9 detained

    Nine people are facing criminal charges in connection with a deadly construction site accident in East China’s Jiangxi Province, police said on Monday.

    The platform for a cooling tower of a power plant under construction collapsed in Fengcheng City on November 24, leaving 74 people dead and two injured. Local police detained nine people suspected of major liability* in the accident on early Monday.

    Severe brain drain

    China’s northeast has lost more than 1 million people in the last 10 years, many of whom are high earners and well educated, according to figures from the National Development and Reform Commission.

    The information was released to counter earlier reports that Northeast China, a geographic term that mainly includes Helongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces, was losing a million people each year. “The population loss of the region is not that serious,” said Zhou Jianping, head of the Department of Northeastern Revitalization under the commission. “But we have to admit, many of the 1 million we’ve lost in the past decade are top executives and management,” he added.

    Killing of ‘king of fish’

    The killing of a giant eel*, which used to live in Lingwan Lake in Nanning City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has sparked outrage online, according to local media.

    Earlier last week, a person going by the online name “Diving and Photography Lover” posted on the Twitter-like Weibo service, claiming that a 1-meter-long marbled eel in the lake had been killed by a man. In a photo posted with the text, the man, whose face was pixelated*, is holding a metal stick going through the eel’s head.

    Women’s employment

    The employment rate among Chinese women continues to drop while the second-child policy may further aggravate* the situation, according to a recent report by Labor Market Research Center under Beijing Normal University.

    The report noted a continuous drop in employment over the past decade, with a faster pace for women than men. However, the rate for Chinese women and the discrepancy* between different genders are still above the world average, it was added. (SD-Agencies)