Jenna Cook, a girl of Chinese origin adopted by an American school teacher over 20 years ago, returned to China to look for her birth parents.

Before her arrival, the Yale student had no idea that her trip in search of her roots would touch so many people in Wuhan city: 50 families came forward in the hope that she might be their abandoned daughter.

Jenna Cook’s story started on March 24, 1992, when she was abandoned as a baby near a bus stop in Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei Province.

She was taken to the Wuhan Children’s Welfare House to be cared for.

In June that same year, she was adopted and given the name Jenna Cook by Margaret Cook, a primary schoolteacher who lived in Massachusetts.

Jenna was one of the first 200 Chinese babies to be adopted by American families. About 80,000 children born in China were estimated to have found homes in the United States, mostly girls.

Jenna always knew she was adopted. Living in an area with few Chinese faces around, Jenna’s adoptive mother tried her best to look after the girl and her younger sister, who was also a Chinese adoptee. She learned Mandarin, and all about China, socializing with other families with similar adoption backgrounds.

Despite Margaret’s best efforts to help her two daughters keep a link with their country of origin, Jenna yearned to find her birth parents.

At the age of 20, Jenna was admitted by Yale University, where she received a grant to fund a trip to China to look for her parents as part of an academic study program.

Accompanied by her adoptive mother, Jenna traveled to Wuhan in 2012 and managed to get her story posted in local newspapers. The article aroused huge public interest.

Dozens of families came forward to say that Jenna was their daughter, 50 of whom claimed to have left an infant in the street where Jenna was found in March, 1992.

During Jenna’s meetings with the 50 families, the girl found them all thoughtful and considerate. Every family treated Jenna as if she were their daughter. They asked Jenna about her life, wanting to know whether she had been well looked-after.

Jenna carried out DNA tests with 37 families, narrowed down from the 50 who’d come forward, but none of them turned to be related to Jenna.

It’s reported that Jenna has left a sample of her DNA with police in Wuhan, leaving a hope for a possible reunion in the future.

The voting for the fifth-term chief executive of China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) started on Sunday.

The voting started at 9 a.m. local time (0100 GMT) and nearly 1,200 members of the Election Committee for the next chief executive cast their votes by secret ballot at the main polling station in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center.

There are three qualified candidates running for the SAR’s top position. The order of their names on the ballot paper is — Tsang Chun-wah, Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and Woo Kwok-hing.

The voting will be closed at 11 a.m. and the results of counting will be announced later. If no candidate wins outright, the second round of voting will be scheduled from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. and the third round from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday.

A candidate wins the election when he or she obtains more than 600 valid votes in any round of voting and will be appointed by the central government, according to Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the Chief Executive Election Ordinance.

After the appointment, the winner will take oath of office on July 1 and become the fifth-term chief executive.

A Chinese court has ruled in favor of Apple Inc. in design patent disputes between it and a domestic phone-maker, overturning a ban on selling iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones in China.

Last May, a Beijing patent regulator ordered Apple’s Chinese subsidiary and a local retailer Zoomflight to stop selling the said phones after Shenzhen Baili Marketing services Co. (Shenzhen Baili) lodged a complaint to it, claiming that the patent for the design of its mobile phone 100c was being infringed upon by the iPhone sales.

Apple and Zoomflight took the Beijing Intellectual Property Office’s banning order to court.

The Beijing Intellectual Property Court on Friday revoked the ban, saying Apple and Zoomflight did not violate Shenzhen Baili’s design patent for 100c phones.

The court ruled that the regulator did not follow due procedures in ordering the ban while there is no sufficient proof to claim the designs constitute violation of intellectual property rights.

Representatives of Beijing Intellectual Property Office and Shenzhen Baili said they would take time to decide whether to appeal the ruling.

In another related ruling, the same court denied a request by Apple to demand stripping Shenzhen Baili of its design patent for 100c phones. Apple first filed the request to the Patent Reexamination Board of State Intellectual Property Office. The board rejected the request, but Apple lodged a lawsuit against the rejection to court.

The Beijing Intellectual Property Court on Friday ruled to maintain the board’s decision. It remains not immediately clear if Apple will appeal.

Apple phones are popular among China’s urban young people, but the sale faces stiff competition from domestic phone makers, which produce a wider range of affordable and quality smart phones.

Last year, three domestic brands — OPPO, Huawei and Vivo — outperformed Apple as China’s top selling phone brands, according to a report by the International Data Corporation.

OPPO sold 78.4 million handsets in China last year, tailed by Huawei with 76.6 million units.

China’s air quality worsened year on year in the first two months of 2017 mainly due to unfavorable weather conditions and a warming economy, official data showed.

In the first two months, 338 major cities around China enjoyed good air quality on 64.6 percent of days, down 4.8 percentage points from a year earlier, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) said in a statement.

The average density of fine particulate matter PM2.5 in those cities rose 12.7 percent to 71 micrograms per cubic meter.

In the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the share of days with good air quality was down by 19 percentage points to 44.7 percent in the same period, and PM2.5 density surged 48 percent from a year ago, MEP said.

The share of good air days for Beijing plunged 22.5 percentage points to 54.2 percent.

The city of Haikou in southern China’s Hainan Province had the cleanest air out of the nation’s 74 major cities, while Hebei’s capital city Shijiazhuang was the worst polluted.

Chai Fahe, expert with the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, attributed the deterioration partly to unfavorable meteorological conditions for pollutants to disperse, including lighter wind and higher humidity in some regions.

The warming economy also weighed on air quality, Chai said.

With recovering production and demand since the latter half of last year, both output and pollutant emissions from high-polluting sectors were on the rise, he said.

China is heading in the right direction for tackling air pollution, head of MEP Chen Jining said earlier this month.

In the past three years, days of good air quality increased in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, Chen said.

However, the campaign against air pollution cannot be completed in a short period of two or three years, but will need a relatively long time, he added.

“We will make our skies blue again,” according to this year’s government work report.

In 2017, China will cut the emissions of both sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide by 3 percent, and reduce PM2.5 density in key areas markedly, the report said.

Commenting on Douglas Carswell’s decision to leave UKIP,
Labour’s Shadow Minister and Elections Chair, Andrew Gwynne MP, said:

“UKIP are tearing themselves apart. Their ‎only MP has quit, their biggest donor has fled and their leader
was utterly rejected by the voters of Stoke-on-Trent a few weeks ago. Under Paul Nuttall UKIP now has no MPs and no
future.

“This episode exposes the truth of UKIP: they’ve got nothing to
offer the voters and they’re a divided party with extreme policies, such as
privatising the NHS.”