Shanghai's mayor won a second five-year term yesterday, cementing his political survival after a wide-ranging corruption scandal brought down the city's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) boss.
Han Zheng (韓正), 57, was reappointed at the annual meeting of the municipal legislature, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Xinhua gave no details. Han's new term will run through Shanghai's staging of the 2010 World Expo, an opportunity for international exposure that the city hopes will rival Beijing's hosting of this year's Summer Olympic Games.
Han, first appointed mayor in 2003, pledged last week to repair the city's "negative image," a reference to the scandal that toppled Chen Liangyu (陳良宇), the city's most powerful official, in September 2006, as well as other top city officials and businessmen.
The mayor was never implicated in the investigation into misuse of city social security funds.
However, he was seen as tainted by his long association with Chen and likely owes his survival at least in part to the CCP's desire to maintain stability and investor confidence in China's biggest and wealthiest city.
While Shanghai has firmly established itself as China's financial center, it is struggling to modernize while contending with traffic snarls and a rising population of migrants from elsewhere in the country.
Most recently, hundreds of residents held unusually bold protests against a proposed extension of the city's showcase magnetic levitation train line.
Authorities have not yet indicated whether the multibillion-dollar project will still go ahead, but Han pledged last week to forestall protests by resolving tensions over construction projects and other issues.
He made no direct mention of the train or the recent protests.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS