CULTURAL MEETING: The International Youth Summer Camp on Chinese World Heritage opens in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, on July 17. Teenagers from 21 countries and regions spent eight days visiting world heritage candidate sites in China (XINHUA)

Legal Aid

A volunteer legal aid campaign has benefited more than 17 million people over the past year, one of its co-organizers revealed on July 15.

In the 1+1 Volunteer Legal Aid Campaign, launched by the Ministry of Justice and the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League in 2009, about 180 volunteers have handled 13,280 cases and helped solve 2,600 disputes in the past year, according to the China Legal Aid Foundation.

The campaign aims to provide legal services in areas lacking lawyers. Lawyers and law students are sent to the regions to provide assistance for a year at a time.

More than 100 Chinese counties still have no lawyers working in them. The absence has caused a bottleneck in economic and social development of these areas. This year's campaign will see more than 200 volunteers sent to 123 counties across China to dispense legal advice and assistance to those in need.

HK Suffrage

Zhang Xiaoming, Director of the Liaison Office of the Chinese Central People's Government in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), said on June 16 that the Central Government's sincerity toward universal suffrage in Hong Kong is undoubted, and the whole process must follow the course set in 2007 by the HKSAR Basic Law and the National People's Congress Standing Committee.

"We should get to know clearly the terms and regulations of the Basic Law concerning the Chief Executive and Legislative Council elections to find what problems are yet to be solved and what problems have already been tackled," Zhang said.

"Then we should concentrate on studying those unsolved problems, explore their possible solutions and finally have a concrete solution plan. That would be the right approach," he said.

Zhang stressed that the HKSAR's approach to universal suffrage must be compatible with its administrative status, comply with the principle of "one country, two systems" and respect the relationship between Hong Kong and the Central Government, adding that the electoral setup must ensure state sovereignty and the Central Government's lawful rights.

Voc-Ed Employment

The employment rate for graduates of higher vocational schools in China rose slightly from 2010 to 2012, according to a report released on July 16.

The report, jointly conducted by the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences and educational research company MyCOS Institute, said that the employment rate of vocational graduates increased to 90.4 percent in 2012, just below the 91.5-percent employment rate for college graduates in the same year.

Researchers surveyed about 200,000 graduates of higher vocational schools in the 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland over the past few years.

According to the report, more than 40,000 technical courses were jointly developed by vocational schools and companies, and 1,318 majors were created in higher vocational education. The survey also shows that the incomes of higher vocation school graduates rose 120 percent from 2009 to 2012.

Scientists from all over the world will conduct advanced interdisciplinary studies at a Beijing branch of the International Space Science Institute (ISSI).

Launched on July 16 by the ISSI, based in Bern, Switzerland, and Beijing-based National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing institute will contribute to a deeper understanding of the results from different space missions, ground-based observations and laboratory experiments.

The newly established ISSI-Beijing will advance the internationalization of space science research, and provide an important window on Chinese space science to the scientific community, according to a statement of the branch.

This year, ISSI-Beijing will support one international team and four forums on science topics, including x-ray timing and polarization, as well as solar polar orbit observation.

The ISSI was established in 1995 and funded by agencies including the European Space Agency, the Swiss Federal Government and the Russian Academy of Sciences.