China began Thursday to restore the maximum speed of bullet train on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway to 350 kilometers per hour, six years after it was was reduced to 300 kmh.

A Fuxing bullet train, which will enjoy the high speed, departed Beijing South Railway Station at 9:00 a.m. for Shanghai.

The speed hike will cut the Beijing-Shanghai journey to 4 hours 28 minutes.

Authorities in charge of the recently-concluded 2017 Beijing International Marathon have confirmed several cheating scandals at the event, which took place on September 17, reports chinanews.com.

A review of pictures posed online show at least five different runners wearing the same ID number: D0198.

The Beijing Marathon organizers say they’re now investigating, and say the cheaters will face severe punishment, including lifetime bans, once it’s made clear who the culprits are.

This is not the first scandal connected to marathons in Chinese cities.

A number of cases have emerged in recent years, including racing under fake names and fabricating different competition numbers.

In a move to crack down on the increasing number of scandals in the sport, the China’s Athletics Association (CAA) moved to impose lifetime bans on marathon cheats in March.

This latest scandal has created a lot of heated discussion.

As marathon racing is becoming increasingly popular in China in recent years, this is starting to limit the number of people who can take part.

It’s being reported people who register early for a marathon have been found selling their slot in the race, which normally costs around 100 yuan, for as high as 2,000 yuan online.

Others have been found creating their own numbers the runners pin on their clothes to enter a race without paying.

“Those who cheat in the race lack reverence for the sport,” said Wen Fenglin with Alisports.

“People are keen in participating in the race, but fail to learn about the culture of marathon,” said an insider.

More than 80 percent of adults in China have misconceptions about contraception, according to a survey by the All-China Women’s Federation.

The survey was released on Wednesday by Huakun Women’s Life Survey Center, which is administered by the federation. Tuesday is World Contraception Day.

It was based on questionnaires from 2,378 males and females aged 20 to 40 from all the country’s provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said Liu Ping, deputy chief of the center.

Of those surveyed, more than 36 percent said they used withdrawal as a means of contraception, which is ineffective.

Nearly half of the respondents said they believed it is absolutely safe to have sex during a woman’s menstrual period, and 5.5 percent believed a female cannot get pregnant if the male didn’t reach orgasm during sex.

And 3.7 percent of respondents said a woman will not get pregnant if she takes a shower immediately after sex. Nearly 2 percent believed a woman will not get pregnant if the couple stands during sex.

Education and marriage status didn’t guarantee knowledge. More than 53 percent of those surveyed hold a bachelor’s degree or above, and about 90 percent of them said they are married or have one partner.

More than 17 percent said they or their partners have had an unwanted pregnancy in the past year, and more than 18 percent said either they or their partners had abortions in the past year.

About one-fourth of those said they had no knowledge of oral contraception pills at all, and only about 6 percent said they had ever used them.

“Lack of knowledge of contraception among young people in China can lead to safety risks, including rising numbers of abortions,” Liu said. “We are also sorry to see that women in China generally fail to take active contraceptive measures.”

Li Jian, a gynecologist at Beijing Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, said lack of knowledge about conception – and preventing it – among the general public has been a major cause of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, which can lead to infertility.

Using condoms properly, taking contraceptive pills or using intrauterine devices can be very effective, Li said, while some actions, such as withdrawal, don’t work well.

Wang Qiaomei, an official at the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s department for women and children’s health, said China has been supplying free contraceptive devices and pills and contraception has been included as part of the government’s basic public health service programs.

“Medical institutions should provide more contraceptive advisory services to promote the knowledge of contraception,” she said. “We also call on individuals to place more importance on contraception to protect themselves and their family.”

The Chinese government announced Wednesday that it had built an alert system to monitor regional environmental and resource capacity conditions, and punish those responsible for environmental damage.

Regions with serious environmental and resource capacity overloading will not be allowed to start new projects, according to a document issued by the general offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council Wednesday.

The new system will divide environmental capacity conditions into three levels: overloading, near overloading and not overloading.

Meanwhile, based on actual resources or environmental losses, regions facing capacity overloading will be issued with a red or orange alert, while regions close to capacity overloading will be issued with a yellow or blue alert.

Regions whose environmental capacities are without excessive pollution and resource loss will be labeled green non-alert zones.

For red-alert areas, government authorities will stop granting approval on relevant projects, while enterprises causing severe environmental and resource destruction will face punishment, including fines, production restrictions and shutdowns.

Deadlines will be set for these regions to improve local environmental capacity conditions to below the red-alert level.

Individuals, such as owners of polluting enterprises or those in local authorities with slack supervision, will be held accountable for the environmental damage and even be prosecuted for criminal liability.

The government will also work to provide compensation to green non-alert zones for their ecological protection efforts and development rights, as well as increasing green financing support.

The document also put forward detailed management measures for specific fields such as water resources, land resources and the marine environment.

China has said “no more” to economic growth at the price of the environment, by putting environmental protection at the top of the agenda to ensure greener, more sustainable development.

The country has introduced action plans to fight air, water and soil pollution and rolled out its harshest-ever environmental protection law.

An ecological “red line” strategy will also be implemented to put certain regions under mandatory and rigorous protection.

Chinese police have caught 118 suspects believed to have swindled seniors out of nearly 20 million yuan (around 3 million U.S. dollars) through selling healthcare products, authorities said Wednesday.

The fraud ring organized health lectures and promised free prizes and vacations to methodically earn the trust of the elderly, according to Wenzhou city police in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province.

The swindlers then hornswoggled the victims into purchasing costly healthcare products with false advertizing, and promised to return the cash. When the victims paid the money, the suspects ran away, police said.

Police said the fraud was masterminded by Changsha Yunyi Technology, a company based in Hunan Province. So far, police have solved 520 cases of seniors being targeted by the fraud ring across the country.

Further investigation is underway.

Police said that seniors usually have money and property, and were interested in products promising to improve their health, making them targets for fraud.