The local business community celebrated Australia Day last weekend in Shanghai - a little past the official Jan 26 holiday but with full vigor at Le Meridien's She Shan resort hotel. AustCham Shanghai president David Keir says the turnout of about 250 was five times the crowd size last year for the chamber's annual barbecue.

Joining him at the head table were Consul General Alice Cawte and her husband, Richard Dale, who arrived in the city in October, and Qantas Airways new GM for China, Andrew Hogg.

Australia's consul general in Shanghai, Alice Cawte, welcomes local Aussies to an annual barbecue. Mike Peters / China Daily

Foul weather prevented a planned cricket match in the park outside, but an impromptu hallway game started outside the hotel ballroom after dinner with a tennis ball - for kids of all ages.

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UK Ambassador Sebastian Wood visited the Shunyi Chinese Paralympian Training Center on Valentine's Day, meeting many athletes in suburban Beijing at a ceremony "to mark 200 days to go to the London Paralympics."

At the biggest Chinese Paralympian training camp, Wood visited members of the country's swimming, blind women's croquet and wheelchair boccia teams, promising a warm welcome in London. After watching their training, the ambassador was invited to put on an eye mask to simulate the experience of a blind athlete.

Wood said Britain plans to host the most accessible Olympic and Paralympic Games ever. Hosting the Paralympics in 2012 will be a particularly special moment for the UK, he said, as the country that founded the Paralympic movement in 1948 and put disability sport on the map.

Wood was accompanied by Jia Yong, the executive vice-chairman of China's Paralympic Committee.

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German professor of mathematics Andreas Dress was presented with an award for international cooperation in science and research at the capital's Great Hall of the People on Feb 14. Accompanied by German Ambassador to China Michael Schaefer, Dress was honored for significant contributions from foreign individuals or organizations to China's development in science and technology. In 2005, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Society officially established a "Partner Institute for Computational and Theoretical Biology" in Shanghai, with Dress as the MPS founding director.

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As part of a "Diplomats lecture" on Chinese investment in Germany and Europe, the German embassy's Hendrik Lucht Meier last week outlined the mutual benefits of a greater Chinese engagement in Germany.

"Just a few days ago, you could read in the newspapers about the Chinese company Sany taking over the German well-established company Putzmeister, which has 3,000 employees," he said. "With this acquisition, Sany strengthened its position as the biggest producer of concrete pumps worldwide."

He said his example shows Chinese companies are discovering Germany as a location for strategic investment, noting that Chancellor Angela Merkel recently called Chinese investment "highly welcome".

While German companies have been investing around 21 billion euros until today (re-invested profits not included), he said, Chinese investment in Germany is still less than 1 billion euros. There are around 5,500 German companies producing in China, but only around 800 - mostly small - Chinese companies in the German market. He said there has never been any kind of rejection of a Chinese investment by the German government, but noted that for Chinese companies, Germany sometimes is not an easy market.

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Danish Minister for Trade and Investment Pia Olsen Dyhr, who will travel to China later this month, was in Copenhagen on Monday to salute a new Danish-Chinese research partnership.

BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, has opened its first European Genome Research Centre in the Danish capital Chinese and Danish researchers at the center are eager to gain insight into human genomes and one day be able to prevent and cure diseases like cancer.

BGI chairman Huanming Yang thanked the Danish government and the scientific partners in Denmark for longtime commitment to the company's research.

Send embassy news to michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.