A former mayor in central China’s Hunan Province who made headlines for drug use has been sentenced to seven years in prison on corruption charges.

The Intermediate People’s Court in Yueyang City handed down the verdict Friday to Gong Weiguo, former mayor of Linxiang City, after convicting him of taking bribes and abuse of power.

Gong was put under investigation by police following accusations he had used drugs in April 2015. Months later, he was expelled from the Communist Party of China and removed from his public post for “serious disciplinary violations,” including corruption and his drug use.

The court found that Gong accepted bribes worth 1.5 million yuan (230,000 U.S. dollars) and in return helped others obtain benefits from 2007 to 2015, when he worked in the cities of Miluo, Yueyang and Linxiang.

In addition, he illegally exempted real estate developers from administrative fees, resulting in government losses of nearly 16 million yuan.

Gong was also fined 300,000 yuan and had his illegal gains confiscated.

Eight people died and another went missing due to rainstorms in northeast China’s Jilin Province, local authorities said Saturday.

Torrential rain battered central and eastern Jilin on Thursday and Friday, forcing relocation of more than 120,000 people as of 8 a.m. of Saturday, according to provincial flood control authorities.

In Yongji County, which saw record-breaking daily precipitation, five people died in the disaster.

The rainstorms have affected lives of nearly 320,000 people in 13 counties, damaging homes, roads, bridges and dikes.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) Friday issued a revised regulation on inspection, in a renewed effort to improve supervision and governance of its more than 89 million members.

Shifting its focus from fighting corruption and Party rule violations in the initial rounds of inspections, the amendment lifted political inspection to a more prominent place on its supervision agenda.

The revised rules clearly stipulate that “political inspection should be deepened, and inspections should mainly focus on upholding the Party leadership, improving Party building, and advancing comprehensive and strict rule of the Party.”

The inspections should staunchly safeguard the authority and the centralized, unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core, and ensure the CPC is always the firm and core leadership of the socialist cause with Chinese characteristics, it said.

“Political inspection is a major innovation in both theory and practice of the inspection work of the 18th CPC Central Committee,” said Yang Xiaochao, member of the inspection leadership group of the CPC Central Committee.

“Incorporating requirements of political inspection into the regulation is a key point and highlight of the latest revision,” Yang noted.

At a meeting on May 26, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee decided to amend the Party’s regulation on inspection work, to reflect the latest innovative practices.

The CPC inspection regulation was first put into force on a trial basis in 2009. This is the third version of the regulation following the release of a revised version in August 2015.

The regulation made public Friday also stipulates that Party committees at both the central and provincial levels should conduct inspections on Party organizations of all localities, departments, public institutions and enterprises under their jurisdiction.

In addition, Party committees at the municipal and county levels are also required to establish special agencies to conduct inspections.

On June 21, the CPC discipline agency published the results of its 12th round of inspections into CPC organizations in provincial-level regions, central CPC and government organs, major state-owned enterprises, central financial institutions and centrally-administered universities.

This was the final round of such inspections during the term of the 18th CPC Central Committee, as the 19th CPC National Congress will be held in Beijing later this year. The 18th CPC Central Committee thus became the first in the Party’s history that has successfully inspected all these entities in its term.

Such internal supervision has proven effective in exposing problems.

According to the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, more than 50 percent of investigations into centrally-administered officials were as a result of information found by discipline inspectors, since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012.

The municipal- and county-level inspections should pay special attention to corruption and bad work styles which hamper the interests of the general populace or alienate Party members from the public, such as major corruption scandals committed by low-level officials or village bullies, said Yang, of the inspection leadership group of the CPC Central Committee..

“With inspections extending from the central to the county level, the comprehensive and strict rule of the Party can be expected to reach the grassroots,” he said.

A police investigation found that Guo Wengui, one of China’s most-wanted fugitive, had knowingly used fabricated and distorted information to mislead the public.

According to Chinese police, Chen Xiangjun, 43, who has been unemployed since junior high school, and Zong Zuoling 32, also currently unemployed, confessed that they had offered to give Guo fake information in exchange for money.

Last month, Guo claimed that a relative of a high-level official in China controls 20 trillion yuan (about 3 trillion U.S. dollars) in assets at different firms.

It turned out that Guo’s so-called “proof from senior officials” was all fake business data created by Chen, who received 50,000 yuan in payment for the information.

“I sent him fake information to win his trust, and he asked me to uncover more information on relatives of senior officials so that he could reveal it overseas,” said Chen.

Guo gave out his personal social media accounts online and promised to pay informants, according to the police

Zong, who had less than five yuan in his bank account and 90,000 yuan in credit card debt when the police captured him, claimed to know the secretaries of senior officials.

Chat records showed that Guo promised to give Zong 2 million yuan in exchange for information about Zhang Yue, a former provincial-level official in north China’s Hebei Province.

“Guo told me that he was engaged in anti-graft work,” said Zong. “He criticized me for not giving him accurate information, but still released the fake information I gave him.”

Guo, the actual controlling shareholder of Beijing Pangu Investment and Beijing Zenith Holdings, fled China under the suspicion of multiple crimes in August 2014 and is currently listed on an Interpol “red notice” for wanted fugitives.

China’s environmental inspectors found that nearly two-thirds of the more than 32,000 enterprises they checked have violated environmental rules.

The findings came after three months of inspections across 28 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and other nearby areas, which resulted in the discovery of problems including excessive emissions and insufficient pollution control equipment, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) said Friday.

The inspectors, who are on a year-long on-site investigation to discover the sources of air pollution in the region, exposed 6,662 companies with unauthorized locations, lacking relevant certificates, or failing to meet emission standards.

The teams also found nearly 2,000 companies have been operating without any pollutant treatment facilities, while another 1,732 companies have pollutant treatment facilities that have been malfunctioning.

MEP official Tian Weiyong said the ministry will urge local authorities to further investigate these firms and rectify the problems.

The MEP will also send inspectors to recheck these companies, ensuring the problems be rectified, he said.

The inspections are part of China’s campaign to fight pollution and environmental degradation as decades of growth have left the country saddled with smog and contaminated soil.

China started the inspections amid widespread concerns about smog in its northern region.

Tian said such inspections have helped control air pollution in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and other nearby areas.