Travel rush

More than 300 million train tickets for the Spring Festival travel rush have been sold after the pre-sale kicked off December 12, 2019, according to the latest statistics from China’s railway operator.

Thursday saw a single-day record of 16.33 million tickets sold for train journeys on January 31, the first working day after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, the China State Railway Group Co. Ltd. said.

Garbage sorting

A total of 237 Chinese cities have started to practice garbage sorting, data from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development showed.

In 46 key cities, household garbage classification has covered 77,000 housing estates, or 53.9 percent, and 49 million households, according to the ministry. Garbage sorting practices have reached over 70 percent of housing estates in 18 cities including Shanghai, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Credit blacklists

The country will give leniency to wrongdoers on the credit blacklists who are restricted from consumption due to court order defaults with a grace period from one to three months, according to a guideline released by the Supreme People’s Court.

Full-time students who lose their credit because of falling into illegal campus loans will be exempt from being listed on credit blacklists or restricted from purchasing certain products and services, according to the guideline.

HPV vaccine

China has approved its first domestically made vaccine against the cancer-causing human papillomavirus for use by females aged 9 to 45, providing an alternative to foreign drugmakers’ products, according to the National Medical Products Administration.

The newly approved vaccine is designed to protect against Type 16 and Type 18 HPV, the two most common virus strains that lead to cervical cancer, the administration said.

Fishing ban

China last week began a 10-year fishing ban on key areas of the Yangtze River to protect biodiversity in the country’s longest river, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Starting this year, the ban will be observed in 332 conservation areas in the Yangtze River basin, which will also be expanded to all natural waterways of the river and its major tributaries from no later than January 1 next year.(SD-Agencies)