Six Chinese companies have been fined US$26 million for discharging tens of thousands of tonnes of waste chemicals into rivers, state media said, the biggest such penalty ever in China.
The firms in Taizhou in eastern Jiangsu Province were sued by a local environmental protection organization and found to have dumped 25,000 tonnes of waste hydrochloric acid into two rivers, Xinhua news agency reported.
A court in the city ordered the companies to pay 160 million yuan (US$26 million) in fines last year — the highest-ever penalty in Chinese environmental public interest litigation — and a higher court upheld the punishment on Tuesday, it said.
Photo: AFP
In August, 14 people involved in the case were sentenced by another court to prison terms of two to five years for causing environmental pollution, it added.
The previous heaviest penalty for polluting the environment was a fine of 37.14 million yuan meted out to three defendants in neighboring Shandong Province, also for contaminating rivers, according to an earlier report by the Southern Weekly newspaper.
Three decades of rapid and unfettered industrial expansion have taken a heavy toll on the country’s environment and Chinese Communist Party leaders have been concerned by an increasing number of angry protests over the issue.
Recent studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of China’s soil is estimated to be polluted and that 60 percent of underground water is too contaminated to drink.
Meanwhile, residents of big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are regularly confronted with hazardous smog levels.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) announced in March that the country was “declaring war” against pollution, and a series of measures have been announced, but questions remain over enforcement.
China in April amended its environmental protection law — the first such move in 25 years — imposing tougher penalties and pledging that violators will be “named and shamed.”
Yet holding polluters legally accountable has proved difficult in a country where local governments are often focused on driving growth.
Amid the push to crack down on pollution, China’s environmental regulators nearly doubled the number of cases they referred to police involving suspected polluters over the first three-quarters of last year compared with all of 2013, state media reported last month.
Xinhua said environmental agencies also penalized about 190,000 enterprises for violating environmental laws over the past two years.
In total, Xinhua said Chinese authorities have investigated and handed down punishments in 103,707 cases over the past two years. They issued about US$633 million in fines during that period.
Xinhua said environment regulators transferred 1,232 cases involving suspected environmental crimes to police over the first three-quarters of last year, compared with 706 all of 2013.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not