and imperial collections make it one of the most prestigious museums in the world.
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China will build more theme parks in the coming years.
Tourism officials say that by 2020, China will encourage tourist areas to integrate with recreation facilities, theaters, and performing centers.
Branded theme parks from overseas will be introduced into China, while domestic theme parks are also encouraged to expand overseas.
A fantasy adventure indoor theme park opened to the public recently in Shanxi Province in north China. With laser technology and 3-D effects, the theme park aims to offer tourists immersive experiences.
Entertainment companies are strongly encouraged to use hi-tech equipment.
According to a development plan for the tourism industry, China will improve tourism infrastructure and public service facilities while pushing forward innovative development of theme parks.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
In the Chinese animation "The Tales of Effendi", a cute donkey from Kashgar in northwest China&`&s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region becomes famous as he carries his master around.
In reality, donkeys don&`&t usually have such noteworthy lives. They mostly plod around carrying heavy loads and doing tedious chores. But in Kashgar&`&s Yopurga County, farmer Abdul Kerim has turned the braying beast of burden into a cash cow.
Kerim says he had been doing various jobs to support his family since he was laid off ten years ago. Last year, he decided to go into the donkey business after hearing that donkey milk could be very profitable.
Kerim and four of his neighbors poured almost all of their savings into setting up a cooperative last year. They bought 38 donkeys of a cross-breed between the region&`&s native donkeys and those from northwest China&`&s Shaanxi Province. They built stables and stockpiled bales of hay.
After a year of hard work, the biggest donkey milk processing company in the region bought the cooperative&`&s first batch of milk for 28 yuan, roughly 4 U.S. dollars, per kilo.
Donkey farms are now springing up in this previously impoverished area. Around 27,000 donkeys are being raised for their milk, which is expected to generate an annual revenue of 250 million yuan.
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20th Century Fox&`&s "Alien: Covenant" topped North American box office with an estimated 36 million U.S. dollars during its debut weekend, dethroning "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" with a narrow victory.
Movie analysts say that featuring a terrific cast, this R-rated space adventure harkens back to the first "Alien" film that blew audience&`&s minds with its gritty dark intensity back in 1979.
The sixth installment in the "Alien" franchise directed by Ridley Scott cost 97 million U.S. dollars to make and opened 29 percent behind the first prequel, "Prometheus", which debuted to over 51 million U.S. dollars in North America in August 2012.
Disney and Marvel&`&s "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" moved to second place with an estimated 35 million U.S. dollars in North America after two weeks at the top of the charts. The Marvel&`&s superhero sequel has earned a whopping 733 million U.S. dollars globally.
Warner Bros.&`& teen romance "Everything, Everything" opened in third place with an estimated 12 million U.S. dollars in its debut weekend. The PG-13 rated film is about a young woman with an illness that prevents her from leaving the protection of her sealed environment and who falls in love with the boy next door. The film is based on the bestselling book of the same name.
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This is Special English. I’m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
The recent WannaCry ransom ware outbreak across the world is the latest alarm about cyber security that demands immediate efforts at different levels, including international cooperation.
It has been found that measures as simple as official Microsoft patch installation and security software update can work to fend off WannaCry in the largest cyber-attack in more than a decade. The hacking highlights the need for Internet users to heighten cyber security awareness.
However, it also calls for systematic efforts as well as international cooperation to tackle cross-border challenges in a digitally connected world in order to affect a universal defense.
A senior research fellow on cyber policy and security at Stanford University told the Xinhua News Agency that international cooperation on cyber security will be essential for a safer and more secure cyberspace.
Herb Lin deplored the fact that countries have different views on how they intend to use cyberspace and the rules they want to apply have so far made it difficult to achieve international cooperation.
Some experts foresee more attacks like WannaCry, which has hit more than 200,000 computers in some 150 countries since May 12. The vast majority of successful hacks require only the most basic techniques.
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Pharmaceutical company Merck recently won approval from the China Food and Drug Administration to sell its human papillomavirus vaccine, Gardasil, to help women fight cervical cancer.
Developed by the US-based company in 2006, the vaccine has proved effective in protecting against the virus, better known as HPV, the chief cause of cervical cancer. The virus is found in almost all cervical cancer cases.
Gardasil is the first HPV vaccine in the world and the second to be licensed for use in China.
In July, Cervarix, an HPV vaccine developed by pharmaceutical GlaxoSmithKline, received approval to be sold on the Chinese mainland after almost 10 years of seeking approval.
Gardasil is expected to be commercially available on the mainland in three to six months, which means women will no longer have to seek vaccinations outside of the mainland, in places such as Hong Kong.
After breast cancer, cervical cancer is the second-most common cancer in women aged between 15 and 44 in China. China reports more than 130,000 cervical cancer cases a year, accounting for 28 percent of the global total.
The HPV vaccine, as the first anti-cancer vaccine in the world, has proved effective in preventing cervical cancer and is seen as a breakthrough in the fight against the condition.
Today, such vaccines are in use in around 120 countries and regions, including the United States, Australia and most European countries.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A 100-year-old medical technique could be used to achieve pregnancy in infertile women without the need for expensive in vitro fertilization treatments. That’s according to researchers from the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute.
The often overlooked historical technique, which involves "flushing" the woman&`&s fallopian tubes with iodised poppy seed oil, has been proven to be successful in aiding fertility.
Research teams in Australia and the Netherlands say that the procedure, called HSG, was first carried out in 1917 and involved flushing the tubes with the oil during an X-ray.
Professor Ben Mol from the University of Adelaide says that over the past century, pregnancy rates among infertile women reportedly increased after their tubes had been flushed with either water or oil during the X-ray procedure. Until now, it has been unclear whether the type of solution used in the procedure was influencing the change in fertility.
He said the results have been even more exciting than scientists could have predicted, helping to confirm that an age-old medical technique still has an important place in modern medicine.
According to the results of Mol&`&s study, around 35 percent of infertile women who underwent the procedure achieved successful pregnancies within six months of the HSG being performed.
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Some 1,730 new plant species were discovered globally in the last year, some of which have food and medicinal value. That’s according to an annual report released recently by the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, based in England.
Involving 128 scientists from 12 countries, RBG Kew&`&s State of the Worlds Plants report presents data never seen before on patterns affecting plants in different regions.
New species of Manihot were discovered in Brazil that have the potential to be developed into better food crops, and new species of the climbing vine genus Mucuna, used in the treatment of Parkinson&`&s disease, were found in South East Asia and South and Central America.
Kathy Willis, director of science at RBG Kew, says they have tried to make sure that this year&`&s State of the World&`&s Plants report goes beyond the numbers to look at the natural capital of plants -- how they are relevant and valuable to all aspects of our lives.
The report also reveals that plants with thicker leaves and bark, more efficient water use, deeper roots, and higher wood density are better able to cope with future climate change.
The report also highlights information on how new technology is helping to speed up the discovery and classification of plants that are providing important sign posts to the next food crops and actions in protecting some of the most important plant species globally.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Climate change is more real than ever. A new study has found a steady growth of moss in Antarctica over the past 50 years, and suggested that the continent will be greener in the future.
The study was published recently in Current Biology, a scientific journal that covers all areas of biology. The research is led by Matthew Amesbury, a researcher at the University of Exeter in Britain.
The Antarctic Peninsula might sound like a remote and untouched region, but the study showed that the effects of climate change are felt there, and it has been warming faster than the rest of the continent.
The research team looked at 150 years&`& worth of data and found clear change points in the last 50 years, which showed the increase of moss cover. That could shift the ecosystem in Antarctica, driving it to simulate what has been observed in Arctic.
Last month, the sea ice cover in the Arctic was record low, and that of Antarctic was near record low too, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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The World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa has been held with calls for increased support for youth and addressing unemployment and poverty.
Officials during the forum at the Dead Sea said providing financial and moral support to the youth in the Middle East and reforming education were key in addressing the pressing challenges facing the region.
The forum attracted more than 1,100 political and business leaders from more than 50 countries. The participants agreed that the world is facing many problems including high unemployment rate, fast population growth and political regional challenges. The problems are relentlessly seeking to thrive on the hopelessness and despair of the younger generation. The forum said providing hope and support are vital for the youth in the region.
Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan said at the forum that what young people need most is for all to take a bet on them, and to support them, morally and financially, so they can create their own impact.
The forum agreed that as 31 percent of young people in the region are unemployed, new initiatives and urgent action are needed.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
More than 30 national library curators and representatives from 20 countries and regions in Asia and Oceania gathered in Beijing to discuss the building of sustainable regional library networks.
The participants came from countries including Australia, Japan, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. They shared their experience in international cultural exchanges at the two-day conference hosted by the National Library of China.
The National Library of China is promoting the establishment of the "Silk Road" international library alliance, and most of the participating libraries are from countries along the ancient trading route.
The annual conference is hosted in turn by the participating libraries. This year marks the third time that China has hosted the event.
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A Peking opera adaptation of the Western masterpiece "Faust" was staged recently in Germany’s western city of Wiesbaden, starting its premiere tour in the country.
The opera was co-produced by China National Peking Opera Company and Italy&`&s Emilia Romagna Theater Foundation. It was performed as part of the International May Festival, a world-known traditional theater festival.
The opera is based on the Western masterpiece "Faust", written by Johann Wolfgang Goethe more than 200 years ago. The Peking Opera adaptation combines music, vocal performances, mime, dance, and acrobatics.
Since its debut in 2015, the opera has been staged over 70 times worldwide. It offers a creative blend of Western classics with oriental culture as well as presents a perfect cooperation between Chinese artists and performers from Italy and Germany.
The opera has been added to this year&`&s German-Chinese cultural program, a national event in Germany featuring the theme "China Today" to celebrate the 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The first International Tea Expo has been held in east China’s Zhejiang province, attracting tea vendors and companies from both home and abroad.
The expo is held in Hangzhou, the provincial capital, at the venue where the G20 Summit was held. Over 1,000 enterprises from more than 30 countries participated in the event.
President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to be read at the opening ceremony, extending his hope that the expo would give exposure to Chinese tea culture. He said he hopes the event will grow into an important platform for exchanges and cooperation between China and the rest of the world.
The letter also included a call for the expo to promote both the tea industry and tea culture.
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The first China-themed library in Mexico has opened in a bid to promote cultural exchange.
Books on Chinese history, culture, medicine and music, as well as digital and video archives, can be found at the new Chinese Library at Mexico City&`&s Anahuac University.
Officials from China and the prestigious private university were on hand to inaugurate the 14th library of its kind worldwide, as part of celebrations marking 45 years of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
Chinese officials say the library provides an opportunity for Mexico to know China better. It will also be a new platform for deepening educational, academic and cultural exchange between the two countries.
The library currently has 6,000 books and 80,000 digital archives with information on China&`&s politics, economy, culture, science and technology, as well as education and history.
Special software is provided, in both Spanish and English, for those who wish to learn Mandarin Chinese.
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As part of the celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, an exhibition about the revolution has opened at the British Library.
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2017-06-06 Special English
This is Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
China has celebrated its first science and technology day, which means it has only been one year since the country declared its intention of becoming a leading power in Science and Technology by the middle of the century.
Things have moved pretty swiftly since.
Jiaolong, China&`&s manned submarine, went quite literally to the bottom of the ocean recently. Scientists collected samples of seawater, rock and marine life, including sea cucumbers, sponges and starfish. The geological samples will help them understand how the trench was formed.
In pursuit of the kind of quantum scientific leaps China needs, space is another frontier to be conquered.
In southwest China, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope began scanning the skies in September. It is the world&`&s largest radio telescope. Its mission is to help scientists understand the origin and structure of the universe, and perhaps bring the search for extraterrestrial life closer to what would be an astonishing conclusion.
Meanwhile, out in actual space itself, the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft, launched in October last year, carried two astronauts to the space lab Tiangong-2, where they remained for 30 days.
In April this year, the Tianzhou-1 cargo spacecraft docked with Tiangong-2, refueling and resupplying the orbiting lab.
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China&`&s manned submarine Jiaolong has descended to 6,699 meters in the Mariana Trench, recording images of two swimming snailfishes.
The mission, on May 30th, was Jiaolong&`&s fourth dive in the trench this year.
The dive began at 7:03 a.m. local time and reached the planned depth at 10:21 a.m. where scientists worked for three hours and ten minutes.
Jiaolong collected samples of rock, sediment, deep-sea life and sea water in this dive, and recorded images of two swimming snailfishes.
Scientists say research on snailfish, a typical deep-sea species, deepens our understanding on the evolution of deep-sea fishes and their environmental adaptation mechanism.
Jiaolong&`&s first dive of this year in the world&`&s deepest known trench took place on May 23, with a Xinhua News Agency journalist descending inside the submarine along with scientists to a depth of 4,811 meters. The second and third dives on May 25 and 27 reached depths of 6,300 meters and 6,544 meters respectively.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
U.S. President Donald Trump has called Germany&`&s trade and military spending policies "very bad" for the United States as tensions between him and German Chancellor Angela Merkel increased.
Trump wrote on Twitter that the country have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO and military, which was very bad for the U.S. He wrote that this will change.
The blast came two days after Merkel cast doubts on EU&`&s alignment with the United States and Britain, saying that Europeans should determine their own destiny.
Merkel, addressing an election campaign at a beer tent in Germany&`&s southern state of Bavaria, said recently that following the election of Trump and Brexit, Europeans "really have to take destiny into their own hands".
Merkel said "the times when we could fully rely on others are to some extent over".
Although Merkel did not further elaborate the reasons for her unexpected remarks, many German media speculated that Merkel was referring to her frustrating experience at the G7 meeting earlier this week in Italy&`&s Sicily.
The German leader described the summit as "very difficult, not to say very unsatisfactory".
Trump and Merkel had a long history of disagreement that was previously focused on the two leaders&`& view on immigration.
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The daughter of a longtime confidante of the former South Korean President has been delivered to South Korea.
The 20-year-old is on her way home to South Korea. She was wanted for questioning in connection with a major corruption probe in her home country.
The daughter was arrested by Denmark&`&s North Jutland Police on Jan. 1. Her mother is charged with using her friendship with former president Park to extort funds from large businesses and meddling in state affairs.
The daughter is alleged to have received illegal favors when entering a prestigious South Korean university. She is also accused of being behind economic crimes in collusion with her mother, which she denied.
Initially, the young daughter fought against a local court&`&s decision to extradite her and appealed. On April 19, the Court of Aalborg upheld the extradition decision so that she can stand her trial in South Korea. She has dropped her opposition.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
Li Sun, former coach of Chinese table tennis super star Zhang Yining has replaced suspended Kong Linghui to take charge of China&`&s women&`&s national team at the ongoing World Table Tennis Championships.
Head coach of the Chinese national team Liu Guoliang made the announcement as Kong had been ordered to return home from the World Championships. Liu and Kong won the men&`&s doubles gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.
Kong was suspended as head coach of the Chinese women&`&s team following a lawsuit over a gambling debt filed by a Singaporean hotel.
The Singaporean hotel where Kong and his family had stayed in 2015 filed a lawsuit against him in a Hong Kong court. Media reports said Kong borrowed 1 million Singapore dollars, roughly 721,000 US dollars, from the hotel, but failed to pay back the debt in full.
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Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has launched the standard gauge railway cargo train that is expected to ease congestion at the port of Mombasa.
The Chinese Ambassador to Kenya and the President of the China Communications Construction Company attended the launch ceremony.
President Kenyatta said at the unveiling of the train that it ushered in an era of fast, efficient and reliable transportation of goods.
He said this is a historic moment as Kenya begins its journey of transformation, adding that his government is banking on the cargo train to hasten industrial growth and cross-border trade.
Besides reducing the cost of ferrying goods from the port of Mombasa to the hinterlands, the cargo train will drastically reduce congestion in the highways and the environmental pollution.
According to Kenya Railways Corporation, it will cost 500 dollars to transport a single container through the train when compared to 900 dollars by road between Mombasa and Nairobi.
The president said expansion of Mombasa&`&s port and the operation of the train marked a critical milestone in Kenya&`&s quest to become an industrial and efficient trading hub.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Sri Lanka has said it is preparing to face health concerns once the floods which lashed the country recede.
The Health Minister of Sri Lanka told reporters that while there was no spread of disease so far, diarrhea and skin diseases are expected later.
However he said health officials have been deployed to the affected areas and steps will be taken to counter the spread of any disease following the floods.
The death toll from the floods and landslides increased to 193 on May 30th and 94 others are reported missing.
Foreign assistance is continuing to flow in with China, Pakistan and India among the countries sending ship loads of humanitarian aid.
Meanwhile the World Health Organization is liaising closely with the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health and is assisting the government to provide critical healthcare services.
The main areas for support are medical team deployment, strengthening surveillance of communicable diseases, as well as provision of mental health and psychological support for survivors.
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Late night mobile phone use has devastating effects on teenager&`&s mental health. That&`&s according to a new study by Australian researchers at Murdoch and Griffith Universities.
The study is funded by the Australian Research Council and is the world&`&s first long-term assessment of adolescent mental health regarding late night mobile phone usage. The study examined student&`&s quality of sleep, along with mood, aggression and coping skills.
The process was conducted as an annual survey over four years and included 1,100 students from 29 schools.
When the subjects began the process, they were in their eighth year of education at high school; and when the program concluded, they had hit year 11.
The questionnaires focused on what time of the night students continued to receive or send text messages and phone calls.
The study found that late night phone use directly contributed to poor sleep habits, which over time led to declines in overall well-being and mental health.
Around two thirds or 65 percent of students in year eight who owned a mobile phone, reported to use it regularly after "lights out."
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Ryan Price in Beijing.
An inquiry into the accuracy of seven wristband activity monitors showed that six out of seven devices measured heart rate within 5 percent. None, however, measured energy expenditure well.
The findings were based on an evaluation of the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2 in a diverse group of 60 volunteers.
Millions of people wear some kind of activity tracker and often share the data with their physician.
Euan Ashley, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University says people are basing life decisions on the data provided by these devices. But consumer devices aren&`&t held to the same standards as medical-grade devices, and it&`&s hard for doctors to know what to make of heart-rate data and other data from a patient&`&s wearable device.
In the study, the volunteers wore the seven devices while walking or running on treadmills or using stationary bicycles. Each volunteer&`&s heart was measured with a medical-grade electrocardiograph. Metabolic rate was estimated with an instrument for measuring the oxygen and carbon dioxide in breath, a good proxy for metabolism and energy expenditure. Results from the wearable devices were then compared to the measurements from the two instruments.
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"The Square", directed by Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, has won the Palme d&`&Or of the 70th Cannes Film Festival.
This film tells the story of Christian, a respected curator of a contemporary art museum, a divorced but devoted father of two girls.
Christian&`&s next show is "The Square", an installation which invites passersby to altruism, reminding them of their role as responsible fellow human beings. Meanwhile, the museum&`&s PR agency has created an unexpected campaign for "The Square". The response is overblown and sends Christian, as well as the museum, into an existential crisis.
"The Square" presents a satirical exploration of the art world, and was seen by many as an unexpected, but solid choice for the prestigious award.
The Grand Prix, often seen as the runner-up to the Palme d&`&Or, went to French director Robin Campillo for "120 Beats Per Minute".
Chinese art film director Li Ruijun was also present at the renowned international film festival, after his film "Walking Past the Future" was chosen as an official selection for the "Un Certain Regard" category.
This is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I&`&m going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
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2017-06-05 Special English
This is Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for efforts to build the Chinese Navy into a strong and modern force to lend support for the realization of the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation and the dream of a strong military.
President Xi is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission. He made the remarks during an inspection of the Chinese Navy headquarters recently.
The president congratulated the Party congress of the Navy, met delegates to the congress and conveyed greetings to all navy members.
He noted that the navy is a strategic military service concerning national security and overall development. He asked naval authorities to build a world-class force by promoting political awareness, reforms and rule of law.
Xi visited the navy&`&s operational command center, where he greeted navy officers who were performing duties at sea.
Via video, he first talked with the crew of flotilla 150, which was taking part in an overseas journey of a good-will visit. The crew told Xi that they had visited five countries in more than one month and were warmly welcomed by the host countries. Xi asked them to pass on friendship and contribute to world peace.
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The leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, the G7, have signed a joint declaration on combating terrorism.
The 15-point document says the fight against violent extremism is a major priority of the G7, which will bring the fight to a higher level by relentlessly preventing, investigating and prosecuting terrorist acts, their perpetrators and supporters.
The leaders pledged to combat the misuse of the Internet by terrorists to work together to manage the risk posed by foreign fighters as they disperse from theatres of conflict and to take action to cut off sources and channels of terrorist financing.
Among the measure is the expansion of the use of Passenger Name Records and Advance Passenger Information in traveler screening.
Terrorism was pushed to the top of the G7 summit agenda after a suicide bomber claimed 22 lives and wounded dozens of others when he blew himself up at a concert in the British city of Manchester on 22nd of May.
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In view of the latest situation in Britain, the government of China&`&s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has issued an Amber Outbound Travel Alert for the country.
A spokesman of the Hong Kong regional government said residents who plan to visit the United Kingdom or who are already there should monitor the situation, exercise caution and pay attention to the advice of the local authorities.
The announcement came after the British authorities raised the country&`&s terror threat to critical, the highest level, after a suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena left 22 people dead.
The Hong Kong regional government said its Security Bureau will closely monitor the situation in Britain, and will issue updates through media and the bureau&`&s mobile app and webpage.
Residents who need assistance while in Britain may call the 24-hour hotline of the Assistance to Hong Kong Residents Unit of the Hong Kong Immigration Department. They may also contact the Chinese Embassy in Britain at the consular protection hotline.
Hong Kong residents are encouraged to use the online Registration of Outbound Travel Information service of the Immigration Department to register their contact details and itinerary when outside Hong Kong. The information provided allows the department to disseminate practical information to them through appropriate means on a timely basis when necessary.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China says the current development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is facing new opportunities and challenges.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Charter and the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty on Long-Term Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation by the organization members.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi says that under the collective efforts of all members, the organization has grown into a new type of regional cooperative organization with advanced ideas on cooperation and significant international influence. It plays an important role in promoting regional peace and development.
The foreign minister pointed out that the organization is facing new opportunities and challenges in its development.
After India and Pakistan complete the process of joining the organization during the forthcoming Astana summit, it will become the world&`&s most populous and largest regional cooperative organization, which will bring unprecedented development capacity and cooperation potential.
Wang said that in the face of the rise of protectionism and regional security, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization should adhere to and be supportive of trade liberalization and facilitate and promote the process of economic integration.
Meanwhile, the organization should promote security cooperation to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism in a more precise and efficient manner, so as to safeguard the sovereignty and homeland security of all members and maintain the regional peace and stability.
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A cultural exchange delegation from China has given lectures on Chinese cultural diversity and traditional arts to the students of Kiev Taras Shevchenko National University in Ukraine.
In particular, the lecture offered insights into Tibet&`&s history, culture, medicine, Buddhism philosophy and arts. It attracted an audience of around 300 people.
Karina Kolyadych, a third-year student at the university&`&s faculty of regional studies, said the lecture on Tibetan thangka art kindled her particular interest. Thangka is the form of scroll paintings on paper, cloth or silk, which has a 1,300-year-old history.
The lecturers also introduced cultural features of other Chinese ethnic groups to the Ukrainian public, stressing harmony and equality among the people of all of China&`&s 56 ethnic groups.
While speaking after the lecture, a student of the university&`&s faculty of international information said ethnically diversed Ukraine has to learn from China&`&s experience in building a harmonious society.
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The Chinese Bridge, a Chinese language proficiency contest for foreign students, has been held in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The first prize went to Ahmad Walid Ahadi from the Confucius Institute at Kabul University and another student from Marefat, a famous private school in Afghanistan. The top winners will represent Afghanistan in the final event in China later this year.
A total of 12 students from Kabul University and Marefat took part in the contest.
There are three sections in the contest themed "Dreams Enlighten Future", namely Chinese speech, knowledge of China, and a China-related talent show.
In his speech, one of the winners, Ahadi, talked about his dream of becoming a diplomat working to improve China-Afghanistan friendly relations. Contestants also performed Wushu, the Chinese martial art, and Chinese calligraphy, for the audience.
An official from the Confucius Institute at Kabul University said that in the backdrop of the Belt and Road Initiative, they hope to facilitate such bilateral exchanges by teaching students about the Chinese language and culture.
Founded in 2008, the Confucius Institute at Kabul University has enrolled 321 students, 246 of whom have won the scholarships to study in China. It cooperates with Marefat School to further promote the Chinese language teaching and Chinese culture.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
A fund of 160 million yuan, roughly 23 million U.S. dollars, has been set up to help the development of four space science satellites, as well as advanced scientific research.
The fund was jointly set up by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with each side sponsoring half of the investment. The fund will last from 2017 to 2020.
The four satellites are the Dark Matter Particle Explorer Satellite, retrievable scientific research satellite SJ-10, a quantum communication satellite and a hard X-ray modulation telescope satellite.
The fund will support experiments including the exploration of dark matter particles, microgravity science and space life science, as well as the observation of compact objects including black holes and neutron stars.
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American astronauts have successfully replaced a failed computer relay box outside the International Space Station during a short spacewalk that lasted less than three hours.
U.S. space agency NASA has declared victory on the installation of this replacement. A NASA TV commentator said around two hours into the contingency spacewalk conducted by astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer that the relay box, known as MDM, which failed on Saturday, which is one of two units that regulate the operation of radiators, solar arrays and cooling loops, have been successfully replaced.
The cause of the MDM failure is not known, but because each MDM is capable of performing the critical station functions, the crew on the station was never in danger and station operations have not been affected.
A similar MDM replacement spacewalk was conducted in April 2014.
Typical spacewalks last around six and a half hours, but Tuesday&`&s spacewalk lasted just two hours and 46 minutes.
During the spacewalk, the two astronauts also installed a pair of antennae on the station to enhance wireless communication for future spacewalks.
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The latest and most advanced U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has left Norfolk naval station for acceptance trial.
Media reported that the first-of-its-class warship will conduct test operations at sea, ensuring that it was built according to contract specifications.
American navy officials say the acceptance trial, the last phase before the deliverance of the ship to the Navy, will be overseen by the Navy&`&s Board of Inspection and Survey.
Acting Navy Secretary Sean Stackley predicted recently that the aircraft carrier, hull numbered CVN-78, will soon enter service upon completion of its acceptance trial.
The USS Ford completed its shipbuilder&`&s trial in April.
Construction of the USS Ford began in 2005 and was originally set to be completed in September 2015, but saw its construction delayed and its cost raised to 12.9 billion U.S. dollars, up two billion dollars from its original cost forecast.
The USS Ford is the first of a new class of supercarriers. Boasting the most advanced weapons in the world, it is part of a push by the U.S. government to bolster its naval power.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The China Xinjiang International Dance Festival will be held in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region from July 20 to August 5.
Local officials say that with the theme "Chinese dream, colorful Silk Road", the festival will be an artistic gala of dance from both home and abroad.
The festival will present more than 60 performances by art groups from Pakistan, Egypt, Russia and other countries in Asia, Africa and Europe, as well as domestic groups, including groups from Xinjiang.
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Archaeologists in north China&`&s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region recently found a cave painting of human hand prints that they estimate to date back to the Paleolithic Period.
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2017-05-23 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
Beijing will award scholarships to students from the Belt and Road countries studying in 160 programs at universities in the city by 2020.
The scholarship program was jointly initiated by the municipal education commission and finance bureau in December 2016. So far, a total of 64 programs have been covered by the scholarships, benefiting some 1,100 students.
From 2016 to 2020, 32 undergraduate and postgraduate programs will be chosen each year.
Last year, 32 programs of 23 universities were chosen, and 32 programs of 32 universities were chosen in 2017. The programs cover subjects including aerospace, legal studies and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Officials with the commission said they hope more high-level talent from Belt and Road countries will come study in Beijing and more educational cooperation will be carried out between Beijing and those countries.
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Chinese central government has called for more efforts in helping college graduates get jobs or start businesses. That's according to a statement issued recently after a national teleconference on employment.
Premier Li Keqiang's written instruction on employment was read out at the conference, which was attended by other state leaders.
The employment of college graduates matters to China's social stability, as a total of almost 8 million college students are expected to graduate this year.
The central government asked local authorities and schools to encourage the students to work in the grassroots. They are also encouraged to seek jobs and start businesses in advanced manufacturing, strategic emerging industries, service and agriculture.
In terms of general employment, the central government stressed enhanced vocational training and other public services.
China has set employment targets of 11 million new urban jobs and a registered urban unemployment rate under 4.5 percent this year.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
The length of Shanghai metro system is now the longest in the world, surpassing the size of networks in other world cities, including New York and Paris.
Shanghai Party Secretary Han Zheng said infrastructure transportation within the city is now an important part of the development between urban and rural areas of Shanghai.
Han added that Shanghai strengthened its position as global port city, with the transport of containers leading the world for the past 7 years. Freight transport out of Shanghai's main airports ranks the third in the world. Air passenger volumes have reached 100 million, which tops in China.
In the next 5 years, more efforts will be made in the transportation integration of the Yangtze River Delta. Plans are in place to make every city within the Yangtze River Delta region reachable within 90 minutes of one another.
Additionally, Shanghai will work to make public transport the most convenient means of transportation for its citizens.
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China has started a yearlong experiment using an airtight advanced life-support system to house eight volunteers as a way to help with the nation's goal of long-term manned deep-space exploration.
The project's operator said the Lunar Palace 365 experiment was launched at the Lunar Palace 1 bio-regenerative life-support laboratory in Beihang University in Beijing.
The eight volunteers are all postgraduate students at the university. They are divided into two teams and will undertake the experiment in three shifts. Once the team has entered the lab, team members will stay for 60 days before another team takes over. The second group will live in the lab for 200 days before the first team will complete the remaining 105 days.
Lunar Palace 1 is capable of providing a habitable environment similar to Earth's biosphere and can support four people each time. It was designed to test and verify technologies to be used on space missions of extended duration in deep space, and with multiple crews.
The 500-cubic-meter lab is sealed from the outside. During the experiment, volunteers will not leave the lab during their shifts unless they encounter emergencies.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
China will carry on phasing out sub-standard production capacity, especially in the fields of steel and iron, coal-mining, as well as coal-fired power plants, to keep up with targets set for the year.
The decision was made at a State Council executive meeting, which was presided over by Premier Li Keqiang.
Li listened to reports on the latest progress of this year's campaign to cut excess capacities of steel, iron, coal-mining and coal-fueled power generation, as well as the findings of inspections over the drive in concrete and glass sectors.
Li said the reforms offer the way forward in cutting overcapacity, which is a vital part of the supply-side structural reform.
Li said China takes the initiative to reduce production capacity based on its own national conditions. The efforts are to make the growth model and economic structure shift to new economic drivers.
The government work report Li delivered in March set targets for this year to cut steel and iron overcapacity by 50 million tonnes and coal mining by 150 million tonnes respectively. The targets also include phasing out coal-fired power generation capacity of more than 50 million kilowatts.
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A senior Chinese leader has urged more cooperation between Chinese and overseas Taoist circles in contributing to world peace and harmony.
The chairman of China's top advisory body made the remarks in a congratulatory letter to the fourth International Taoist Forum.
The three-day event was held in the Wudang Mountains in central China's Hubei Province, with representatives from 30 countries and regions attending.
The chairman said Taoism is rooted in Chinese culture, and could boost harmony between nations and religions. By supporting the forum, the Chinese government would like to promote exchange and understanding between Taoists in the world.
The chairman called on Taoist circles and figures to building a global community of a shared destiny, world peace and humanism.
Taoism is a religious belief originated from the writings and philosophy of Lao Tze who lived 2,500 years ago. According to his thoughts, everything in the universe was born from a vacuum, and a balance must be achieved between humans and nature.
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The collapse of a tunnel containing radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex in the United States underscored what critics have long been saying: The toxic remnants of the Cold War are being stored in haphazard and unsafe conditions, and time is running out to deal with the problem.
Kevin Kamps of the anti-nuclear group "Beyond Nuclear" said that unfortunately, the crisis at Hanford is far from an isolated incident.
For instance, at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the government is laboring to clean up groundwater contamination along with the 40 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored in tanks that are decades past their projected lifespan. The site opened in the 1950s and produced plutonium and tritium. The cleaning job is likely going to take decades.
In addition to the tunnel collapse discovered recently, dozens of underground storage tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are leaking highly radioactive materials. Some of the storage tanks dated to World War II.
Anti-nuclear activists say the problem is that the U.S. government rushed to build nuclear weapons during the Cold War with little thought given to how to permanently dispose of the resulting waste.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Mandarin signs are being added at airports and railway stations in Italy, and free Wi-Fi services are being set up at public venues to make Chinese tourists' visits to the country easier.
A senior Italian official said the Italian government is also encouraging hotels to provide more Chinese-friendly services in preparation for the 2018 European Union-China Tourism Year. The vice-minister of culture and tourism Dorina Bianchi made the remarks during an interview in Shanghai.
She said such services will include hotel staff who are fluent in Chinese, rooms with China Central TV channels, acceptance of China UnionPay cards and hot drinking water to cater to Chinese stomachs.
China has become the seventh-largest source of tourists for Italy after years of continuous leaps since a wave of outbound travel to Italy began in 2004.
Statistics from the Italian consulate general in Guangzhou show that Italy received a record 900,000 visitors from the Chinese mainland last year, and the numbers have maintained double-digit annual growth for the past decade.
Longer stays are being considered for Chinese with tourist visas. Italy guarantees that its visa application process will be completed within 36 hours for Chinese tourists.
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A group of college students from the China West Normal University in Sichuan province launched a fundraising to buy a cell phone for a sanitation worker who lost his phone during work.
The sanitation worker surnamed Ren rejected the offer at first, saying a phone is too much for the students who were not making any money. But the students insisted, and he finally accepted the phone.
Sixty-three-year-old Ren lost his phone when he was cleaning a street near the university. Students tried to help him by putting up posters but the effort ended in vain.
Later one of the students suggested a fundraising; and more than 100 students donated 800 yuan, roughly 120 US dollars, to buy the cell phone.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
A photo competition on giant panda conservation and research is being held in Sichuan province in southwest China. The event lasts from May till early November.
The competition is jointly organized by the China Conservation and Research Center for the giant panda and Jiuzhaigou, a scenic attraction in the province. A total of 200,000 yuan, roughly 30,000 U.S. dollars will be offered as prize to the winners.
Award-winning works will be displayed overseas in locations including the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.
Organizers say the competition aims to increase people's attention on panda conservation and research. Entries are welcome from both at home and abroad.
Jiuzhaigou is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a natural habitat for pandas.
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For three hours, a dog was running back and forth at the beach, picking up waste cans, abandoned slippers and floating plastic bags. This happened in the seawater at a tourist attraction in the coastal city of Xiamen in east China's Fujian Province.
The 8-year-old golden retriever named Tiger has become an online celebrity for its dedication to cleaning the beach over the past five years. A video featuring its efforts has been viewed more than 70,000 times.
Its owner says the dog showed a keen interest in picking up floating objects five years ago.
Whenever Tiger spots garbage in the seawater, it will rush to pick it up and bring it back. But as it grew old, the dog lost some of its vision and is showing other health problems.
This is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I'm going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
This is the end of today's program. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing, and I hope you can join us every day, to learn English and learn about the world. -
2017-05-22 Special English
This is Special English. I’m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
China will boost the development of online media by encouraging eligible websites to go public and create new mainstream media groups.
A government blueprint has been issued by the Party authority and the State Council, China’s Cabinet. The document on cultural development and reform vowed to gradually set up a modern communication system by 2020.
This is a major project to "build public opinion fronts" online. Efforts will be made to improve the communication abilities of major news websites and online radio and TV stations. It also aims to develop a system for communication on the mobile Internet.
Eligible websites will be encouraged to go public.
The authorities will give support to mainstream media institutions in developing their websites and new media. Efforts will be stepped up to guide and standardize investment in the Internet cultural sector with both state and private funds.
Meanwhile, existing laws and regulations on news and publishing will be extended to cover the management of online media.
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A butt joint weighing 6,000 metric tons has been lowered into the Pearl River, bringing work on an underwater tunnel linked to the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge a step closer to completion.
A chief engineer at the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center said favorable weather conditions made it suitable for connecting the butt joint, which involved 160 welders.
The tunnel is the final component of the long-awaited bridge which is scheduled to open to traffic later this year.
The Y-shaped cross-sear bridge is estimated to cost more than 10 billion yuan, roughly 1.5 billion US dollars. It is expected to play a significant role in the economic development of the area comprising Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macao.
Construction started in 2009, and the bridge is part of China's planned national highway network, linking the eastern and western banks of the Pearl River.
The bridge includes a 7-kilometer underwater tunnel and a 23-km overwater bridge, making it the longest cross-sea bridge in the world.
The service life of the bridge is expected to reach more than 120 years.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China's manned submarine Jiaolong has explored submarine turbidity currents in the South China Sea.
With a depth of 2,980 meters, Jiaolong was underwater for almost 10 hours in the ocean scientific expedition.
Three crew members in the submarine collected samples and measured environmental parameters in the ocean. They brought back sediment and seawater near the seabed as well as high-definition photos and video footage.
Scientists say China started the research on submarine turbidity currents relatively late, compared with other countries. This study is a major challenge in geoscience.
The dive helped scientists to obtain evidence of the topographic features in northeastern South China Sea. It enriched scientific understanding of canyon turbidity current in the region and provided key data and technical support for future research.
The oceanic scientific expedition started in early February. The team will conduct surveys in the Yap Trench and the Mariana Trench later in the year.
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China's new-generation training vessel has set sail on its maiden voyage from the port city of Dalian in northeast China to South Africa.
The 340-million-yuan, roughly 50 million US dollar-ocean-going vessel is China's most advanced cruise training ship.
The 200-meter long ship, "Yupeng", is owned by the Dalian Maritime University.
During its maiden voyage, 87 graduating students joined the crew to undergo training. It was also loaded with four locomotives and other equipment for customers in South Africa.
Founded in 1909, Dalian Maritime University is one of China's largest maritime universities. It already owns and operates another ocean-going training vessel that boasts more than a 10,000 deadweight tonnage.
The new ship has a carrying load of 30,000 tonnes and can be used for training, scientific research and shipping.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Scientists say they have switched on the world’s biggest X-ray laser, designed to capture images of structures and processes at the atomic level.
The DESY research center near Hamburg in Germany said bringing the laser to life for the first time "marks a new era of research in Europe".
Operators say the first laser pulse lasted one second. This frequency will be increased to 27,000 flashes per second by the start of September when it officially opens for research.
Scientists hope the European X-ray laser project will open up new areas of research, including mapping the molecular structure of new drugs and seeing biochemical reactions in real time.
Institutions from Germany, France, Italy and other countries are involved in the project.
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China has conducted a maiden flight of its dual-seat FC-1B trainer/fighter jet, aiming to seize a bigger share of the global military aircraft market.
The flight took place at an airport of the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group, a State-owned aircraft giant and the manufacturer of the plane. The flight was witnessed by executives from the Aviation Industry of China, guests from other countries and journalists.
The aircraft is capable of training pilots and engaging in aerial combat as well as striking ground targets.
Officials say the new aircraft is one of the best trainer fighter jets in the international market. It is able to carry beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles and precision land-attack ammunition.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
More than 20,000 authors from universities and research institutions across China have joined a project to write an authoritative online Chinese encyclopedia in an effort to promote China's historical heritage and soft power.
The digital encyclopedia is the third edition of the Chinese Encyclopedia. It will feature more than 300,000 entries, each with an average length of 1,000 words. It will be twice as large as the Encyclopedia Britannica. The online encyclopedia will cover more than 100 disciplines and be put into use in 2018.
The project's editor-in-chief Yang Muzhi said China faces challenges from every corner of cyberspace, so it should have its own online encyclopedia to lead public opinion."
According to Yang, the new encyclopedia's top rival is Wikipedia. The goal of the project is to surpass Wikipedia rather than play catch-up with it.
Yang said people think Wikipedia is correct and authoritative, while it claims to be a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. He said the idea is alluring, but China has the world's largest group of authors, so they can do better.
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The Palace Museum in Beijing plans to stop selling paper tickets from its box office, probably by later this year.
An official from the museum says an Internet-based system will be set up to better coordinate the number of visitors for different hours of the day.
He said the new plan is preliminarily scheduled to be launched in an "appropriate time in late October", but it still depends on whether conditions are ripe. Starting in July, the museum will gradually decrease the percentage of tickets available at traditional box offices.
The Palace Museum opened its online ticket system in 2011. Almost half the tickets are sold via the internet. The tickets sold at the box office in the first quarter of this year decreased by 10 percent from the same period a year earlier.
The Palace Museum, or the Forbidden City, was China's former royal palace from 1420 to 1911. It is one of the most visited museums in the world. The Forbidden City received more than 16 million visitors last year.
The Palace Museum set a daily quota of 80,000 visitors in 2015 due to safety concerns caused by overcrowding. The new move is another step to handle the crowds.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
It is critical and important for children in the United States and Europe to learn Chinese. Education experts say a booming Chinese economy provides great opportunities for foreigners who can speak both English and Chinese.
That was the consensus among teachers, students and experts who gathered to mark the Experience China Day in the United States.
The event was held by the Chinese Consulate General in New York City. It attracted more than 200 American teachers, students and parents to the Chinese Consulate General for the event. Various activities were held for people to experience traditional Chinese culture, including calligraphy and traditional Chinese musical instruments.
Acting Consul General Cheng Lei said the event aims to motivate young people' interests in learning Chinese and understanding Chinese culture.
American students entertained the crowd by playing the Kongzhu, also known as the Chinese yo-yo. They also staged a short drama in both English and Chinese.
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Zambia will host the first-ever Africa Cup Wushu Tournament next year. Wushu is a Chinese martial art.
The tournament has attracted kung fu experiments from around 20 countries to participate. T competition has been tentatively set for June or August.
The event is organized by the Zambia Wushu Association. Officials say the tournament is a milestone for Zambia in promoting the Chinese martial art.
Preparations for the event have already started. As a host country, Zambia will pick its final team from among many martial art athletes. Organizers say they hope the event will encourage more local people to learn Chinese kung fu.
Formed in 2013, the Zambia Wushu Association has trained 600 martial art learners in the capital and a nearby province.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A Minor Planet has been named after Chinese aerospace scientist Ye Peijian at a ceremony in Beijing.
Ye is active in the country's lunar probe and deep space missions, and an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The minor planet, No. 456677, was discovered by a Chinese team at the Purple Mountain Observatory in east China's Nanjing city in 2007.
The naming suggestion was approved by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in January.
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Renowned Chinese mathematician Wu Wenjun has died in Beijing at the age of 98.
Wu became well known in the field of mathematics in the late 1940s for his contribution to research on topology, one of the major areas of mathematics.
Later, Wu devoted his attention to research on mechanical geometry theorem proof, using computers to prove complicated and time-consuming geometrical theorems.
His work has been described by mathematicians as pioneering, and some of his theories have been included in textbooks. The Wu formula and Minor Planet No.7683 were named after him.
He was the winner of China's top science and technology award in 2000.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A photo competition on giant panda conservation and research is being held in Sichuan province in southwest China. The event lasts from May till early November.
The competition is jointly organized by the China Conservation and Research Center for the giant panda and Jiuzhaigou, a scenic attraction in the province. A total of 200,000 yuan, roughly 30,000 U.S. dollars will be offered as prizes to the winners.
Award-winning works will be displayed overseas in locations including the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.
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This is Special English. I’m Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
The C919, China&`&s first homegrown large passenger plane, has made its debut flight in Shanghai, a breakthrough in the country&`&s innovation and manufacturing drive and a change to the landscape of the global civil aviation market.
The successful test flight of the C919 comes only nine days after the country debuted its first homegrown aircraft carrier in Dalian in northeast China. The development showed the world China’s manufacturing prowess, development of advanced technology and the national ambition to regain past glory.
The flight lasted around 80 minutes at an altitude of 3,000 meters and an average speed of 300 kilometers per hour. Then the plane returned to Shanghai Pudong International Airport, from which it had taken off.
In a letter of congratulation to the C919 project, the State Council, China’s Cabinet, said the successful maiden flight of the C919 marks a milestone for China&`&s aviation industry. The project carries great weight and importance to the country&`&s innovation drive and manufacturing upgrade push.
The letter said it is also a shot in the arm for the ongoing supply-side reform.
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It’ll be free. It’ll be uniquely Chinese. It’ll be an online encyclopedia to rival Wikipedia, but without the participation of the public. And don’t expect certain entries to come up in your searches, either.
Scholars and experts hand-picked by Beijing to work on the project say only they will be able to make entries, the latest example of the Chinese government’s efforts to control information available on the internet.
The scholars say truth is their guiding light, and their editing and review process is a rigorous one. If there is a difference of opinion, a committee should figure it out.
A chief editor of the history of science and technology section told The Associated Press that "Of course, science does not come from democratic votes, to convince others you will have to present the most convincing proof".
The effort to compile 300,000 entries that span science, literature, politics and history is being led by the Communist Party of China’s Central Propaganda Department. It guides public opinion through instructions to China’s media, internet companies and publishing industry as well as overseeing the education sector. It has instructed the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House, known for its offline Chinese Encyclopedia, to produce it.
Currently, the Chinese Wikipedia is inaccessible on the mainland. -
This is Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
China&`&s domestically produced C919 passenger plane has completed its first public test flight, marking a milestone in the development of China&`&s civil aviation industry.
The successful flight signals China&`&s entry into the global aviation market, and moves the country one step closer to transforming itself from a manufacturer of low-cost goods to a creator of advanced technology.
Aviation experts have hailed the strong growth momentum of China&`&s aviation industry, which, they say, has taken an important step in the right direction.
Nikolay Yakubovich, an aviation engineer and aviation historian in Russia says this event could only be welcome. It indicates that the Chinese aviation industry is gaining momentum and is rising to a new level.
The twin-engine C919 is made by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China. With a standard range of 4,075 kilometers, the narrow-bodied jet is comparable with updated Airbus 320 and Boeing&`&s new generation 737 planes.
A director from Air-Insight-Research in Seattle in the United States was also impressed by the great efforts made by the Chinese government in accelerating innovation.
Officials say that despite the successful test flight, it will still take time for the C919 to take off in the market.
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Jiaolong, China&`&s manned submarine has retrieved a basalt sample from the South China Sea which scientists say could shed light on the formation and evolution of seamounts in the area.
Jiaolong stayed underwater for 9-and-a half hours in its third dive in the second stage of China&`&s 38th ocean scientific expedition. The maximum depth of the dive was 2,930 meters below the ocean surface.
Aside from the 5 kilogram basalt sample, the ship also brought back samples of sediments and seawater from near the seabed, as well as other biological samples. High-definition photos and video footage were recorded.
A researcher with the State Oceanic Administration said it is not easy to acquire such a basalt sample. The valuable rock will lay the foundation for the study of the formation and evolution of seamounts in the South China Sea. It is very important for the study of the region&`&s structural evolution.
Jiaolong completed four dives in the South China Sea. The oceanic scientific expedition started in February. Earlier this year, Jiaolong completed a dive in the northwestern Indian Ocean. It will travel to the Yap Trench and the Mariana Trench later this year.
Named after an auspicious mythical dragon, the Jiaolong made its deepest dive in the Mariana Trench in June 2012, at 7,062 meters.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
The Chinese government plans to cultivate a large number of competitive private medical institutions to complete a diversified multi-layered healthcare system by 2020. The move aims to meet growing demands for customized services.
The target was set in a document that encourages private businesses to provide diversified medical services. Encouraging private medical services is vital to developing a prosperous healthcare industry, unleashing the potential for domestic consumption and promoting economic restructuring and upgrading.
Premier Li Keqiang said the necessity to develop healthcare industries cannot be overestimated. Healthcare has great potential as people&`&s lives are getting better, but is still in short supply. The key is to transform governmental functions and push forward administrative reforms.
As one of the document&`&s seven key tasks, the guideline eyes private businesses to set up and operate high-quality general clinics, which will offer customized services.
Support will be given to the private sector to create strongly competitive institutions with their own branding in subfields such as stomatology. -
2017-05-09 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
China is expected to establish a national emergency and coordination committee to deal with nuclear accidents.
The draft law on nuclear safety states that the committee is responsible for organizing a response to nuclear accident. The draft was first read among legislators in November.
The latest draft highlights the need for transparency of nuclear information. It requires government departments in charge of nuclear safety supervision to publish information about nuclear accidents and other nuclear-related data.
In addition, the draft clarifies the importance of disposing of radioactive waste. Data on the source, amount, character and location of such waste should be recorded and stored permanently.
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China's conversion of coal into natural gas could prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths each year. But there's a catch. Researchers say as China shifts its use of vast coal reserves to send less smog-inducing chemicals into the air, the move threatens to undermine efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.
The environmental trade-off points to the difficult choices confronting leaders of the world's second largest economy as they struggle to balance public health and financial growth with international climate change commitments.
Between 20,000 and 41,000 premature deaths annually could be prevented by converting low-quality coal in the country's western provinces into synthetic natural gas for residential use.
The findings by researchers from the United States and China have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers said that if the gas were used for industrial purposes, fewer deaths would be averted and they would carry a steeper price - a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide emissions.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
U.S. Space Agency NASA's Cassini spacecraft has survived an unprecedented trip between Saturn and its rings, and has amazing pictures to show for it.
Flight controls regained contact with Cassini, one day after it became the first craft to cross this hazardous region. The rings are made up of countless icy particles, any of which could have smacked Cassini. The spacecraft's big dish antenna served as a shield as it hurtled through the narrow gap, temporarily cutting off communications.
Cassini skimmed 3,100 kilometers above Saturn's cloud tops, closer than ever before. It came within 320 kilometers of the innermost visible ring.
Scientists say Saturn continues to surprise them, after 13 years of Cassini orbiting the planet. The pictures show details never seen before. For example, there's an incredible close-up of a gigantic swirling hurricane at Saturn's North Pole.
Given their importance, data from the crossing are being sent to Earth twice, to make certain nothing is lost. It takes more than an hour for the signals to travel the 1.6 billion kilometer distance between Saturn and Earth.
Cassini was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, and reached Saturn in 2004.
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Astronaut Peggy Whitson broke the U.S. record recently for the most time in space and talked up Mars during a congratulatory call from President Donald Trump.
The International Space Station's commander surpassed the record of 534 days, two hours and 48 minutes for most accumulated time in space by an American.
Trump said that it is a very special day in the glorious history of American spaceflight. His daughter and close adviser Ivanka Trump also offered congratulations to Whitson from the Oval Office.
Whitson said it's a huge honor for her to break such a record. She said it's an exciting time", as NASA prepares for human expeditions to Mars in the 2030s. The program has been included in new legislation signed by Trump last month. Whitson called the space station "a key bridge" between living on Earth and traveling into deep space. She singled out the station's recycling system that transforms astronauts' urine into drinking water.
Whitson was already the world's most experienced spacewoman and female spacewalker, as well as the oldest woman in space, at 57 years old. By the time she returns to Earth in September, she'll have logged 666 days in orbit over three flights.
The world record is 879 days. It is held by Russian Gennady Padalka. Whitson broke the NASA cumulative record set last year by astronaut Jeffrey Williams. Scott Kelly holds the U.S. record for consecutive days in space, at 340.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
Three African countries have been chosen to test the world's first malaria vaccine.
Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will be piloting the injectable vaccine next year with hundreds of thousands of young children, who have been at the highest risk of death.
The World Health Organization said the vaccine has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives if used with existing measures. The challenge is whether impoverished countries can deliver the required four doses of the vaccine for each child.
Malaria remains one of the world's most stubborn health challenges. It infects more than 200 million people every year and kills about half a million. Most of the victims are children in Africa. Bed netting and insecticides are the chief protection.
Sub-Saharan Africa is hardest hit by this disease. The area had around 90 percent of the world's cases in 2015. Malaria spreads when a mosquito bites someone already infected, sucks up blood and parasites, and then bites another person.
The World Health Organization says a global effort to counter malaria has led to 62 percent cut in deaths between 2000 and 2015.
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The White House says President Donald Trump is appointing the former president of a leading anti-abortion organization to a senior position at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Charmaine Yoest, who actively supported Trump in his campaign, will serve as assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. From 2008 until February 2016, she was president of Americans United for Life, which campaigned at the federal and state level for tough restrictions on abortion.
Among the many state bills backed by the group under Yoest's leadership were measures that would ban most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. These measures require women seeking abortions to undergo a sonogram and impose tough regulations on abortion clinics that could lead to their closure.
The appointment was assailed by abortion-rights groups.
Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood, said Charmaine Yoest has spent her whole professional life opposing access to birth control and a woman's right to safe, legal abortion.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Increasingly strict government controls on genetic information have resulted in longer, slower registration procedures for new and developing drugs. However, experts say the procedures could pose a threat to the people's privacy.
An expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences says that rather than providing extra safeguards, the precautions are actually making genetic information less secure. He urged greater streamlining of the procedures to the bottleneck and shorten the registration process.
In late 2015, China issued a statement outlining extra application and approval procedures for clinical drug trials conducted in collaboration with foreign pharmaceutical companies. The document also cover drug trials by research institutions funded by investment from overseas. The same rules apply if projects are overseen by foreign nationals.
The measures require tests to be conducted on a greater number of people. This has resulted in a substantial rise in the amount of personal information being collected and stored.
Scientists are saying the stricter procedures have had a negative effect on many new potential treatments in China. Many companies have reported six to nine months extra waiting time, which has seriously slowed down the approval process for badly needed new drugs.
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Global warming's milder winters will likely nudge Americans off the couch more in the future, which is a rare, small benefit of climate change.
A new study finds that with less chilly winters, Americans will be more likely to get outdoors, increasing their physical activity by as much as 2.5 percent by the end of the century.
Areas including North Dakota, Minnesota and Maine are likely to see the most dramatic increases, usually the result of more walking. The study was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
But this good global warming side effect is not likely to extend to the Deep South and especially the desert southwest, where hotter summer days keep people inside. The study found that Arizona, southern Nevada and southeastern California are likely to see activity drop off the most by the year 2099.
A lead author of the study said it is a small little tiny silver lining amid a series of very bad and very unfortunate events that are likely to occur. The scientist added that global warming "almost certainly will be very costly for humanity".
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
U.S. marine scientists say collisions of whales and boats off of the New England coast may be more common than previously thought.
The scientists focused on the humpback whale population in the southern Gulf of Maine, a body of water off of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. They found that almost 15 percent of the whales had injuries or scarring consistent with at least one vessel strike. The wales come to New England to feed every spring.
The researchers published their findings in the March issue of the journal Marine Mammal Science. The study shows that the occurrence of such strikes is most likely underestimated. The figure is likely low because it does not account for whales that are killed in ship strikes.
A lead author of the study said vessel strikes are a significant risk to both whales and to boaters. Long term studies can help people figure out if the outreach programs to boaters are effective.
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When Logan Snyder got hooked on pills after a prescription to treat pain from a kidney stone, she joined the millions already swept up in the nation's grim wave of addiction to opioid painkillers. She was just 14.
Youth is a drawback when it comes to kicking drugs. Only half of U.S. treatment centers accept teenagers and even fewer offer teen-focused groups or programs. After treatment, adolescents find little structured support. They are outnumbered by adults at self-help meetings. Sober youth drop-in centers are rare. Returning to school means resisting offers to get high with old friends.
But Snyder is lucky. Her slide ended when her father got her into a residential drug treatment program. Now 17 years old and clean, she credits her continued success to Hope Academy in Indianapolis, a tuition-free recovery school where she is enrolled as a junior.
The opioid epidemic is the worst addiction crisis in U.S. history. It has mostly ensnared adults, especially those in their 20s, 30s and 40s. But teens have not been spared. Each day, 1,100 start misusing pain pills. Federal data show that opioids killed 521 teens in 2015.
Not enough is known about opioids and teen brains. But getting hooked early is trouble. The vast majority of adults in treatment reports say they started using as teenagers.
This is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I'm going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
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2017-05-08 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
Tianzhou 1, China's first cargo spacecraft, has completed the country's first in-orbit refueling test with the unmanned Tiangong II space laboratory.
The China Manned Space Agency has called the mission a success.
The space agency said the refueling test was a major technology breakthrough and has paved the way for China to assemble and operate a space station.
The agency said China has become the third nation to complete in-orbit refueling technology, following Russia and the United States.
As the first of the planned three such tests for the cargo spacecraft, the in-orbit refueling took five days. Making sure there is no leakage of fuel is crucial.
The agency said that after the first test, the two spacecraft will stay connected as they orbit Earth for around two months. The second in-orbit refueling test will be conducted in June.
After that, the two spacecraft will undock. The cargo vessel will make sophisticated, automated maneuvers to circle the space lab, and docking with the lab at a different site.
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China is to extend the current nine-year compulsory education to encompass high school students nationwide by 2020.
A Guideline for Popularizing High School Education has been released by the Ministry of Education and another three ministries.
The guideline aims to raise the gross enrolment ratio for high schools to above 90 percent on average nationwide. The rates in central and western China will be substantially improved.
Last year, China's overall gross enrollment ratio was 87 percent for high schools, representing a tendency of a rise of 3 percent in the next four years.
The ratio is a statistical measurement to show the number of enrolled students to those who qualify for certain grades, ranging from primary school to middle and high school periods. Over the past few decades, China required children to attend primary and middle schools, while high school was not obligatory.
The new document is also to bridge the gap for regional disparity of high school education, as the central and western regions lag far behind eastern China.
For example, the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in southwest China still has an insufficient number of high school teachers, demanding 13,000 more to reach the national average ratio of teachers to students. What's worse is that the region's high schools have debts worth 2 billion yuan, roughly 290 million US dollars.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Police have opened a new front in the war on drugs by targeting traffickers who recruit disabled people as couriers.
Drug gangs target people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, as well as pregnant or lactating women, because Chinese laws contain a number of clauses allowing these "vulnerable people" to avoid prison. That, plus the offer of "easy money", is often enough for those from the poorest sections of society to run the risks associated with the trade.
Last year, more than 5,300 such people were detained while transporting narcotics. Among them, 780 were foreign nationals, and a large number were from Myanmar. That's according to a report released recently by China's top anti-drug authority, the Office of National Narcotics Control Commission.
In August, an 18-year-old pregnant woman from Myanmar was caught with almost 3 kilograms of methamphetamine stashed in 80 moon-cakes, a traditional Chinese delicacy.
The couriers had been hired to carry the narcotics from Myanmar to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. The woman was caught as she was about to deliver the food to the buyer. In her confession, she said she was due to receive 5,000 yuan, roughly 730 US dollars, when the deal was closed.
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China's health authorities are installing vendor machines selling home HIV test kits on university campuses. The move aims to help raise awareness and fight HIV/AIDS, as the epidemic begins to hit more young people in China.
To date, 10 universities across China have joined the initiative, which many call "progressive". Sex remains largely a taboo subject in many parts of the country, and systematic sex education is still lacking.
The initiative is led by the Chinese Association of STD and AIDS Prevention and Control. The association says it cannot wait to take action, but it's hard to do so, especially on university campuses.
An official from the association says more universities are planning to join the move to install such machines on campus as an alternative option for students seeking HIV testing.
The official says many students are reluctant to visit HIV testing clinics run by health authorities, even though the visit is free of charge. Privacy concerns and fear of being discriminated against are largely the seasons they stay away.
China has seen a rapid increase in HIV cases in recent years, particularly among young students aged between 15 and 24.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Construction has begun on China's first commercial space industry center in Wuhan, the capital of central China's Hubei province.
The Wuhan National Space Industry Base aims to attract at least 100 enterprises involved in the space industry before 2020. It plans to generate 30 billion yuan, roughly 4 billion US dollars, in annual gross product by then.
The main investor is the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation. The center will occupy 70 square kilometers of land area.
"Expace Technology" is a subsidiary of the corporation. It will invest 1.7 billion yuan to build production and assembly plants for solid-fuel carrier rockets for commercial launches. The company plans to produce 20 rockets at the center each year.
In China, a commercial launch usually means a space launch financed by an entity other than a Chinese government or military agency.
The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation will invest 300 million yuan to construct a research, development and manufacturing complex at the center to make small satellites. The corporation will launch 156 small communications satellites into low Earth orbit, at an altitude of 160 to 2,000 kilometers, before the end of 2025. They would form a network capable of global coverage.
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A specialized Chinese university has launched a nationwide search for students with the passion and talent to study the languages used in countries along the Belt and Road Initiative.
Beijing Foreign Studies University has kicked off an independent recruitment program to find candidates for 22 language majors that will be offered in the next academic year.
The languages are Portuguese, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, Lao, Thai, Indonesian and Hausa. They are found along the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which make up the Chinese initiative aimed at boosting connectivity between Asia, Europe and Africa.
Applicants must have an outstanding high school record in Chinese and foreign language studies and will need to pass several rounds of interviews to test their commitment and potential.
The university says it hopes to ensure students recruited through the program have a strong interest in studying Belt and Road languages and have the ability to study well.
The program was launched last year to nurture talent in linguistics and regional research, and to provide intellectual support for the initiative.
The standards are strict. Of more than 2,700 applicants for 15 majors, only 270 students were admitted. The number of students admitted this year will not increase much, as the university wants to guarantee quality.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
The National Copyright Administration of China has launched its English website to enhance international communication on copyright protection.
The website has been launched to mark the 2017 World Intellectual Property Day. The website is en.ncac.gov.cn. It features news, law and regulation, as well as other subjects.
Officials say the next step is to provide more information at the website. China's intellectual property rights have made great progress in the past decade.
An annual crackdown campaign initiated by the National Copyright Administration has focused on pirated music, videos, games, animation and software for 12 consecutive years to create a good online copyright system.
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The face-lift of a section of the Sanlitun area of Beijing is underway. Demolitions raised mixed feelings among foreigners and locals as the decades-old bar street will likely disappear.
Heavy equipment was used to knock down dozens of illegal building additions that stretched from residential buildings to shopping malls.
Beijing has been targeting illegal constructions since the beginning of the year. Illegally constructed extensions associated with several thousand units in the city will be removed. Missing walls, windows and other elements will be restored according to their original designs.
The bar street is home to a variety of nail salons, foot massage parlors and restaurants. It has become increasingly popular in recent decades because of an influx of foreigners and diplomatic personnel.
Frank Hansen from Denmark said the special charm of the street will be gone when all the extended rooms have been removed. He used to have weekend gatherings with friends on the street. He said they will probably not go back to the new bars after the demolition.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Bike-sharing fever has spread to Tibet, with 500 shared two-wheelers appearing on the plateau.
Bright yellow Ofo bikes have been placed in over 20 spots in Xigaze, the second largest city in Tibet.
A local sponsor of the project says it hopes to make shared bikes a major means of transport for the local people in Tibet and tourists alike. The company's next target is Lhasa, the capital of the Autonomous Region.
The bike-sharing business took off in big cities in China last year. It allows riders to hire bikes for as little as one yuan, roughly 15 U.S. cents, per hour via a mobile app. Riders can drop the bikes off anywhere for the next user.
The bikes on the busy streets of Xigaze have attracted curious users. A local resident in the city, Cering says it's cheap for a short ride. He and his friends rented bikes just for fun.
Backed by two-digit economic growth for over 20 years, car sales in Tibet have been booming. The under-populated region now has 300,000 vehicles, with half of them in Lhasa. The four-wheelers have led to traffic congestion and parking problems in downtown Lhasa.
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The water levels of the Pacific Ocean off California may rise more than previously thought. Storms and high tides may hit harder than previously estimated.
California's Ocean Protection Council revised upward its predictions for how much water off California will rise as a result of globing warming. The forecast helps agencies in the nation's most populous state plan for climate change. Rising water is seeping toward low-lying airports, highways and communities, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Discoveries that ice sheets are melting increasingly fast in Antarctica largely spurred the change. Antarctica holds almost 90 percent of the world's ice.
Fossil-fuel emissions warm the Earth's atmosphere. The melting ice is expected to raise the water off California's 1,770 kilometers of coastline even more than for the world as a whole.
Officials say state agencies take climate change into account in planning and budgeting.
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2017-05-02 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
An international medical journal's retraction of 107 research papers from China, many of them by clinical doctors, has reignited concerns over academic credibility in the country.
Tumor Biology, a journal published by Springer Nature, announced a couple weeks ago that it had retracted the papers after an investigation showed the peer review process had been compromised.
Peter Butler, editorial director for cell biology and biochemistry at Springer Nature, said the articles were submitted with reviewer suggestions, which had real researcher names but fabricated email addresses.
Butler told Shanghai-based news website The Paper that the editors thought the articles were being sent to genuine reviewers in the discipline. Following investigation and communication with the real reviewers, they confirmed they did not conduct the peer review.
Peer review is an evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to those who produce the work, which helps validate research.
The online notice about the retraction lists all 107 articles and 524 authors, nearly all of whom are clinical cancer specialists from China. The hospitals named are all top public institutions.
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Chinese citizens' personal information and the country's important data collected by Internet service providers may need evaluation and permission before being shared with non-domestic entities.
A draft guideline has been released for public opinion by the Cyberspace Administration of China. According to the guideline, Chinese citizens' personal information should be kept within the country and be subject to security assessment before being provided to anyone outside China.
The document says that to sell someone else's personal information, one must get permission from this individual.
For data related to national security, the economy or public interest, the seller should coordinate a security evaluation with the authorities. The evaluation will ensure online data is managed legally.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
China's air quality monitoring network is to be expanded to cover a wider area, especially at the grassroots level, to facilitate scientific and effective control of airborne pollution.
By March, more than 5,000 monitoring stations had been built across China. They are managed by the environmental monitoring authorities at four levels, namely State, provincial, city and county levels.
The China National Environmental Monitoring Center operates 1,500 State-level monitoring stations nationwide. The center ensures that the data collected are independent of local government oversight to prevent interference and guaranteeing accuracy and authenticity.
The 5,000-plus monitoring stations test for six "criteria" of airborne pollutants, including PM2.5, PM10 and sulfur dioxide, across different regions and locations.
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China imposes some of the world's toughest driving restrictions for cars, and now the checks and controls are expanding to the bicycle-sharing industry.
Police in Shenzhen in south China's Guangdong Province have clearly said they are considering restrictions on the use of shared bikes, especially during the holidays, to prevent road congestion and public disorder.
Police said that around 520,000 bikes have been put on the streets in the city in the year since bike sharing began.
A growing number of people are taking the colorful two-wheelers to work or using them for recreation, which has brought some challenges. For example, over the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday last month, paths at a local park became seriously clogged with bikes, while careless parking of the bikes often blocks traffic as well.
The police are partnering with bike-sharing companies to monitor the number of bikes in designated areas. Under the plan, if the accumulation of bikes in an area hits a certain number, a warning system will be activated that prohibits bikes from entering. Cyclists will be notified at the same time via a mobile app.
A limit on the number of bikes will also be enforced, along with temporary bans in certain public areas during peak seasons.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
Australian researchers have compiled an unparalleled database detailing the almost 6 trillion tonnes of global fishing since 1950.
The database was created by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania. It was based on more than 800 million fishing records from 1950 to 2014.
During the 65 years covered by the records, fishers from 193 countries caught almost 6 trillion tonnes of fish of 1,400 different species. Among them, 900 million tonnes have been taken illegally.
Reginald Watson, who collated the data, said the database illustrated that the global fish population was finite.
Watson said the database brings together every major international statistical collection of fisheries data since comprehensive records began, providing unique insights into the industry.
He said more than 860 million fishing records have been compiled into a single harmonized view and mapped down to tiny spatial cells, so people can see where fishing has been happening and how it's changed over time.
Watson said despite a plateau in recent years, the annual rate of fishing has grown from 27 million tonnes of fish taken in 1950 to 120 million tonnes in 2014.
Since 1950, fisheries have moved further offshore and greatly intensified. People now have more vessels of a greater size and larger storage capacity. They are spending longer time at sea and fishing in deeper waters.
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A new study suggests that the system of grid cells, known as the brain's global positioning system, is more complicated than anyone had thought before.
While the brain needs some basic navigational instruments to get around, just like a driver in a car, researchers have found that brain cells are similar to speedometers, compasses, GPS and even collision warning systems.
However, researchers with Stanford University in the United States report that human brains map out the world in a more complex way. Some of the neurons in the internal navigation systems look a lot like speedometers or compasses. Many others operate flexibly, each one encoding a dynamic mix of navigational variables, like a compass that somehow transforms into a GPS when driving downtown.
The project began in 2014, when scientists got a Bio-X seed grant to take a closer look at how the brain finds its way around. The same year, a Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of grid cells, which are specialized neurons that help animals keeping track of where they are in their environments.
The findings of that time said that while some neurons fell within the ballpark of how a grid cell was supposed to behave, most provided only noisy, error-prone navigation, like a GPS on the fritz. That led the researchers to wonder whether the brain had a way to correct those errors. In 2015, they reported that the brain does have a way: boundary cells, so named because they fire when nearing walls and other landmarks.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Car models supporting autonomous driving and Internet-based services are bright spots at the 2017 Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition.
A total of 113 models of car made their global debut at the auto show, which has attracted more than 1,000 exhibitors from 18 countries and regions. The 1,400 complete vehicle exhibitions included 160 new energy vehicles and 56 concept cars.
The theme of this year's show is "Committed to a Better Life".
The Shanghai-based electric vehicle startup Nio made its much-awaited domestic debut at the show. The company brought a model of its concept driverless car EVE, whose interior space is designed as a living room.
Li Bin, founder of Nio, said that when humans are freed from driving, the car would be transformed into a space for relaxation and entertainment.
Domestic auto maker Roewe unveiled its new model i6 16T, featuring a smart operation system that has access to mobile payment tool Alipay.
When the driver gets on the car, the system tells them to bring an umbrella if it is going to rain. It can select routes based on real-time road conditions and the driver's habits, and can even help order and pay for take-away coffee.
Another model of the carmaker, the RX5, carries a similar system. Sales of the new model have exceeded 140,000 since it was released eight months ago.
German manufacturer BMW also brought new models to the show. The new models feature intelligent driving.
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Beijing is taking steps to improve its vehicle parking management by encouraging the construction of parking facilities and imposing stricter penalties for illegal parking.
The Beijing Municipal Commission of Transportation released a draft of its new parking regulations recently. The document is available for public comment until May 10.
A shortage of parking lots has become a serious problem in Beijing, as the number of cars in the city continues to grow. Researchers say it requires integrated efforts in planning and management to improve the situation.
According to the draft regulations, police will set up parking areas along secondary roads near communities that have a shortage of parking lots.
For residential communities and government buildings that can sufficiently meet their own parking demand, the authority encourages them to open their parking facilities to the public and charge fees.
For existing parking areas, the government should work on raising their efficiency by improving charging systems and making full use of parking spaces in residential communities and commercial areas, as well as office buildings.
Beijing's planning and transportation departments should work together to make use of spare land by building more parking facilities, especially multi-level garages, and install smart parking systems.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
Cameras captured images of a panda in a nature reserve in southwest China's Sichuan Province three years after it has been released into the wild.
The pictures and videos of the panda were taken at a nature reserve in the Yi Autonomous Prefecture in late February.
Researchers identified the panda as one they released into the wild in 2013 and its name is Zhangxiang. The panda is living in a suitable environment where it can find enough bamboo. After further investigation, researchers revealed that the panda was in a normal physical condition.
The findings also prove that the panda has moved from one group to another. This marks another success in releasing pandas into the wilderness in China.
Zhangxiang is a female giant panda born in 2011. It was released in 2013 following two years of wilderness training.
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Almost 20 years after being stolen, a 1,300-year-old stone Buddhist pagoda has been returned to its home of Shanxi province in northern China with help from pilgrims across the Taiwan Straits.
The almost 2-meter-high item is part of a 3-meter-high pagoda. Based on inscriptions, scientists say the pagoda was built in 720 AD. It was included in the province's first list of key protection cultural relics in 1965. However, the top part of the relic was stolen away in 1996, and the rest became missing two years later. Only the foundation and certain parts were left at the site.
The facade of the pagoda were carved with Buddhist scriptures and decorated with colorful paintings.
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2017-05-01 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
More than 3,100 government officials have been held to account for the poor implementation of pollution control measures. Environmental problems have been uncovered in all seven provincial level regions included in the environmental inspections by the central authorities.
Inspectors have conducted their month-long reviews in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing municipalities as well as in other provinces since late November. The performance audits exposed more than 15,000 violations.
The inspection reports featured the complaint that governments have not focused enough attention on the environment. The failure has resulted in worsening air and water quality in some areas.
In one case, Gansu province in northwest China made plans to control air pollution, but inspectors found that it had not fully implemented the measures. The province has failed to meet its air pollution reduction targets for 2014 and 2015.
Inspectors also found a lack of assessment in Beijing, where seven districts failed to meet targets for 2014. The municipality did not release information or punish the officials responsible.
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China's manned submarine Jiaolong has gone through a dive simulation in Hainan Province to prepare for a deep descent in the South China Sea.
The submarine stayed underwater for 18 minutes in the drill before returning to its support ship. The crew completed tasks including underwater training, practical operation and emergency escape.
The ship's forthcoming South China Sea dive is part of the second stage of China's 38th ocean scientific expedition. The expedition will last for around four months.
Officials say the drill was necessary to test the equipment and personnel. Currently the Jiaolong's "technological status" is stable and the cooperation among various departments is smooth.
The submarine completed a deep-sea operation in the northwestern Indian Ocean earlier this year. It will also conduct surveys in the Yap Trench and the Mariana Trench.
Named after a mythical dragon, the Jiaolong reached its deepest depth of 7,062 meters in the Mariana Trench in June 2012.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
China has begun a series of changes to the rules regarding permanent residence for foreign nationals in the country.
A plan has been issued by the Ministry of Public Security. The "foreigner's permanent residence card" will be renamed as the "foreigner's permanent residence identity card".
Similar to the identity cards used by Chinese citizens, foreigners' identity information will be embedded in the chips on the machine-readable cards. The information will be shared by railways, airlines, insurance agencies, hotels and banks.
The old version cannot be read by machines, and foreigners often face difficulty in identity authentication. The reform aims to provide foreigners with easier access to public services.
The new card can be obtained at the original registration authority, while the old version can still be used until the expiry date. Related technical work is expected to be finished by June, and then foreigners can apply for the new cards.
Last year, 1,600 foreign nationals became permanent residents of China, an increase of 160 percent over the previous year.
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China is aiming to increase the scale of its cloud computing industry by more than 2.5 times from 2015 levels by 2019.
According to a new government plan, the scale of the cloud computing industry will be expanded to 430 billion yuan, roughly 62 billion U.S. dollars, by 2019. The action plan was issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Other targets include making breakthroughs in core technology, increasing cloud computing in manufacturing and government affairs, and strengthening the global influence of Chinese cloud computing companies.
The ministry expects that two to three Chinese cloud computing companies will lead the global market within three years. It says cloud computing should be a strong support for China's manufacturing and Internet industries and help other social and economic sectors.
The ministry pledged to enhance cloud computing network security and improve security regulation and relevant laws, as many users from key industries are still hesitating due to safety concerns.
In the next three years, China will help boost cloud computing technology and encourage local governments to work with leading cloud computing companies to build public service platforms.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
Chinese search engine Baidu has succeeded in using artificial intelligence to reconnect a man with his family 27 years after he was abducted.
The company is working with a charity group dedicated to connecting missing children and their families. Baidu uses its cross-age facial recognition program to analyze pictures of abducted children and identifies potential matches through the comparison of selected facial features. The missing children's pictures were uploaded by the victims and their birth families.
Thirty-three-year-old victim Fu Gui was born in Chongqing Municipality in western China. He was abducted in 1990 and later transferred to Fujian Province in southeastern China. He registered in 2009, and his birth family did the same in early 2017.
Baidu's facial recognition program was able to draw up a short list of potential identities for the man from pictures uploaded to the site, and a DNA test later verified the correct match.
Baidu has around 200 million sample pictures that it uses to improve the sensitivity and accuracy of its facial recognition program, which can be over 99 percent accurate.
Baidu's founder and CEO Robin Li says artificial intelligence systems, including facial recognition, could be used to help find missing children. The company has suggested that there should be a central database with missing children's information installed.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
Psychologists at the University of Manchester in Britain have revealed that they have come up with a new way of helping people overcome their fear of spiders.
Dr. Warren Mansell says rather than encouraging arachnophobias to face their spider fears, which is the current approach of many therapists, giving people control over how much they approach or avoid what they are afraid of is more likely to help.
Mansell based his findings on a theory known as Perceptual Control Theory. The study was published in Journal of Anxiety Disorders.
People with a fear of spiders sat in front of a screen and they themselves were able to control how close or distant the spider would appear.
He said Perceptual Control Theory predicts that it is vital for a client to have control over their experience of important elements of the environment including the sources of threat. He said control itself is pivotal for health and well-being.
The team recruited a large sample of people with high levels of spider fear and asked them to list their reasons for avoiding spiders but also their reasons for approaching spiders.
After completing a simple task, people reported avoiding spiders less in their everyday lives two weeks later, despite their fear, and without any prompting to do so.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A new study suggests that when Coffea arabica plants were subjected to even short-duration heat waves, they became unable to produce flowers and fruit. This means there would be no coffee beans and no coffee to drink.
Researchers from the United States investigated how leaf age and heat duration affected Coffea arabica's recovery from heat stress during greenhouse testing.
The study found that the younger "expanding" leaves were particularly slow to recover compared to mature leaves, and that none of the plants that endured the simulated heat waves produced any flowers or fruit.
Coffea arabica is the dominant coffee-plant species on the globe. It grows in 80 countries in four continents in the tropics, accounting for 65 percent of the commercial production of the 9 billion kilograms of coffee consumed globally each year.
The findings emphasized how sensitive Coffea arabica is to temperature. The leaf temperature is higher than the surrounding air temperature, which is a realistic result of global climate change.
This is Special English.
A British researcher says governments worldwide should invest in global approaches to learn how carbon capture and storage works, which is a realistic way of reducing carbon emissions. That's according to a commentary published online recently by the journal Nature Energy.
David Reiner from the University of Cambridge, author of the commentary, said that like many new technologies, it is only possible to learn what works and what doesn't by building and testing demonstration projects at scale. He argues that by giving up on carbon capture and storage instead of working together to develop a global "portfolio" of projects, countries are turning their backs on a key part of a low-carbon future.
Reiner says carbon capture and storage works by separating the carbon dioxide emitted by coal and gas power plants, transporting it and then storing it underground so that the carbon dioxide cannot escape into the atmosphere.
However, the technologies have fallen out of favor with private and public sector funders in recent years. Corporations and governments worldwide, including most recently the UK, are abandoning the same technology they championed just a few years ago.
The researcher says there are several reasons why carbon capture and storage seems to have fallen out of favor with both private and public sector funders, including costs, commercial pressure and timescales, as well as a lack of international cooperation.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A special edition of the "Ukraine-China" magazine has been launched to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Ukraine.
The magazine features celebration remarks by the leaders of the two countries, as well as expert opinions on the historical path and the current state of China-Ukraine friendly relations.
The publications highlight topics including the strategic partnership between China and Ukraine, interregional cooperation, trade and economic relations, as well as collaboration in science and education.
The "Ukraine-China" magazine was first published in 1999 by the Kiev-based Institute of Oriental Studies. It was previously issued on an irregular basis, and became a periodical this year.
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An exhibition featuring conventional craftsmanship in Anhui Province has opened to the public at Beijing's Palace Museum.
The exhibition showcases 85 works by 20 successors of national intangible cultural heritage from the eastern Chinese Province. The items on display include ink stones, ink and brush pens, lacquer ware and bamboo carvings.
In ancient times, most calligraphy supplies used by Chinese emperors came from Huangshan city in the province. The Palace Museum and the city government launched a workshop last year, aiming to promote the craftsmanship and tourism development in the city.
Mount Huangshan is a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site. It is known for its elegant architecture and high-quality green and black tea.
That is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I'm going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
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This is Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
The central government and local authorities will accelerate planning for the Xiong&`&an New Area.
China&`&s top economic planner said that in addition, those governments will provide policy and financial support for key projects and budgeting.
The National Development and Reform Commission said a master blueprint of the new area, as well as overall and detailed blueprints of the initial area are among the first plans to be mapped out.
The commission will guide the Hebei provincial government and authorities as they draft the plans to ensure they meet the high standards of quality needed for the project.
Apart from having world-class urban planning, the architecture in the new area will also showcase Chinese cultural characteristics.
The central government will also give support to major transportation, ecology, water conservation, energy, and public service projects in the new area.
China announced a historic decision to establish the Xiong&`&an New Area in Hebei province as part of measures to advance the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
The new area is similar to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. It is of national significance and "crucial for the millennium to come".
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China&`&s environmental watchdog has sent inspection teams to 7 cities to cope with a new round of severe smog.
The inspection teams have been sent by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. They went to cities including Beijing and Tianjin, in northern China.
Inspectors discovered factories fabricating pollutant data in some cities. A steel mill in a city was found to have shut down a pollutant detector. Those responsible have been detained by local police.
The inspection team found that smog emergency plans have been poorly implemented in Tianjin. Several cement producers in another city were found to have continued operations when they should have been suspended.
In Beijing, a ceramics producer and a paper maker cheated inspectors regarding the use of purifying equipment. A furniture plant in Hebei Province refused inspectors who were attempting to conduct inspections.
A new round of air pollution continues in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, with some cities issuing orange alerts, the second-highest in China&`&s four-tier warning system.
China has been under growing pressure to address air pollution as smog frequently smothers the country.
You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. -
2017-04-25 Special English
This is Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. Here is the news.
Chinese central authorities have released a detailed 10-year youth development plan, vowing better education, employment and healthcare for the nation's youth.
"Youth" in the context of the plan released by the Communist Party of China's Central Committee and the State Council refers to those aged from 14 to 35.
The Middle-and Long-term Youth Development Plan covers the period between 2016 and 2025. It sets a general goal for establishing a "youth development policy system and work mechanism" by 2020 and improving the system by 2025.
Specifically, the plan sets educational goals of an average 14 years of education for the newly added labor force and a gross higher education enrollment rate of over 50 percent within 10 years. It aims for 90 percent of the groups to meet physical standards and give them more accesses to mental and physical care.
Authorities will strengthen educational campaigns targeting different ages within the group to champion patriotism and socialism with Chinese characteristics, making the "Chinese dream" a common goal for them.
This is Special English.
The preparatory committee of the Xiong'an New Area in north China's Hebei Province has said to control illegal land and housing purchase as well as construction.
China has announced to establish the Xiong'an New Area, a landmark new economic zone near Beijing designed to integrate the capital with its surrounding areas.
The announcement attracted investors to swarm into the area, and drove up housing prices.
The committee warned all forms of illegal trade of properties are not protected by law, and vowed to crack down on illegal construction and trading of second-hand houses.
The committee said it will strictly implement the central authorities' guidelines that say "homes are for living in, not for speculating with".
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
China's top quality watchdog said more than 40 percent of consumer goods exported to China last year through e-commerce platforms fell short of standards.
Last year, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine conducted random quality inspections on 1,000 batches of the products. The items were consumer goods including toys, diapers, clothing and kitchenware. Four hundred items were found to be substandard, accounting for 41 percent of all sampled products.
In addition to meeting quality standards, imported products must be correctly labeled in Chinese.
The quality of consumer goods imported through the channels other than e-commerce proved to be higher, with only 29 percent falling short of standards.
The authority organized two large-scale inspections last year, involving more than 5,300 batches of imported consumer goods, including air purifiers, car brake blocks, household electrical appliances and clothes. More than 1,500 were found to be substandard.
Last year, quality supervision authorities across China handled 36,000 cases relating to violations of laws on quality standards, involving 2 billion yuan's, roughly 330 million U.S. dollars' worth of goods.
Quality supervision authorities at all levels have been urged to intensify quality supervision and keep cracking down on law violations to improve the quality of products and protect consumer rights.
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China has started the construction of one of the world's largest and most sensitive cosmic-ray facilities.
The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory will attempt to search for the origin of high energy cosmic rays. It aims to study the evolution of the universe and high energy celestial bodies, as well as to push forward the frontier of new physics.
The observatory is located at 4,400 meters above sea level in an mountainous area in Southwest China's Sichuan province. The total investment is 1.2 billion yuan, roughly 180 million U.S. dollars.
The construction of the project is set for completion in January 2021. It will be a key frontier project for cosmic ray research in the world.
Cosmic rays are particles that originate in outer space and are accelerated to energies higher than those that can be achieved in even the largest man-made particle accelerators. The origin of the cosmic rays has remained a mystery since they were first spotted some 100 years ago.
The observatory will be mankind's first attempt to hunt for the highest-energy Gamma ray, which is the burst of radiation thought to be produced alongside cosmic rays in the Galaxy.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
The United Nations' intellectual property agency says China is showing "quite extraordinary" growth in international patent applications, putting Chinese applicants on track to outpace their U.S. counterparts within two to three years.
Francis Gurry, director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, says China posted nearly 45-percent growth in such patent applications last year, saying "the country continues its journey from "Made in China" to "Created in China".
Overall, the United States was first for the 39th straight year and accounted for nearly 56,600 applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, followed by Japan at over 45,200 and China at nearly 43,200.
China's state-owned ZTE Corporation in Shenzhen, one of the world's biggest suppliers of network switching gear, was the No. 1 applicant last year, topping crosstown rival Huawei. U.S.-based Qualcomm.
This is Special English.
In Shaanxi province in southwest China, a farmer's rent-a-chicken business has helped hundreds of rural families cast off poverty. Zhang Chunpu's program is a free loan of chickens to farmers who then make money by selling the free-range eggs back to Zhang's cooperative businesses.
Over the past decade, rent-a-chicken has helped more than 800 households in Yanchang County, who previously survived on an annual per capita income of less than 2,300 yuan, roughly 335 U.S. dollars.
The idea came to Zhang by accident. In 2003, he saw profits from selling healthy eggs and acquired 6,000 chickens.
It wasn't always easy. Zhang recalled the time that the chickens nearly ate up all the grass on the nearby mountain, as well as fought with each other and didn't lay eggs. He was nearly bankrupt, but he couldn't see the birds starve to death. He started giving the birds to the villagers.
The birds he rents to farmers roam free in yards and on hillsides, eating pumpkins, cabbage and worms.
Zhang's cooperative earns 0.1 yuan from each egg, while farmers can earn 0.15 yuan. However, the real profit comes from the chickens.
Each farmer earns about 100 yuan per year per chicken, enabling them to get away from poverty.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.
A group of Swedish university students who raised 1.2 million euros, roughly 1.3 million U.S. dollars, in crowd funding for their startup to build electric cars has caught the attention of German industrial heavyweight Siemens.
The two sides said they were starting a partnership that will see them create 50,000 lightweight city cars annually starting next year.
The twin-seat vehicles, called L7e, have 15 kilowatt engines with a maximum speed of 130 kilometers per hour. They weigh 400 kilograms each and have a 150 kilometer range.
The cars are made from sustainable composite materials and will be unveiled in late 2017. The first deliveries are scheduled for early 2019. The first high-end vehicle has a target price of 200,000 kronor, roughly 22,300 U.S. dollars. The price for an electric Smart Car in Sweden is at least 210,000 kronor, roughly 23,400 U.S. dollars.
The vehicle's steering system resembles a Wii controller more than a traditional car's steering wheel.
Lewis Horne, the CEO of the startup, called Uniti Sweden, says the deal gives his company "the opportunity to not only develop a sustainable car, but also manufacture it in a sustainable way at a large scale."
This is Special English.
Matt Garlock has trouble making out what his friends say in loud bars, but when he got a hearing test, the result was normal. Recent research may have found an explanation for problems like his, something called "hidden hearing loss".
Scientists have been finding evidence that loud noise, from rock concerts, leaf blowers, power tools and the like, damages our hearing in a previously unexpected way. It may not be immediately noticeable, and it does not show in standard hearing tests.
But over time, Harvard researcher M. Charles Liberman says, it can rob our ability to understand conversation in a noisy setting. It may also help explain why people have more trouble doing that as they age. And it may lead to persistent ringing in the ears.
Liberman says the bottom line is "noise is more dangerous than we thought."
His work has been done almost exclusively in animals. Nobody knows how much it explains hearing loss in people or how widespread it may be in the population. But he and others are already working on potential treatments.
You're listening to Special English. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing.
The Gulf of Oman turns green twice a year, when an algae bloom the size of Mexico spreads across the Arabian Sea all the way to India.
Scientists who study the algae say the microscopic organisms are thriving in new conditions brought about by climate change, and displacing the zooplankton that underpin the local food chain, threatening the entire marine ecosystem.
A marine biologist at the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, wrinkles his nose as the research vessel nears the bloom. He says "Sea stench", referring to the algae's ammonia secretions.
He signals the boat to stop as it speeds up beneath a gigantic rock arch off the coast of Muscat, the capital of Oman, an arid sultanate on the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The captain kills the engine and drops anchor into a slick of bright green muck surrounded by crystal-clear blue water.
The swarms of microscopic creatures beneath the surface of the Gulf of Oman were all but invisible 30 years ago. Now they form giant, murky shapes that can be seen from satellites.
Across the planet, blooms have wrecked local ecosystems. Algae can paralyze fish, clog their gills, and absorb enough oxygen to suffocate them. Whales, turtles, dolphins and manatees have died, poisoned by algal toxins, in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. These toxins have infiltrated whole marine food chains and have, in rare cases, killed people.
This is Special English.
China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region will build more kindergartens and hire more bilingual teachers to improve its three-year bilingual pre-school education.
A total of 4,400 bilingual kindergartens will be built or expanded in 2017 across the region. And 10,000 bilingual teachers will be hired this year, 6,500 more compared with previous years.
The education department announced that Xinjiang will also provide more training courses for bilingual teachers and encourage more college graduates to work as bilingual teachers.
From 2011 to 2015, Xinjiang built 2,500 new bilingual kindergartens in rural areas, bringing the region's pre-school education penetration rate to 77 percent, or 480,000 pre-schoolers.
With funds from the central government, Xinjiang plans to offer three years of bilingual pre-school education, instead of the current two years, in its rural areas in the next four years.
This is the end of this edition of Special English. To freshen up your memory, I'm going to read one of the news items again at normal speed. Please listen carefully.
This is the end of today's program. I'm Ryan Price in Beijing, and I hope you can join us every day, to learn English and learn about the world. - Vis mere
