Drought has affected 2.67 million hectares of farmland in China due to lack of rainfall in the country’s north and northeast, according to latest official statistics.

As of May 27, 120,000 people and 500,000 livestock faced shortage of drinking water as a result of the drought, said Chen Lei, minister of water resources, at a video conference of the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

Authorities have dispatched 15 work teams to help heavily-affected regions, said Chen, who is also deputy head of the headquarters.

About 5.5 million people have joined the fight against drought, drilling wells or working on pumping stations to irrigate over 4 million hectares of farmland, according to the minister.

He demanded priority be given to ensuring drinking water safety for rural and urban residents.

Chinese children were rehearsing one of their programs, Passion for Opera, in Beijing on May 30, for an activity named “Dreams of the Future in B&R Young Hearts -Celebrating International Children’s Day” to be held on May 31 by Beijing-based not-for-profit organization China Soong Ching Ling Foundation. [By Chen Boyuan / China.org.cn]

Children from the Belt and Road countries will celebrate the upcoming International Children’s Day in Beijing on May 31.

An activity named “Dreams of the Future in B&R Young Hearts -Celebrating International Children’s Day” will be held by Beijing-based not-for-profit organization China Soong Ching Ling Foundation.

The activity will be attended by about 650 children from 38 countries along the Belt and Road who are currently in Beijing. China-based diplomats from Belt and Road countries and representatives from international organizations such as Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Association of Southeast Asian Nations will also attend the celebration activity.

Children will participate in a series of programs on the morning of May 31, including singing, painting exhibition, robots performance and gifts exchange.

The celebration is intended to promote the consensus reached at the recently concluded Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation and facilitate people-to-people exchange among different countries.

Guangzhou’s petrol-powered buses will soon be a thing of the past. Starting this year, the southern Chinese city will begin replacing the thousands of public buses with greener, more energy-efficient vehicles.

According to the new plan, all buses that use petrol and diesel will be replaced with pure electric buses by 2020, meaning Guangzhou will have about 30,000 new energy public vehicles including buses and taxies by 2020.

To attract individual consumers of electric cars, Guangzhou also plans to lower electric vehicles prices, reduce maintenance costs and build more charging stations. More than 120,000 individual electric cars are expected to be on the streets in the city by 2020.

According to the new measures, the number of parking spaces with electric car chargers is no less than 30 percent of the total parking seats in new office buildings, shopping malls and restaurants. The city plans 100,000 charging piles by 2020.

Guangzhou is now seeking public opinions on the plan.

The latest round of air pollution inspections in China have uncovered many violations of environmental rules among companies.

Some 23 inspection teams examined 319 businesses on Sunday and discovered that 251 companies, or 79 percent of the total, violated environmental standards in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and other nearby areas.

Excessive emissions, insufficient pollution-control equipment or failure to install pollution-control equipment were among the most common problems for the inspected businesses, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said Monday in a statement.

The ministry has asked local authorities to shut down businesses or halt production at companies that failed to meet the standards.

The ministry issued punishments in nearly 5,000 cases related to violations of environmental protection regulations and laws in Q1, up around 200 percent year on year.

It’s not uncommon for parents of freshmen college students to drive their children to their new school as a way to say their last goodbyes as their children set off on their adult lives.

But one father in China is taking that ‘goodbye’ to a whole new level. Huang Haitao has managed to convince his daughter, Huang Xinyi, to allow him to drive her to her new school, in Seattle, Washington!

He says he decided to make his “crazy” decision after Xinyi was accepted at Seattle University.

While most young people might balk at the idea of spending so much time together with one of their parents in a vehicle, the experience will not be a new one for Huang Xinyi and her father.

The two have travelled over 120,000 kilometers together already in vehicles to promote the Youth Olympic Games, which took place in Nanjing in 2014.

Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu province, is also going to be the starting point for their latest journey.

Huang Haitao and his daughter say they plan to travel across 52 countries as part of a 9-month journey to finally get her into class in Seattle. They both say their main goal is to help promote Chinese culture among the countries they visit along the way.