New cases

The State health authority said on Monday that it received reports of 49 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases on the Chinese mainland as of Sunday, of which 39 were domestically transmitted and 10 were imported.

Of the domestically transmitted cases, 36 were reported in Beijing and three in Hebei Province, the National Health Commission said in its daily report. No deaths related to the disease were reported, according to the commission. As of Sunday, the overall confirmed cases on the mainland had reached 83,181, including 177 patients who were still being treated, with two in severe condition.

Tank truck blasts

Emergency rescue is under way after a truck loaded with liquefied gas exploded on a highway in Zhejiang Province on Saturday.

As of Sunday morning, the blasts had left at least 19 dead and 172 injured, with 24 suffering serious injuries, local authorities said. The accident occurred at around 4:40 p.m. on Saturday when the truck exploded near Liangshan Village in Daxi Township under the city of Wenling on a section of the Shenyang-Haikou Expressway. A second blast soon followed. The explosion caused the collapse of nearby residential houses and factory workshops.

College admission

China will further tighten international students’ applications for undergraduate programs in Chinese universities and colleges in an effort to uphold education fairness, said a recently released circular.

The circular, issued by the Ministry of Education, noted that students whose parents are both Chinese nationals or one parent is a Chinese national and who have acquired foreign nationality at birth are qualified for admittance to undergraduate programs of Chinese universities and colleges on the condition that they have a record of actually living abroad for more than two years in the last four years, in addition to other application requirements.

Dancing farmers

A farming couple in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, have become an Internet sensation after videos of them dancing in the fields went viral.

Their videos have had more than 60 million views, with 2.5 million thumbs up and over 100,000 comments. The couple, 45-year-old Peng Xiaoying and her 49-year-old husband Fan Deduo, began to learn to dance about five years ago because dancing possibly would help Fan recover from depression. (SD-Agencies)