News briefs

Passengers line up at a subway entrance in Beijing Railway Station on Feb 7. With the Spring Festival holidays ending, it is the peak time for people to flock back to their homes. Zou Hong / China Daily

Travel

Spring Festival travel hits peak

Railroads and highways in China saw their busiest day of the Spring Festival holiday on Feb 8 when the number of travelers returning to major cities peaked, just as a cold snap was sweeping across much of the country, the ministries of railways and transport said.

The Ministry of Railways said there had been a sharp rise in the number of travelers leaving smaller cities on Feb 7 bound for such places as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

China's railways moved about 77.3 million passengers during the first 15-day period, which went from Jan 19 to Feb 2, the Ministry of Railways said.

Healthcare

Boost to medical reporting

Health authorities have ordered "honest, accurate and timely" reporting of medical accidents by medical institutions and administrations across the nation in the latest effort to make medical practices safer.

The regulation, which was issued by the Ministry of Health and will take effect in April, stipulates that all medical institutions have to report to local health administrations their medical errors and accidents.

The regulation stipulates that accidents will be divided into three grades based on their severity. Accidents and disputes settled in private by patients and hospitals must also be reported.

Law

Crackdown on judges

China's top court is set to bring in three new regulations aimed at ensuring judges are not swayed by family ties or other types of relationships when making legal decisions.

The move is the latest salvo in its attempts to deal with judicial corruption and began last year with the Supreme People's Court starting to draft the three regulations.

The first regulation refers to avoiding possible conflicts of interest among judges, technically called recusal, because of the involvement in cases of family members who are lawyers.

The second tackles the pleading or interceding of the relatives of judges, their friends or other people.

And the third targets lax management and poor working practices on the part of some local courts and urges court staff members, especially judicial police officers, to perform their duties in accordance with the law.

Accident

Fires kill 40 during fireworks

Forty people died in more than 118,000 cases of fire reported across China from Feb 2 to Feb 8, as revelers celebrated the Chinese New Year holiday with fireworks, according to a statement released on Feb 8 by the country's Ministry of Public Security.

The number of cases jumped from the 7,480 fires reported during last year's Spring Festival holiday, which caused losses worth 28.5 million yuan (3.1 million euros). The incidents also injured 37 people and caused more than 56 million yuan in damages, which is almost double the figure from last year.

Telecom

Holiday text messages reach high

A record number of text messages were sent during Chinese New Year. According to China's major mobile phone operators, about 1 billion text messages were sent in Beijing alone on Feb 2, the eve of Spring Festival. China Mobile, one of the leading mobile phone operators in China, said its Beijing users sent 770 million text messages that night, up about 13 percent year-on-year.

China Unicom mobile users in Beijing sent more than 143 million messages during the day, and at about 7 pm on Spring Festival eve, the company was handling about 4,700 text messages per second.

Shanghai users of China Mobile sent 920 million text messages on the same day, up 20 percent, while in Guangdong province, the number of messages sent on that day increased by more than 23 percent year-on-year.

Internet

Parental controls for online gaming

Online game operators in China will be required to provide services for parents to monitor their children's game-playing in the latest effort to prevent minors becoming addicted to Internet games.

A notice issued on Jan 31 by eight central government departments, including the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Public Security, ordered the implementation of the Parents' Guardian Project for Minors Playing Online Games on March 1.

Under the plan, all online game operators must cooperate with parents in monitoring their children's online game-playing.

The move is the latest effort to address growing Internet addiction among minors as statistics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences suggest the number of teenage Internet addicts in China has risen to 33 million.

China Daily