Leaders of Sansha City

Xiao Jie (WEI YAO)	Fu Zhuang (WEI YAO)

Xiao Jie was elected mayor of the newly established Sansha City, and Fu Zhuang the director of the standing committee of Sansha Municipal People's Congress in the first session of the first Sansha Municipal People's Congress held on Yongxing Island, the government center of Sansha, in south China's Hainan Province on July 23.

Forty-five deputies to the municipal people's congress attended the session to cast their votes.

Fu, 56, was deputy director of the Hainan Provincial Civil Air Defense Office before he was elected. Xiao, 50, was head of the Hainan Provincial Agriculture Department and Party secretary of the Hainan Academy of Agricultural Sciences before his new post.

Homicide Charge

Bogu Kailai and Zhang Xiaojun were recently charged with intentional homicide by the Hefei Municipal Procuratorate in Anhui Province, Xinhua News Agency learned from authorities on July 26.

The municipal prosecuting body filed the charges with the Hefei Municipal Intermediate People's Court. The prosecuting body informed the two defendants and the family members of the victim of their litigation rights during the investigation period. The prosecuting body also interrogated the two defendants and heard the opinions of the defense team.

Investigation results show that Bogu Kailai, one of the defendants, and her son Bo Guagua had conflicts with the British citizen Neil Heywood over economic interests. Worrying about Neil Heywood's threat to her son's personal safety, Bogu Kailai along with Zhang Xiaojun, the other defendant, poisoned Heywood to death.

Bogu Kailai is the wife of Bo Xilai, former Party chief of Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality and a former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

In April, the CPC Central Committee suspended Bo from his posts at the committee and its Political Bureau because "Bo is suspected of being involved in serious violations of discipline." Bo is under investigation by the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

Shantytown Renovation

China had allocated 6.5 billion yuan ($1.02 billion) from the central budget to fund the country's shantytown renovation projects, the Ministry of Finance said on July 22.

"The money will be used to fund the government's shantytown renovation scheme, including the relocation of shantytown residents and construction of new houses and infrastructure facilities," the ministry said in a statement.

The amount brings the Central Government's total investment in the scheme to 27.7 billion yuan ($4.34 billion) this year. The plan is expected to benefit 1.9 million urban households nationwide.

Registration Network

Chinese authorities have ended the practice of requiring manual marriage registration by setting up a national network and database for marriage registration covering all 31 provincial-level regions around the end of June this year.

A local marriage network and database has also been set up in each provincial-level region to offer online marriage registration and verify individuals' marital status based on national data.

Civil affairs authorities were working to update data for the national network, the Ministry of Civil Affairs announced on July 24.

The ministry plans to exchange and share marital information with foreign affairs departments and relevant agencies in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan in the future in order to set up a national marital status database for all of the country's citizens.

School Merger Control

The Ministry of Education has issued a circular banning the "blind" closures and mergers of rural public schools over concerns regarding road safety and students' commute times.

County-level governments must work out feasible plans for the locations of their elementary and primary schools in accordance with local conditions, according to a circular issued by the ministry on July 22.

Chinese authorities have been making efforts to optimize educational resources in rural areas since 2002, urging schools to reassemble or merge in order to distribute education more fairly.

Higher enrollment in urban schools and a decreasing birth rate in rural areas have contributed to the efforts, the circular said.

However, overcrowding and long commute times remain a problem for rural students. Many also worry about traffic safety and boarding conditions at the schools, particularly after a string of school bus accidents and food poisoning incidents since late last year.

The circular said that students' commutes should be within 40 minutes.

New AIDS Treatment

A drug typically used to treat AIDS-triggered lung infections may be able to prevent the reproduction of HIV and possibly provide a new method for the control and elimination of the virus, Chinese scientists said on July 19.

A research team led by Shen Binghui, a life science professor at Zhejiang University in east China's Zhejiang Province, found that a drug containing pentamidine can cut the life cycle of HIV and prevent the reproduction of the virus that causes AIDS.

HIV has an incubation period of 10 years on average, during which the virus infects immune cells and uses the cells and proteins to reproduce and spread, gradually damaging the immune system. Symptoms appear in the form of AIDS when the body loses its ability to fight the virus and other diseases that would ordinarily be eliminated by a healthy immune system.

Research indicates that a kind of human protein called FEN-1 has a decisive function in the reproductive process of HIV.

Shen said that his team found that the drug can effectively prevent the reproduction of HIV by destroying the protein. The virus can no longer cause any damage to the immune system once it cannot reproduce, and a small amount of HIV can even be eliminated by a healthy immune system.

Sci-fi Saga in English

The Three Body trilogy, one of the most popular Chinese-language science fiction series, will be published in English soon, a publishing company said on July 20.

The Chinese edition of the three-part saga by award-winning Liu Cixin has sold 400,000 copies, according to China Educational Publications Import and Export Corp. Ltd., which will cooperate with Science Fiction World magazine to release the English version.

The trilogy depicts the human race's centuries-long contacts and conflicts with an alien civilization hailing from a three-star system. Its finale, Dead End, came out in 2010.

The novel will be available to Western readers both in paper and digital versions, according to the company.