China finds new lost relics of Old Summer Palace in U.S.

CHENGDU, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese experts have found some previously unknown lost relics belonging to Yuanmingyuan, or the Old Summer Palace, in the United States, palace sources have said.

Chen Mingjie, director of the palace's management office, said at a press conference on Monday that the findings included a painting from the Song dynasty (960-1279).

"We discovered the Old Summer Palace's seal in the painting, and that was how we knew where the painting comes from," Chen said.

Yuanmingyuan management launched in October last year the search for lost Yuanmingyuan relics and decided to send research teams around the world to find and catalogue artifacts of Yuanmingyuan. Thomas sabo charms The project involves teams of experts traveling to museums, libraries, and private collections in countries such as the United States, Britain, France and Japan.

The search team departed for the United States on Nov. 29 last year, and spent 18 days in nine museums in the country's cities such as Washington D.C, New York and Boston, referring to large quantity of documents concerning the history and relics of Yuanmingyuan.

Chen said the searching team had also found many other artware including snuff bottles, seals, pots and other similar items, evidently from royal families of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and very possibly belonged to the Old Summer Palace.

The team also found hundreds of old pictures of the Old Summer Palace, other imperial gardens of the Qing Dynasty and many valued historical documents.

"The mission has been a success, actually more successful than we had expected," Chen said.

The goal was to identify and document what relics were looted from the palace, Chen said.

Numerous of relics went missing or were stolen from Yuanmingyuan when the palace was burned down by Anglo-French allied forces during the Second Opium War in 1860.

"So far the documentation of all the existing relics of Yuanmingyuan is largely incomplete," Chen said.

Chen said the results from the searches would help future research on the Old Summer Palace and would enhance international cooperation as well.

"Searching for Yuanmingyuan relics in the U.S. was the first stage of the project," Chen said, "next, we'll search in Europe and Asia."

China Faw Group sets 2010 sales target at 2.3 mln units: executive

Thomas sabo charms CHANGCHUN, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- China Faw Group Corp. has set its sales target for 2010 at more than 2.3 million units, an increase of 18.3 percent from a year earlier, an executive said Sunday.

Jin Yi, Faw Group's deputy general manager, told the 2010 purchase convention that the nation's No. 2 carmaker also targets a sales revenue of 290 billion yuan (42.5 billion U.S. dollars), up 11.2 percent from 2009.

The carmaker reported strong replica breitling watches sales last year thanks to cuts in purchase tax and subsidies on small car purchases. It sold 1.95 million units last year, with a sales revenue of 260.8 billion yuan. The two figures recorded annual growth of 26.9 percent and 23.4 percent, respectively.

The government stimulus, including subsidies on purchases of small vehicles in rural areas and of new-energy cars in pilot cities, and also old-for-new subsidies, will continue to spur sales this year, Jin said.

The SAIC Group, China's largest carmaker, has set 2010 sales target at 3 million units, up from 2.72 million links of london charms units last year, Hu Maoyuan, the company's chairman, said Saturday.

China overtook the United States as the world's largest auto market last year. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers announced on Jan. 11 that 2009 auto sales rose 46.15 percent year on year to 13.64 million units.

BEIJING - At a time when they wanted to focus on the economy, Chinese leaders face a surprise political challenge: A possible Google pullout that could anger China's public and embolden other companies to vent grievances.

Google Inc.'s threat to shut down its China-based site Google.cn over censorship and e-mail hacking alarmed an Internet-connected public that has tolerated a gap between rapid economic and technological progress and a closed, secretive political system.

"The political outcome is that it could stir up a restive group of people, which is the younger people and the Internet users in China who may look at access to information as a civil right," said James McGregor, a senior counselor for consulting firm APCO Worldwide Inc. .

That potential Internet lobby is vast. China's online population soared by nearly 30 percent last year to 384 million people, bigger than the whole U.S. population. It includes the Chinese elite of entrepreneurs and professionals who have benefited most from economic reform and usually support the ruling party.

- In Cincinnati, the Ohio River was flooding. There was an ice jam ranging from 6-to-12 feet high in the Susquehanna at Lewisburg, but there was no damage.

- The Shamokin Jobs for Men program passed the $263,000 mark with Henry Lark, of Walnut Hosiery Mills and WISL, and H. Wilson Lark, of the North Line Coal Company, giving $1,000 apiece. The Shamokin Elks Home Association had given $25,000 to the program.

- George Fisher was elected president of the Elysburg Rotary, and John Dyer was named vice president.

- At New Philadelphia in Schuylkill County, borough council blockaded the coal trucks in an effort to collect some $25,000 in delinquent taxes from coal companies.

- U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson said there would be price controls and rationing of meat before spring was over. Sirloin steak was selling for 75 cents a pound in Shamokin.

- Lazurus Beauty Salon would take a shot at stopping your falling hair for $2 a treatment.

- The church council of Shamokin and Coal Township arranged a world day of prayer program at the First Presbyterian Church, with Mrs. J.H. Keiser, the Rev. Josephine Richards and Mrs. Ivor Davies in charge.

- Texas playboy millionaire Howard Hughes was dating Rita Hayworth.

- Shamokin High beat Coal Township in basketball 38-32, creating a four-way tie in the Keystone League. On hand for the game was replica breitling watches St. Louis Cardinal great Whitey Krowski, of Reading. The infielder's brother, Walter, was the Coal Township coach.

- Northumberland County Republican Chairman Henry Lark said the GOP would endorse 12th replica tag heruer watches District Congressman Ivor Fenton for re- election. The Jobs for Men program passed $279,000 with a $2,000 contribution from Dime Deposit Bank and Trust in Kulpmont.

- The body of nurse Dorothy Berger of Shamokin was buried in Odd Fellows Cemetery. She had been killed at Port Moresby in New Guinea four years earlier. At her funeral service in Port Moresby, the bugler was Joseph Schiccitano of Shamokin. When Schiccitano blew "Taps" for the nurse in July of 1944, halfway across the world, he had no idea Berger was from Shamokin. Schiccitano blew "Taps" again as Berger came to rest at home.

- The Philadelphia Bulletin seemed to have little use for President Harry Truman. The newspaper said Truman had few of the gifts of leadership in cementing factions within his own party that Franklin D. Roosevelt had.

- Philly Perfecto cigars were $4.25 for a box of 50. The Style Shop was advertising the new reversible bra: sleek black on one side and shiny white if you turned it inside out. A radio commercial for Rinso, a soap powder, caught the national fancy. It said Thomas sabo charms Rinso white with the word "white" sounding as if it came from a scared parrot.

- T. Elmer Transeau, head of the Department of Highway Safety in Pennsylvania, said he could care less if 40 states had a law that drivers had to stop in both directions for stopped school buses. It would never work, Transeau said.

PAUL COLLINGWOOD showed he's in top form with a century for England in a warm-up match this week and is a stand-out Thomas sabo charms 5-1 to be our top run scorer in the ODI series against Bangladesh, which starts on Sunday. The England vice-captain reached three figures in just 74 balls in the victory over a Cricket Board XI.

There's no value to be had in backing England to win the first one-dayer at replica hublot watches prohibitive odds but Alastair Cook's men are a tempting 10-11 to complete a 3-0 series whitewash.

Richard Curtis's films - rose-tinted, upper-middle-class parodies of modern Britain - are bad enough, says Stephen Pollard. But his politics are even worse

There are few film-makers whose name instantly conjures up a style, an atmosphere, a set of recognisable characters, even a plot. Richard Curtis is one of them. From Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill to Love Actually and Bridget Jones's Diary, the label 'Richard Curtis' on a film tells you straightaway pretty much all you need to know.

For myself, I'd rather boil my eyeballs than spend another second of my life being sucked in to his film-making-by-numbers Disney-Britain. Curtisland might be framed as a rose-tinted, upper-middle-class paradise where the men are all Hugh Grant and the women look like Julia Roberts, Renee Zellweger and Kristin Scott-Thomas, but to me it is a dystopian nightmare worse even than A Clockwork Orange. Clearly, however, I'm not the audience for whom Mr Curtis writes his films and, annoying as I find them, it's a free country. Each to their own.

Would, however, that the man himself were as laissez-faire in his own attitudes.

Richard Curtis is not simply the writer and director of some of the most self-satisfied films ever made. He is also, far more significantly, a political agitator of the most dangerous type; a man whose agenda is all the more pernicious for being promoted using the very techniques which he has perfected in his films. He is, if you like, a Leni Riefenstahl for the soggy left - a film-maker who has learned, and relentlessly exploits, every available trick for planting his message in the minds of his audience.

It's been difficult in recent days to miss his latest work, on behalf of the 'Robin Hood Tax' scheme. 'A tiny tax on bankers that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad', is how the umbrella organisation behind the campaign described its scheme. 'By taking an average of 0.05% from speculative banking transactions, hundreds of billions of pounds would be raised every year. That's easily enough to stop cuts in crucial public services in the UK, and to help fight global poverty and climate change.'

With slogans such as: 'This is the first tax you'll be in favour of' and 'Small change for the banks, huge changes for the world', the advertisements have been designed to lead people to the website, robinhoodtax. org. uk, where they can sign a petition demanding its implementation. The campaign seems to be working: on Monday, Welsh Secretary Peter Hain gave it his backing.

The centrepiece of the effort is a short Richard Curtis film. It's a three-minute masterpiece of its kind, with his regular collaborator Bill Nighy playing a smug, patrician banker who grows ever more unsettled and obfuscatory as he is quizzed about the impact of the tax, making it obvious with every passing second that only greed and self-interest could possibly lie behind any objections to the plan. This is a familiar conceit, and one that Curtis has employed before.

Curtis's entree into political propagandising was in founding Comic Relief in 1985.

It's difficult to think of a charity that is said to have raised over 锟?00 million, and whose vision is 'a just world free from poverty', as anything other than a good thing, and some may bridle at my description of it as an organisation propagandising for a political aim. Comic Relief has clearly done much that is admirable, but the problem lies with the bigger picture - the definition of the 'just world' that Mr Curtis seeks, and how h
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