Cabbie held in serial rape, murder case

Police in Baicheng, Jilin province, have arrested a taxi driver suspected of raping and killing at least seven women in a serial murder case that has horrified locals.

Da Li was arrested in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, after a nationwide manhunt and brought back to Baicheng on Monday to stand trial for the crimes. All the victims were found to have gone missing near a rail station. They were raped, murdered and robbed before their remains were burnt.

Police broke the case after a woman who disappeared two weeks ago sent a short message to her mother in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region with the license plate of the taxi she was riding in. When the woman failed to return home, the mother reported the car number to local police.

(news.sohu.com)

Schoolbags cause minor scare at art gallery

A passerby was suspicious of the schoolbags two students had left inside an art gallery in Beijing last Monday so he called police.

Police hurried to the spot but found they contained nothing dangerous.

As they started questioning people about the bags, two 10-year-old girls showed up to claim them, explaining that they had just left them for a little while they perused the works.

(Beijing Times)

Wild swans start their family at Summer Palace

Four eggs laid by a couple of wild black swans, a highly protected species, in Beijing's Yuanmingyuan, or the old Summer Palace, hatched last Monday.

The swans, the first seen in the area in recent years, went to a remote corner of the park two months ago and settled in.

After finding that they had laid four eggs, park authorities erected a fence around them to ward off intruders. They also left food for the birds.

(Beijing Legal Times)

Spurned lover spends her days wandering the streets

Zhang Gufang, a middle-age woman from Yunnan province, has been living a vagrant's life on the streets of Changchun, capital of Jilin province, while searching for the boyfriend who left her about a year ago.

After using up all the money she had, she started calling police whenever she needs food and for free rides to the hospital when ill.

In fact, she has only been able to continue her search by taking advantage of the city's resources.

"Over the past year, she has shown up at our hospital whenever she feels sick and then leaves when she feels better without saying goodbye," a doctor said on Thursday last week.

(East Asia Economy and Trade News)

Jewelry cleaner fleeces customers 1 gram at a time

A man who makes his living cleaning gold necklaces at a jewelry shop in Ordos, in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, was taken into custody on Friday for stripping the precious metal off his customers' jewelry.

Instead of using diluted hydrochloric acid to clean the jewelry, the man, surnamed Wu, soaked his customers' necklaces in aqua fortis, allowing him to strip the gold off.

Police were alerted to the scheme after a customer noticed that the 78-gram gold necklace he had taken in to be cleaned came back 16 grams lighter.

(news.sohu.com)

(China Daily 05/09/2008 page5)