October 16, 1982

Work on hotel starts

Five hundred people attended a ceremony marking the start of construction work on the Kunlun Hotel in Beijing yesterday.

The new hotel is being constructed on the other side of the Liangma River in the eastern outskirts. It is expected to open in about 1985.

It will have a rotunda restaurant, and a large meeting hall, an indoor garden, a swimmig pool, a gymnasium, shops and a car park.

The design is in accordance with traditional Chinese style, but the hotel will be equipped with automatic telephone-exchange facilities and automatic fire alarm and extinguishing systems.

Financed by Hongkong's Sin Gang Company, construction will be carried out by Beijing's Xinhua Enterprising General Corporation.

High traffic toll

Traffic accidents in Guangdong Province so far this year average 25 a day with deaths and injuries totaling 17, Yangcheng Evening News reported.

The main causes are speeding, careless drivers and driving without a license. A bus overturned causing the deaths of five people, and injuring six others, was just one of the accidents that occurred in a county in early October due to speeding.

Successful seminar

A field operational seminar on adult education and literacy sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Asian and Pacific Regional Office closed in Beijing on Thursday after 11 days of field investigations and discussions.

Summing-up, Dr Filemon Salas, on behalf of the participants, expressed satisfaction at the work accomplished. He said that such sharing of experiences should be continued in the future.

Dr Salas said that all countries in the Asian and Pacific region had started literacy programmes and some countries, including China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, had achieved more than 75 percent literacy.

Other countries, however, were still below the 50 percent literacy level. These included Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Paskistan. However, he said, all countries were aware of their problems.

(China Daily 10/19/2007 page11)