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SHANGHAI: A revised rule that forces shipping companies to shoulder the cost of cleaning up pollution from maritime accidents, such as oil spills, in China's waters, is likely to take effect next year, if not sooner, a senior official with China Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) said Wednesday.If the revised regulation is approved by the State Council, companies such as Sinopec, PetroChina and the China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) will be required to contribute to a special compensation and clean-up fund, Liu Gongcheng, executive director of China MSA, said.Liu told a press conference prior to the 2007 Shanghai International Maritime Forum, which kicked off Wednesday, the fund will boost the country's emergency response capabilities to maritime pollution disasters.The official declined to say how big the fund could be.The rules also include a scheme asking all ships using its seawaters to purchase insurance.Liu said the mechanism, already in the pipeline for two years, is one of China MSA's measures to handle possible oil spill pollution, as the ocean environment faces greater pressure with increased shipping traffic, including oil cargo ships to and from China's coast.Figures showed more than 90 percent of China's oil imports - 145 million tons last year - is transported by sea. Some 163,000 tankers of all sizes sailed into and out of China's ports last year, an average of 446 every day."The size of oil tankers is also getting bigger, up to 300,000 tons, which has added to the risk," Liu said. "If only 1 percent of the oil is spilled, we will be confronted with a catastrophe."Oil spills can wreak havoc on sea life, fishing and tourism. They cost millions of yuan to clean up and even more in compensation and damages, he said.The oil spill from the tanker Prestige, which sank off Spain in November 2002, leaked 77,000 tons of oil that caused several billion dollars worth of damage.In the past year, there have been several oil spills in domestic seawaters that involved 500 to 600 tons of oil, but didn't cause serious pollution due to emergency response, Liu said.Losses caused by ships using international waters can be covered by insurance in accordance with international conventions.However China urgently needs a mechanism to cover the costs many small- and medium-sized ship owners cannot afford."It is not fair to let the clean-up companies shoulder the cost, so the compensation fund can be especially useful in that situation," he said.The administration is continuing to invest in facilities and enhance China's emergency response capabilities.

Authorities were unable to accurately predict the recent weather conditions due to lack of equipment and an adequate forecast model, the national meteorological agency has said."We underestimated the duration and severity of the weather and failed to pre-evaluate its impact on transport and the power sector," China Meteorological Administration (CMA) spokeswoman Jiao Meiyan said.The CMA had forecast all five rain and snowstorms between Jan 10 and Feb 5 two to five days in advance. But it failed to alert the public to the extreme danger of the storms."One reason why the weather department could not make precise forecasts is because many of the places most affected were located in mountainous areas where meteorological monitors are in short supply," Duan Yihong, deputy director of the National Meteorological Center, said."Another major problem is that China's numerical weather forecasts still fall far behind world standards."Numerical weather forecasts, based on calculations by high-performance computers, are a core part of modern weather bulletins. China began to develop its own numerical forecast model less than a decade ago.There is a 10-year gap between the Chinese model and advanced foreign models, Duan said.The extreme weather also made it a huge challenge for Chinese meteorologists."It was increasingly difficult to forecast as low-probability extreme weather is occurring more frequently," Qiao Lin, chief weather forecaster of the Central Meteorological Station, said.To enhance the country's defense against extreme weather, China will begin to establish a monitoring and warning system, Jiao said.

CHENGDU: Thick fog continued to blanket parts of western and central China Sunday, causing traffic accidents, flight delays and highway closures.Plunging visibility from the bad weather delayed more than 150 flights and left 12,000 passengers stranded Sunday in the Shuangliu International Airport in this capital of Sichuan Province, airport officials said.The airport was closed for nearly nine hours Sunday morning before a flight to Tibet took place at 11:10 am."Full operations did not return to normal until more than an hour later when the first flight from Shenzhen in Guangdong Province landed here," airport publicity department official Liu Gang told China Daily."It was the second day visibility in the airport had been at about 10m."On Saturday morning, a heavy fog fell on Chengdu, shrouding its downtown areas and six suburban counties with a visibility of under 50m.The airport itself was closed for eight hours that day, with 121 flights delayed and 11,000 passengers stranded.Sichuan weather bureau deputy chief Zhong Xiaoping said environmental pollution was a major cause of the fog.Zhong advised citizens to take buses more often, save energy, cut car exhaust, and play a part in the recycling of waste materials.More than 10,000 vehicles were stranded from the fog on highways Sunday, about 4,000 more than the day before, the Chengdu Transportation Bureau said. It advised residents to take trains in the next few days.He Ping, a 49-year-old company employee, drove from Deyang in northern Sichuan to Chengdu through the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway Sunday afternoon."I've driven for nearly 20 years and have never seen such heavy fog before. I could not even see the line separating the fast lane from the slow one," He told China Daily.Meanwhile, heavy fog also persisted in Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi provinces for consecutive days. The poor visibility forced highways to close and delayed flights Sunday.The Xi'an-Baoji Expressway in Shaanxi Province was closed on Saturday as visibility in some sections was less than 2m.Meteorologists also attributed the fog to a combination of high humidity, lower temperatures and low wind speeds in the affected regions.Xinhua contributed to the story

FUZHOU - Seven people are missing after a fishing vessel collided with a cargo ship in the sea near Keelung Islet, Taiwan, in the early hours of Saturday, said an official with the Taiwan Affairs Office of East China's Fujian Province.A cargo ship, registered in Singapore, collided with a fishing boat, which was carrying 71 people - two from Taiwan and 69 from the mainland, said the official.All the fishermen plunged into the sea but 64 people were later rescued. The seven missing people were confirmed to be residents on the mainland.The rescue operation is ongoing.

A brand-new labor contract law comes into force from the New Year's Day that is expected to markedly propel rights for billions of Chinese workers."The government that is making the most concerted effort to protect workers rights is China," said Auret van Heerden, Geneva-based head of Fair Labor Association, which monitors work conditions in 60 countries.That "goes against the conventional wisdom that China is leading the race to the bottom," the Bloomberg News quoted Heerden as saying on Tuesday.The Labor Contract Law aims to improve job security for workers, making open-ended terms of employment for those employees who have completed two fixed terms with the same employer. The legislation limits overtime, sets minimum wages and guarantees one month's pay for each year worked for sacked employees. It is the first time that China's top legislature, the National People's Congress Standing Committee, has ruled on open-ended work contracts and severance pay for fired workers.The new law will make it more difficult for companies to hire temporary workers, a practice favored by exporters to cope with fluctuations in orders.One side-effect of the legislation will be higher labor costs for all employers in China. It is estimated that some labor-intensive businesses will have to raise their selling prices, or move to other places with lower cost.Olympus Corp., the world's No.4 digital camera maker, and Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Ltd., the biggest maker of shoes for brands such as Nike Inc., are among companies shifting some production to Vietnam to cut costs.According to Chinese press reports, some companies have been terminating contracts and asking employees to resign ahead of the introduction of the law.Huawei Technologies Co., China's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, offered 7,000 workers new contracts with benefits if they terminated their old agreements, spokesman Ross Gan said.Some employees accepted, while others chose not to sign and left, he said, without providing details. The move wasn't aimed at evading legislation, Gan said in an email to the Bloomberg News.