Trending across China

Chinese hotelier feared dead in France. Can liquid nitrogen drive away smog? And there's a pet pig at play in Beijing - It's all trending across China.

Chinese hotelier feared dead in copter crash

A Chinese hotel magnate and a French wine entrepreneur were feared dead with two others on Saturday after their helicopter crashed hours after they had agreed to the sale of a luxury Bordeaux chateau in France, Reuters reported.

Lam Kok, owner of Hong Kong-based hotel group Brilliant, bought the 60-hectare (148-acre) Chateau de La Riviere on Friday from former owner James Gregoire, who then took Kok, his 12-year-old son and a Chinese interpreter on a helicopter tour of the property.

The body of Kok's son was found late Friday in the wreckage of the helicopter, which crashed in the Dordogne River in Gironde, according to Xinhua.

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Chinese words 2013

The Chinese words of the year 2013 were released by the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center on Friday.

Fang (house) and zheng neng liang (positive energy) have won the character of the year and the words of the year.

Online words of the year which have made into the list include Chinese Dama (that literally means "big mama," which can be addressed to any middle-aged woman), Where are We Going, Dad (A China's reality TV program, featuring five pairs of star dads and children), and tuhao (or "nouveau riche," which has been used to describe the color of the new gold-colored iPhone 5s). (chineanews.com)

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Hepatitis B vaccine deaths

Four infant deaths were reported in Hunan, Guangdong and Sichuan provinces after inoculations using a Hepatitis B vaccine.

Chinese authorities on Friday issued a circular to ban the use of the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine produced by the Shenzhen-based BioKangtai company.

Authorities will carry out further investigations into the cases and an inspection of the company, the circular said.

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Fake bank saving passbooks

A stack of lost bank saving passbooks with a total 170 million yuan ($27.9 million) have gone viral on Internet, but much to everyone's surprise, the passbooks turned out to be all fake, as the police found the owner, who admitted that he wanted to make an impression of having a powerful economic background when making project contracts.

A cook surnamed Huang found a wallet containing the passbooks on his way home after work in Liuzhou, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, Dec 18.

Liquid nitrogen to deal with smog?

Beijing may pump liquid nitrogen, which has three times the cooling capacity of the dry ice, into the air on hazy days to drive away smog.

Wang Xinfeng, an atmospheric chemistry researcher at Shandong University, said that although the method is theoretically possible, city officials should be particularly careful as the temperature of liquid nitrogen is extremely low. (South China Morning Post)

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Spring Festival train ticket sale starts

The sale of 2014 Spring Festival train tickets will start tomorrow with the pre-sale period for temporary passenger ticket extending to 25 days (including the day).

Sales for the remaining routine trains, including the high-speed rail, will start on Dec 28. The pre-sale period for online and telephone booking for routine trains is still 20 days and 18 days for each ticket agency.

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A long transfer haul

The station for the military museum on subway Line 9 officially opened on Saturday, realizing the transfer with Line 1 and becoming the only subway with direct access to the Beijing West Railway Station.

It is not an easy transfer, however. It took a reporter from Beijing Morning News four minutes to transfer from Line 1 to Line 9 and seven minutes from Line 9 to Line 1 on Saturday. MTRC spokesman Jia Peng said that the expected passenger flow through the transfer station is 140,000 per day so the transfer time on weekdays is definitely going to be longer than on weekend.

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Pet pig playing on Chang'an Avenue

A pet pig was seen playing on the grassland along the East Chang'an Avenue in Beijing on Dec 21, 2013. Sometimes it does some fitness walking and bouncing, sometimes it eats the grass, sometimes it lies down to enjoy the sunshine and sometimes it scratches its body against the trees. The pig attracts many onlookers who take pictures of it and play with it while not being frightened at all.