Top Japanese and Chinese police officials agreed Monday to spur investigations into toxic dumpling cases by offering evidence the two countries have collected to each other, Japanese officials said. The accord was reached when top officials from Japan's National Police Agency held talks with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing on Monday night. They also agreed on greater collaboration to settle the food poisoning cases involving Chinese-made dumplings, which caused 10 people in two Japanese prefectures to fall ill, the officials said.

The city zoo is expanding its panda exhibit for the 2008 Olympics and will ship in up to 10 more for visitors to see during the August Games, an official said on Thursday. The zoo is expanding its facilities to accommodate the additional animals and is also building a Giant Panda Museum which will document efforts to save the endangered species, a zoo spokeswoman said. "The pandas will be on loan from the Wolong Giant Panda Centre, but the numbers to be brought in are still under negotiation,' she said. According to the Beijing Youth Daily, up to 10 more pandas would be brought in from Wolong, the world's most successful panda breeding centre located in southwest China's Sichuan province. The panda exhibition is the most popular attraction at the Beijing Zoo and currently houses seven of the animals. A record number of pandas have been bred in China in recent years, with 31 born and 25 surviving at breeding centers around the nation in the first 11 months of 2007, earlier press reports said. In 2006, 33 pandas were born, with most of the new births in both years occurring at the Wolong centre, where artificial breeding techniques are continually improving, the reports said.

A man from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China has died of bird flu, the Health Ministry said Thursday. The ministry said on its website that a 41-year-old man surnamed Liang fell sick on Feb 12 and was hospitalized two days later.

Beijing will ban sales of new cars that fail to meet new emission standards starting from March, state news agency Xinhua said on Saturday, in another move to clean up its air before the August Olympic Games. All new cars are required to meet the new national standards that are equivalent to Euro IV standards, Xinhua said, citing Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the city's Environment Protection Bureau. The tougher emission standards will extend to heavy vehicles used for public transportation, sanitation and mail services from July, the report said. About a third of the main pollutants in Beijing such as nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide come from vehicle exhaust, said Du. The new standards are estimated to cut emission of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides by 48,000 tonnes, 5,300 tonnes and 4,100 tonnes, respectively, this year. The capital city will keep a ban on diesel vehicles which emit three times as much nitrogen oxide as gasoline-power ones, Du was quoted as saying. Beijing already ordered petrol stations in the city to sell gasoline and diesel that meet Euro IV standards at the start of 2008. The city has about 3.1 million motor vehicles, and every day about 1,200 new ones hit the road, Xinhua said. (Reporting by Chen Aizhu; Editing by Jeremy Laurence) REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

With booming industries, Beijing finds it difficult to control SO2 and particulate matter. NO2 and toxic hydrocarbons add to its problems. After seven years of controls, SO2 and CO are down by

Panamanian investigators have concluded that at least 174 people were poisoned, 115 of them fatally, by counterfeit cold medicine linked to an unlicensed Chinese chemical plant.

The recent snowstorms in China have signalled that "freak weather' is becoming increasingly more common, a United Nations body that seeks to mitigate the impact of natural disasters has warned. The unprecedented scale, cost, and human impacts of China's snowstorms, its worst in 50 years, herald a need for the world to get ready for "new kinds of disasters,' said the Geneva-based International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).

The recent snowstorms in China have signalled that "freak weather' is becoming increasingly more common, a United Nations body that seeks to mitigate the impact of natural disasters has warned. The unprecedented scale, cost, and human impacts of China's snowstorms, its worst in 50 years, herald a need for the world to get ready for "new kinds of disasters,' said the Geneva-based International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).

Chinese authorities will give a facelift to the world's tallest stone-carved Buddha just six years after the last repairs as they struggle to mitigate the effects of pollution and crowding, state

>> Authorities confirmed an outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu strain in Suffolk county, the UK, on November 13. An exclusion zone was imposed at the site and about 6,000 poultry were ordered to be

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