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School bus collision injures 18 students in Zhejiang A school bus collision has left 18 high school students injured in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province on Monday, according to sources with the city education bureau. The school bus, with 18 students on board, collided with a bus at an intersection and overturned. All the students were sent to nearby hospitals with no life-threatening injuries reported. Parents had rented the school bus to take the students to school, according to authorities, and a complete investigation into the accident is under way. The Hangzhou education bureau has ordered safety checks for all school buses in the city. Statistics indicate that of the 285,000 school buses in China only 10 percent conform to a set of technical standards for school buses that the government issued last year.

Most people will do just about anything to avoid being stung by a bee. But that's exactly what patients are lining up for at the Kang Tai Bee Clinic in Beijing. The clinic uses "shen fen" or "miracle bees" to treat rheumatism, arthritis and even a common cold. Bee sting therapy has a 3000-year history in China, though the treatment itself was only legalized in the country in 2007. The key is the toxin in the bees' stinger. Doctors use tweezer to pick up live bees from the hive, placing them one by one on various pressure points all over their patients. The bees instinctively sting its enemy and dies. The stinger is then left in the body to help ease discomfort. Most patients turn to bee sting therapy when other Chinese and Western medicine has failed them. They say it works wonders, and doesn't actually hurt that much because the doctors perform a special technique on the bee that reduces the pain of the injection.

Matthew Harding has added a photo to the pool: I was shopping nearby and spotted this boy guarding an official's car.

A center for the purpose of conducting research on legal issues regarding the South China Sea was founded in south China's Hainan province on Monday. The center is the first established in China for the research on such issues, local authorities said. The center is aimed at promoting the country's strategy of development in the South China Sea and help construct a legal system for this region, and it will act as a think tank for resolving relevant maritime issues, according to Liu Kangde, secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) Committee of Hainan University. The center is co-founded by Hainan University and the Hainan Federation of Social Science Circles. Liu said the center will carry out researches on areas related to the South China Sea such as marine economics, petroleum and gas exploration, tourism development and marine environmental protection.

Three workers were killed and three others injured after an elevator plunged to the ground at a construction site in east Jiangxi province Monday, local authorities said. The accident took place at about 9 a.m. at the construction site of a real estate project in Gao'an City, when the rope tying the elevator suddenly broke, and elevator with six workers aboard fell from a high position to the ground, a spokesman with the city government said. One worker was killed instantly, and two others died in hospital, the spokesman said. The three others remain hospitalized, he said. An investigation into the cause of the accident is under way, he added.

China is striving to improve access to higher education for disabled people by forbidding examination authorities from excluding people from national level exams due to their physical or mental disabilities, according to a draft law prepared by the top education authority. The amendment to the Regulations on the Education of Persons with Disabilities also requires that due assistance be provided to enable disabled people to take exams, such as providing exam papers in braille for the blind, said Wang Daquan, deputy director of the legislative affairs office under the policy and legal affairs department of the Ministry of Education. The move came after the story of a visually impaired woman's fight to take a self-study exam in order to be enrolled in a university was widely reported. In late October, Dong Lina, 27, wrote a complaint to the Beijing municipal commission of education after the local examination authority twice rejected her application to take a self-study exam. The sel...

Nine people were killed after a gas explosion occurred at a coal mine in Binzhou City of central China's Hunan Province Sunday morning, said rescuers. The rescue work has stopped as rescuers were told that there were altogether nine people working under the pit owned by Sandu Township, when the accident happened at 8 a.m. The mine with an annual production capacity of 60,000 tonnes is under a technological renovation construction. The cause of the accident is still under investigation.