Dense fog

    A heavy fog blanketed China’s northern and eastern regions on Monday, crippled traffic, delaying flights and causing hundreds of cancellations, and creating obstacles in the highways in many places.

    The National Meteorological Center issued a blue alert early Monday morning, the lowest level in the country’s four-scale fog alert system.

    As of 2 p.m., 126 flights had been delayed by an hour or longer and 207 were canceled at Beijing, the world’s second-busiest airport, Xinhua News Agency said.

    In Beijing, the fog has been made worse by pollution. Readings by the U.S. Embassy, which measures inhalable particles of 2.5 microns, have described the pollution for days as “hazardous.”

    Wuhan blast

    Police are offering a 100,000 yuan (US$15,724) reward for information that will help them hunt down a man responsible for a fatal blast outside a bank in Central China’s Wuhan City.

    Two people were killed, one of them a 13-year-old girl, and 15 others were injured in the incident.

    Wuhan police published three pictures of the man they are seeking on its official microblog on Sunday.

    SUST professors

    Forty professors are now teaching and working at the South University of Science and Technology (SUST) in Nanshan District.

    The number of professors at the university is expected to reach 70 next year, allowing the university to set up more departments and courses, said Zhu Qingshi, president of the university.

    ‘City of volunteers’

    Shenzhen plans to build a “city of volunteers” with 10 percent of its permanent residents, or 1.1 million, to be registered volunteers by 2015, according to a plan released on Sunday, one day before International Volunteer Day.

    The city has about 8 million permanent residents and the number is expected to be 11 million in 2015. The number of registered volunteers is currently 270,000.

(SD-Agencies)