LANDMARK VICTORY: In landslide-devastated Zhouqu County, Gansu Province, the last of its four bridges is put back into operation after being flushed to get rid of the sludge on September 1 as the water level fell (HUANG WENXIN)

Negotiable Wages

A senior official with the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) said in two years all trade unions nationwide will carry out collective negotiations on wages.

By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises in China should have trade unions, which would represent more than 92 percent of the nation's workers, said Wang Yupu, ACFTU Vice Chairperson.

Leaders of some grassroots organizations lack the knowledge of collective bargaining and local trade unions should be responsible for training them, he added.

About 80 percent of enterprises in China are privately run, according to Wang, who said trade unions must protect the interests of migrant workers and dispatched workers.

Real Name Phone

Mobile phone customers will now have to present IDs when purchasing a phone number in the latest government campaign to curb the global scourge of spam, pornographic messages and fraud on cellular phones. The new rule came into effect on the first of this month.

Foreigners will also need to register with their passports or other ID in order to subscribe to mobile phone carriers.

As well, street newspaper stands will temporarily stop selling SIM cards, the Beijing Evening News reported.

Subscribers who did not show ID when they registered before the new regulations came into effect are encouraged to do so, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said.

Neighborhood Settlement

Chinese legislators passed the People's Mediation Law on August 29 at the bimonthly meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.

The law establishes the people's mediation committee as the legal organization to resolve everyday disputes, and sets down the procedure for formation of such an organization within community committees.

The law stipulates that governments at county levels and above shall provide financial support for mediation work and shall honor and reward outstanding mediation committees and mediators.

The law encourages people to settle disputes at the neighborhood-level, outside of courts and arbitration.

To achieve that goal, the law streamlines the relation between mediation and other kinds of dispute resolution methods. It provides that courts and police offices should inform parties involved in disputes about the possibility of solving such disputes through mediation.

New Dinosaur

Chinese scientists have identified a new genus of dinosaur in a mountainous city in eastern Shandong Province, a type of ceratops (meaning horn face) never found before, experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said on August 28.

Ceratops were large, plant-eating dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous period that dates back more than 65 million years ago.

Fossils of the dinosaur were unearthed in January 2008 in Zhucheng City, where several Cretaceous dinosaurs have been found since the 1960s, but were identified only quite recently, said Xu Xing, a renowned Chinese dinosaur researcher.

Xu, a researcher with CAS Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, has named it "Sinoceratops Zhuchengensis."

"Its skull is at least 180 cm long and 105 cm wide," said Xu. "It has a 30-cm long horn on its face and at least 10 crooked, smaller horns on the top of its head."