Aids to be sent to Afghanistan

    China has pledged* 2 billion yuan (US$327 million) in aid through 2017 to Afghanistan and will help train 3,000 Afghan professionals over the next five years.

    The offer of aid followed a meeting on October 28 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Beijing and Kabul also agreed to step up intelligence* sharing to fight drug trafficking* and other cross-border issues.

    180 fugitives to face trial Authorities in China have succeeded in getting extradited* or persuading 180 economic fugitives* to return to China and face trial since launching a six-month campaign called Fox Hunt in July.

    The number of the fugitives being repatriated* during the first 100 days of the Fox Hunt is more than that of the whole year of 2013. The returned suspects include many allegedly corrupt officials who fled to more than 40 countries and regions.

    Facebook may enter China

    China may be blocking access to Facebook, but that doesn’t mean the social media network can’t one day enter the country, as long as it follows the rules, a top government official said on October 30.

    Lu Wei, the director of China’s State Internet Information Office, made the comment at a press conference after media outlets had previously reported him saying that Facebook would never be allowed in the country.

    “The media claimed that I said ‘it would be absolutely impossible.’ Today, I can tell you that this news is fake,” he said.

    Space mission completes

    China on Saturday successfully recovered an experimental spacecraft that flew around the moon and back in a test run for the country’s first unmanned* return trip to the lunar surface.

    The eight-day trip marked the first time in almost four decades that a spacecraft has returned to Earth after traveling around the moon. China plans to send a spacecraft to the moon in 2017 and have it return to Earth after collecting soil samples.

    (SD-Agencies)