The new seven wonders of the world were named Saturday following an online vote that generated server-crushing traffic in its final hours.

The final tally produced this list of the world’s top human-built wonders:

• The Great Wall of China

• Petra in Jordan

• Brazil’s statue of Christ the Redeemer

• Peru’s Machu Picchu

• Mexico’s Chichen Itza pyramid

• The Colosseum in Rome

• India’s Taj Mahal

Before the vote ended Friday, organizers said more than 90 million votes had been cast for 21 sites.

Voting at the Web site, http://www.new7wonders.com, ended at 6 p.m. ET Friday. Traffic was so heavy Friday that the site was crashing at times.

One message urged voters to use text messages as an alternative form of voting. “Keep on voting, as it is your votes that decide the New 7 Wonders of the World,” the message said.

“We have traffic that is simply off the scale,” Tia Vering, spokeswoman for the “New 7 Wonders of the World” campaign, told CNN.com. “Things are just going ballistic.”

The new wonders were announced at a star-studded event Saturday in Lisbon, Portugal, that featured performances by Jennifer Lopez and Chaka Khan. The event was hosted by Oscar winners Hilary Swank and Ben Kingsley as well as Bollywood star Bipasha Basu. Send CNN.com photos and video of your favorite “wonder”

The top contenders for the seven wonders were last made public in early June.

The oldest candidate was Britain’s Stonehenge; the newest was Australia’s Sydney Opera House. The U.S. Statue of Liberty also was among the choices.

Voting nearly doubled after the June results, when organizers said about 50 million votes had been cast. A single user can cast multiple votes.

To be considered for the competition, all structures had to be built or discovered before 2000. All are among top tourist attractions around the world.

Of the seven ancient wonders of the world, only one remains standing today, the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

Some nations have enthusiastically endorsed the new wonders campaign. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Jordan’s Queen Rania actively promoted their countries’ hopefuls.

But the new wonders campaign hasn’t been universally recognized. The United Nations’ cultural organization, UNESCO, issued a statement saying it has “no link whatsoever” to the vote.

Egypt’s top antiquities expert also objected to the list. He said Egypt’s pyramids are a “symbol of the genius of the ancient people”—and are above any sort of online poll.

As a result, the organizers struck up a compromise. The pyramids have been assured honorary status, in addition to the new seven wonders.

The new wonders project was the brainchild of Swiss businessman Bernard Weber. He said he wanted to invite the people of the world to take part in selecting the world’s greatest wonders.

“So that everybody can decide what the new seven wonders should be and not some government, not some individuals, not some institutions,” he said.

Vering said she believes the vote has accomplished that goal.

“We’ve managed to bring culture out of the museum—out of the dusty, dry academic corners—and have people talk about it,” she said. “That, we feel, is the greatest achievement of this campaign.”

BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese archaeologists have discovered a section of the Great Wall straddling the Mongolian border that is the northernmost remnant of the landmark yet found, state media reported Wednesday.

The remnants of the wall, found in the Bayannur district of China’s Inner Mongolia region, measures 2.3 metres (7.5 feet) wide and about 1.15 metres high, the Beijing News reported.

Built 2,100 years ago during the Han dynasty, the section also would likely be one of the oldest sections of the wall, which was begun in the reign of the emperor Qin Shi Huang, which began in 221 B.C.

The wall, constructed of stones, was found by a joint team headed by the People’s University’s School of History, the paper said. No other details were provided.

Built and rebuilt over the centuries, the Great Wall was intended as a defence against northern barbarians.

Less than 2,500 kilometres (1,600 miles) remain of the original 6,300-kilometre structure, one of China’s top tourist attractions and a World Heritage Site.

A couple of parents in Sichuan Province sent their college undergraduate son to a construction site to do manual labor during this winter vacation in an attempt to let the young man know “what hardship is”.

The boy, Wang Li by name, has toiled at the work site for two weeks, using a shovel to load sand into wagons and carrying mortar with a shoulder pole. The strenuous labor has led to aching arms, shoulders and waist and blistered hands. And he ate coarse meals like the migrant workers from the countryside.

Wang wrote in his blog that the experience has given him a taste of drudgery and helped him develop confidence in his capabilities. “Since I could endure such heavy work, I will be able to meet more challenges in the future,” the young man said.

Wang’s parents are not alone. Many parents in cities are sending their children to manual labor sites, martial art schools or military camps to toughen their wills and help them develop a sense of discipline, according to media reports.

The news is gratifying. While most families pamper their kids excessively, these far-sighted parents have realized the importance of something neglected by Chinese parents for years.

In the past few decades, Chinese parents were probably the most indulgent toward their children among all the world’s parents. The greatly improved living standards, the memory of their own impoverished childhoods and the country’s one-child policy caused parents to indulge their kids.

As a result, children were spoiled to different extents. Though no authoritative statistics are available, the general impression is that today’s children, including those who have reached their 20s, are mostly self-centered. They are accustomed to being served by their parents (and grandparents) and never do household chores.

To make things worse, parents place high hopes on their children’s academic education and force them to concentrate on school learning. While making every aspect of life comfortable for the kids, they cram every minute of the kids’ out-of-school time with extracurricula exercises and skills ranging from calligraphy and painting to piano lessons and weiqi (go) competition.

With the joint impacts of material comfort and study pressure, children tended to yearn for hedonistic enjoyment and shun hardship.

Children who have grown up under these circumstances are vulnerable to grim social realities after leaving the warmth of their parents’ caring wings. Nowadays, college graduates complain about the difficulty of finding jobs. In fact, the problem is not the shortage of jobs but their concepts of work. They mostly eye office jobs in major cities. Few of them would take a job in underdeveloped areas, where business opportunities abound.

It should be admitted that college graduates in the past few decades were luckier than their contemporary peers. Those were the golden years when China’s major cities developed rapidly generating abundant employment opportunities.

Now it is unrealistic to dream about squeezing into such cities as Beijing and Shanghai. Frankly, white collar labor markets in these areas are almost saturated. Today’s young people should have the courage to go to less developed areas to pursue careers. They will face difficulties and hardships, but if they are mentally and physically prepared, they will succeed. They have no alternative.

That is why people like Wang Li’s parents are far-sighted.

A well-educated retired couple in Wuhan want to adopt a daughter.

Nothing wrong with that, except that they want a grown-up and well-educated woman and their criteria are as tough as those, as many people say, for the “Super Girls” competition.

It’s not that former Ministry of Construction expert Tian Zhendong and wife Ding Shuhui, a retired professor, don’t have an offspring.

In fact, their son is a computer science major who joined IBM’s Chinese branch after graduation. He is married to a woman who is highly educated, too. She is a dentist. But the two emigrated to Canada in 2000.

The elderly couple want their adopted daughter to be between 25 and 40, with a college or higher degree, but without living parents. She should be cheerful, kind-hearted, caring and unmarried. And she has to be living in the capital of Hubei Province.

But there’s more than something for the adopted daughter, too, in the bargain. The couple have vowed to leave their 96-square-meter apartment to her after “living happily” with her for three years. Such a house in Wuhan is worth 400,000 yuan ($51,282).

Till date, 103 women have attended the selection process, and the couple have shortlisted five of them.

“My son was 30 years old when he emigrated to Canada. Initially, I didn’t want him to leave China,” Ding told Wuhan Morning Post recently.

“But then my husband and I thought that as parents we should not be selfish, instead we should support him to develop his career abroad.”

But after he left, Ding began feeling lonely, especially when her husband was invited to deliver lecturers in other cities.

Her decision to let her son shift to Canada was not right after all, she thought. To overcome their loneliness, Ding and Tian talk to their son and daughter-in-law for up to two hours at times on the weekends.

But even that cannot fill the void left behind by their son and daughter-in-law. For six years, they have suffered their loneliness. And during one such moment they decided to adopt a daughter with the help of the local media.

Some people have alleged that the couple have used their apartment as a bait to get a daughter, and the women who want to become that have bitten it. But the couple deny the charge, saying that most candidates have done so because they were seeking parental love.

Wuhan Senior Resident Affairs Office officials believe adopting children is a good solution for such couples. Along with the local civil affair bureau, the office is working out ways to help them.

But Wuhan has 300,000 senior citizens who lead lonely lives, and most of them are resigned to their loneliness because, unlike the Tian-Ding couple, they cannot afford or would not like to go in for adoption.

A CCTV anchorman said having a Starbucks coffee outlet in the Forbidden City makes a mockery of Chinese culture, reported the Beijing News Tuesday.

Rui Chenggang, an English news anchor with CCTV-9 concluded that the Starbucks in the Forbidden City has become a joke among western tycoons after interviews with over 300 of them, including Bill Gates.

“Do you have plans to open stores in Taj Mahal, Versailles or Buckingham Palace?” Rui asked Jim Donald, Starbucks Chairman and CEO in the 2006 Yale CEO Leadership Summit. Rui suggested Donald get the outlet out of the Forbidden City.

In Donald’s latest letter to Rui on January 14, he wrote that Starbucks has been constantly involved in heritage protection since it was invited to open a store in the Forbidden City by museum officials six years ago.

“Four dollars buys you a Starbucks drink in America, and it is not suitable to exist in upper-class places,” Rui said. He believes fast food outlets don’t fit in the Palace Museum, which is a symbol of Chinese civilization.

Rui’s proposal to remove the Starbucks outlet from the Palace Museum stirs heated debates among netizens, who bombarded Rui’s blog with 500,000 clicks within 2 days after the proposal was posted.

“The Forbidden City receives 1.6 million overseas visitors on average every year, and taking care of their food and beverage needs was a major concern when we invited Starbucks here six years ago”, Palace Museum spokesman Feng Naien told the Beijing Morning Post Tuesday.

Feng said Starbucks coffee is operating in one of the museum’s 9,999 rooms. The room covers some ten square meters and is not spacious enough to house any exhibitions.

“Negotiations between the museum and Starbucks are underway, and a solution is expected to be reached in the early half of this year,” Feng concluded.

According to local regulations on cultural relic protection, a fine of up to 500,000 yuan (US$ 64,100) can be imposed if any serious damage is sustained to Palace Museum buildings during renovation or decorating.

Covering more than 720,000 square meters, the Forbidden City houses 1.5 million relics, accounting for one-sixth of the total relics in Chinese museums.

In 2003, a KFC outlet said good-bye to its former home in Beihai Park, a group of imperial gardens located in central Beijing, after the ten-year contract ran out. Park officials believe KFC doesn’t fit in the imperial garden landscape.

By 2020, some 30 million Chinese men will find it well-nigh impossible to find a bride as a result of a rising gender imbalance, a report warned yesterday.

For every 100 baby girls born in 2005, there were 118.58 baby boys, and the gap will continue to widen, said the report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission.

In southern provinces such as Guangdong and Hainan, the picture is grimmer: There are 130 baby boys for every 100 baby girls.

Since 2005, the number of men reaching marriage age has been much more than women. “The increasing difficulties men face finding wives may lead to social instability,” said the report by more than 300 Chinese demographers after two years’ research.

This is because Chinese traditionally prefer boys, and with their financial status improved, those in the booming coastal areas can afford to find out the sex of the foetus.

The picture will be starker in the countryside than in cities, said the report.

To solve the problem, there must be a full-fledged social security system so that rural residents don’t have to depend on their sons when they get old, said Wang Guangzhou, researcher at the Institute of Population and Labour Economics affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

According to the report, China’s population will increase by 200 million in 30 years, which means the total population will hit 1.36 billion by 2010 and 1.45 billion by 2020 before peaking at 1.5 billion in 2033.

The figures are calculated on the assumption that China’s birth rate will be kept at the current 1.8 meaning one woman of childbearing age giving birth to 1.8 babies. The country must maintain the ratio if it wants to build itself into a well-off society reaching the goal of US$3,000 per capita of GDP in 30 years, said the report.

The silver lining is that “for a long time to come, China will not be short of manpower”, it said. There were 860 million Chinese of working age between 15 and 64 in 2000, and the number will reach 1.01 billion in 2016, which is “more than the total number of working age people in all the developed countries”.