Thank goodness THAT is over with...for reasons that I shall not go into!

China will establish a breeding base for giant pandas in northwest China's Shaanxi Province in a another effort to save the highly endangered species from extinction.

The base will be located at the Shaanxi Salvage and Breeding Research Center for Endangered Wild Animals in Zhouzhi county on the northern side of the Qinling Mountains, said Wang Wanyun, an official with the Shaanxi Provincial forestry Department.

Over the past two years, the center has artifically bred three giant pandas and participated in more than 20 panda rescue missions in the wild.

Wang said that the base will contribute more to the research and breeding of giant pandas as well as to their training before their release in the wild.

Giant pandas are notoriously unproductive. There are only about 1,500 of the much-loved black and white creatures left in the wild in China's Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, and the giant pandas living in the Qinling have been separated geographically for 50,000 years from those in Sichuan, experts said.

"The giant pandas in Qinling is a more endangered sub-species of giant pandas," the official said.

A recent survey indicated that the number of giant pandas roaming in the wild of Shaanxi has reached 340 thanks to effective protection measures.

SHANGHAI/BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- New Chinese regulations governing Internet news content tighten the noose on freewheeling bloggers and aim to rein in the medium that is a growing source of information for the mainland's more than 100 million users.

Analysts say the rules issued by the Ministry of Information Industry on Sunday will not change much for authorized, licensed news outlets -- already under the thumb of state control -- but will extend controls to blogs and Internet-only news sites.

"For current media outlets, this is nothing more than a restating of the rules," said David Wolf, who heads Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based media and technology consultancy.

"This is aimed at bloggers and other individual and ad hoc journalists that are out there and that don't have a licensed organization."

The regulations target sites that publish fabricated information or pornography and forbid content that "harms national security, reveals state secrets, subverts political power (and) undermines national unity."

They also ban posts that "instigate illegal gatherings, formation of associations, marches, demonstrations, or disturb social order," indicating a lesson learned from anti-Japanese protests that swept China last April and which spread in part due to postings on Internet bulletin boards and chat rooms.

China routinely blocks access to Internet sites on sensitive subjects such as self-ruled Taiwan, which China regards as its own, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations which were crushed by the military with heavy loss of life.

Providers of online news and other services, from domestic players Sina Corp. and Sohu.com to international firms such as Yahoo Inc., also practice forms of self-censorship by blocking sites and prohibiting message posting on sensitive topics.

But the new regulations would curtail discussion on a wider variety of subjects, analysts said.

"Much more relevant is current affairs, social and political news. You don't necessarily have to touch taboo areas," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley.

The rules also widen a campaign to step up control over the Internet that includes forcing bloggers and chat-room participants to use their real names and restricting university on-line discussion groups to students.

"Online is a new form of media. It's grown rapidly in the last five to 10 years, whereas print and broadcasting are easier to regulate," said Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia.

China has directed another campaign at foreign media, which were taking advantage of newly relaxed laws to set up de facto television channels and production houses.

In that crackdown, China's broadcasting regulator banned the entry of new foreign-invested TV channels into the market and limited foreign media companies to one joint venture apiece in the TV program-making sector.

Analysts said the next few months should see an extension of regulations to mobile phone media, such as text messages, and a few public examples intended to create a climate of self-censorship on the Internet.

But despite the long reach of the state, some said regulating Internet content might prove impossible.

"Those kind of regulations can intimidate and control some sites, but it's just fundamentally against the way information flows on the Internet," Xiao said.

"In the long run, they are still fighting a losing battle."

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- China announced plans Sunday to launch its second manned space mission on Oct. 13 and return five days later.

The launch of Shenzhou 6 is scheduled for 11 a.m. at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Base, in the Gobi desert in northern China, the state-run China News Service reported on Sunday.

The military-backed space program is a major prestige project for the communist government. China hopes to land an unmanned probe on the moon by 2010 and operate a space station.

China’s first manned space flight in October 2003 made it the third country able to launch a human into space on its own, after Russia and the United States.

Col. Yang Liwei, a former fighter pilot, orbited the Earth for 21 1/2 hours aboard the Shenzhou 5 capsule before landing in China’s northern grasslands.

BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- The strongest storm to hit China's southern resort island of Hainan in decades ploughed along its coast on Monday after killing two people and forcing more than 170,000 from their homes.

Typhoon Damrey had caused casualties, flattened houses and damaged crops on an island often referred to as China's Hawaii since it made landfall on Sunday, but the full extent of the destruction was unknown, a disaster relief official said.

"The primary threat now is strong winds, but judging from our experience in recent years, river floods are also possible if the heavy rains continue," he told Reuters by telephone.

He said more than 170,000 people had been evacuated to safety. There was no immediate word of damage to hotels.

Two people were killed in Wanning, the coastal city where the typhoon made landfall on Sunday, when their houses collapsed, Xinhua news agency said.

Some 5,000 people were left stranded at the airport in the coastal city and provincial capital of Haikou after dozens of flights were cancelled.

A Haikou official said power was cut to parts of the city as well as other areas of Hainan. She did not elaborate.

The storm packed winds of up to 200 km (125 miles) per hour, Xinhua news agency said, and state television showed banana trees snapped in two. Experts warned rice and rubber crops could sustain major damage.

"We hope the storm will be over after dinner tonight and the guests can leave then," said Melody Xu, public relations manager for the Sheraton Hotel in the beach resort of Sanya, where some tourists have been stuck in their hotels.

In nearby Guangdong province, 16,000 people were evacuated in Zhanjiang city, state television said, and a fisherman has been reported missing after three boats capsized in choppy seas.

"The typhoon, with the wind speed of 55 meters per second at the center, dwarfs all those that have hit Hainan since 1960," apart from a storm that struck the province on Sept. 13, 1973, it quoted Cai Qinbo, deputy director of the Hainan Provincial Meteorological Station, as saying.

The west-moving typhoon swept down the island's southeastern coast and was headed for Vietnam, where state forecasters have warned the storm is expected to dump heavy rains on more than 10 northern and central provinces.

"Be on alert for inundations in low-lying areas, flash floods and landslides in mountainous areas," the bulletin said.

The typhoon should miss the Central Highlands coffee belt, which lies further to the south. Vietnam is the world's second-biggest coffee producer after Brazil.

The Defense Ministry-run Quan Doi Nhan Dan newspaper said helicopters had been scrambled to tell more than 19,000 fishermen to return to port while soldiers were dispatched to reinforce dykes and help evacuate several hundred people.

Typhoons, known as hurricanes in the West, gather strength from warm sea water and tend to dissipate after making landfall.

They frequently hit Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and southern China during a season that lasts from early summer to late autumn.