A watchtower of the Forbidden City is seen under the blue sky in Beijing on Jan 22, 2018. [Photo/VCG] The country's top environmental authority vowed on Friday to curb the falsification of monitoring data and ensure institutes are not interfered with, as it unveiled a three-year campaign on environmental monitoring. The campaign will cover all 31 provincial regions on the Chinese mainland from 2018 to 2020. Key areas for inspections will be the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster, Yangtze River Delta, and Fenhe-Weihe plain in Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, according to the plan released by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. The campaign will also cover service providers to monitoring stations and the monitoring facilities of polluting enterprises, it said. Inspections will be done randomly. The ministry will choose 10 percent of the air or water monitoring stations, 200 environmental monitoring institutes and 100 motor vehicle detecting companies to inspect each year, the ministry said in a statement on Friday. The ministry will strengthen cooperation with the State Administration for Market Regulation and carry out joint action to exploit the two government bodies' advantages to the full. An information sharing mechanism will be established to enhance the efficiency of environmental monitoring institute supervision, it said. The two government bodies will launch a special inspection on environmental monitoring institutes and motor vehicle detection centers after mid-August. The cooperation will be of milestone significance as it could help develop a long-term mechanism for the supervision work, it said. Institutes with violations will be fined or have their monitoring qualifications revoked. Those involved in data falsification will be transferred to judicial bodies and be prosecuted for criminal liability. Officials involved in falsification will also face disciplinary penalties, it said. The ministry vowed to create an atmosphere in which no one dares to falsify data by exposing typical violations via media. The campaign was launched against the backdrop of polluting enterprises being frequently found to have falsified their environmental monitoring data, and some local authorities have also been found to have beautified data. Six air quality monitoring stations in Linfen, Shanxi, for example, were tampered with more than 100 times from April 2017 to March this year. A local court has sentenced 11 people involved in the incident, including the head of Linfen environmental protection, to prison or detention of up to two years in May. silicone bandswristbands for events
File photo of Li Gaoshan via Sina Weibo by the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. A 94-year-old survivor of the Nanjing Massacre died at his home in the eastern Chinese city on Monday. News of Li Gaoshan's passing was shared on Sina Weibo by the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. Li was born in February 1925 and joined the fighting against the invading Japanese soldiers at age 13 in 1937. He was captured twice during the occupation of Nanjing. On Dec 14, 1937, Li was held captive by Japanese soldiers near Yijiangmen. He and hundreds of other captives had their arms tied behind their backs and were taken to rooms in the Bazishan Mansion, where they stood in rows and were shot by machine guns through the windows. Li survived, but most people died at the scene. According to Li's testimony, the Japanese soldiers poured gasoline and set fire to the building's first floor. He ran to the second floor with six other survivors and jumped a wall to escape. They hid on the roof of another building for five days without food before the Japanese soldiers found them and shot five of them to death. Li was able to run away. At least five survivors of the Nanjing Massacre have died this year.
