WELCOME HOME: Li Changchun (left), member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Political Bureau, meets Chinese entrepreneurs who live overseas and are participating in their biennial gathering in Guangzhou on November 18 (PANG XINGLEI)

Disastrous Landslide

Twenty-three people, including eight children aged 1 to 4 years old, have been confirmed dead after a massive landslide buried part of a village in north China's Shanxi Province, local authorities said on November 17.

The landslide covered an area of about 20,000 square meters and swept away over six homes on the morning of November 16. The victims were migrant workers at a nearby coalmine and their families.

Geological experts confirmed that the accident was a loess avalanche caused by a collapse of weakly cemented loess soil.

Police and officials from the provincial work safety and land and resources authorities are investigating the incident.

Tourism Boom

China's Tibet Autonomous Region received a record 5.27 million tourists in the first 10 months of 2009, a tourism official said.

Wang Songping, deputy head of the Tourism Bureau of Tibet, said the total included 152,077 foreign visitors, a growth of 169 percent over the same period of last year, and 5.12 million domestic tourists, up 154 percent from the previous year. Wang said the tourists generated 4.45 billion yuan ($652 million) in revenue for the region during the 10 months.

The number of visitors to the region fell to 2.2 million in 2008 after the March 14 riot in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, as compared with 4 million during the previous year.

Cleaner Heating

Another 80,000 households in the ancient courtyards of downtown Beijing have bid farewell to coal heating this winter, the Beijing Electric Power Co. said on November 14.

The households in the historic and cultural sites of the city have replaced polluting coal stoves with electric heaters, marking the end of a seven-year program to eliminate coal furnaces in 160,000 homes throughout 19 historic and cultural sites in downtown Beijing.

The company said it has invested 8.8 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) to upgrade the power grid in the ancient courtyard areas to facilitate the switch to electric heaters.

Campaign Against Porn

Chinese authorities have shut down another 41 porn websites during the national campaign to eradicate lewd content from the Internet.

The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center investigated the websites after tip-offs from the public, the center said on November 14.

The websites were found to be displaying content that was lewd and 13 were operating without a permit from authorities.

The move is the latest in a string of drives to crack down on pornographic and lewd content on the Internet.

In late October, authorities banned 1,414 pornographic works of online literature. About 30,000 Web links to the banned works and 20 online literature websites were closed by the General Administration of Press and Publication.

Smarter Rats

Researchers have created a smart transgenic rat whose brain cells communicate a bit longer than usual, shedding light on the possibility of enhancing human memory, a scientist said on November 17 in Shanghai.

Researchers improved the rat's memory by over-expressing the gene NR2B in the hippocampus, a learning and memory center in the brain, said Cao Xiaohua, a professor at the Brain Science Lab of East China Normal University.

"Human beings have a similar NR2B gene and, theoretically, the research is a boost for the study of improving human memory," Cao said. "The finding also brings hope to patients suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia."