The Central Military Commission (CMC) will terminate all paid services provided by the military by the end of June 2018, according to a military professor.

In the first stage, services in 10 fields should stop by the end of this June, said Jiang Luming, professor at the National University of Defense Technology in an interview with Xinhua.

The 10 fields are nursery education, press and publications, culture and sports, communications, personnel training, barrack projects, storage and transportation, militia armament repair, repair technology and driver instruction, he said.

Projects in another five fields — real estate rentals, agricultural products, accommodation services, medical care and scientific research — should be ceased by the end of June 2018, he added.

In February 2016, the CMC issued a circular urging the end of all paid services by the armed forces and the armed police.

Jiang said that the military has received support from local governments and courts.

Thirteen people were injured when an apartment building caught fire early Wednesday in central China’s Hubei Province, the local government said.

The fire broke out at around 2 a.m. in a three-story building in Jiangxia District of the provincial capital Wuhan, the district government said in a statement.

The fire started in an electricity meter box on the ground floor and was extinguished after 40 minutes.

All the residents woke up in time to escape, but 12 suffered burns and one was slightly injured after jumping from a window sill, the document said.

The injured residents are being treated in the Third People’s Hospital in Wuhan and are all in a stable condition.

A report released by the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) on Wednesday said that as of the end of 2016, China had 223,925 journalists holding valid press cards.

Among these journalists, a total of 84,130 were newspaper reporters and 6,007 worked for periodicals, according to the report on China’s journalism development, which was published on the ACJA website.

The report said there were 2,801 news agency journalists and 129,829 were working with radio or TV stations or news film studios.

Also, there were 1,158 reporters working for news websites nationwide, the report said.

The report was jointly compiled by departments including ACJA, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television as well as the Cyberspace Administration of China.

Rice, one of the world’s most important staple foods sustaining more than half of the global population, was first domesticated in China about 10,000 years ago, according to a new study.

“Such an age for the beginnings of rice cultivation and domestication would agree with the parallel beginnings of agriculture in other regions of the world during a period of profound environmental change when the Pleistocene was transitioning into the Holocene,” said Lu Houyuan, professor of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study.

The research, published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done in collaboration with Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Relics and Archaeology and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Questions surrounding the origin and domestication of rice have led to a lot of debate in the last decade.

Rice remains have previously been recovered from a Shangshan site in the lower Yangtze River and recognized as the earliest examples of rice cultivation.

However, the age of the rice was derived through radiocarbon dating of organic matter in pottery shards, which can be contaminated with older carbon sources, Lu said.

Researchers developed new ways of isolating the rice from carbon sources, such as clays and carbonate, and dated the samples directly using radiocarbon dating.

It turned out that rice retrieved from the early stage of the Shangshan site was about 9,400 years old.

Further studies showed that approximately 36 percent of the rice at Shangshan had more than nine fish-scale decorations, less than the approximately 67 percent counted from modern domesticated rice, but larger than the approximately 17 percent found in modern wild rice.

That means rice domestication may have begun at Shangshan at about 10,000 years ago during the beginning of the Holocene, when taking into account the distance between samples and the lowest bottom of cultural strata of the site as well as a slow rate of rice domestication, Lu said.

The time coincided with the domestication of wheat in the Near East and maize in northern South America, both of which are also believed to have occurred at about 10,000 years ago, when the global climate experienced dramatic changes from cold glacial to warm interglacial.

Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine is cooperating with foreign institutions and training students to share traditional Chinese medicine－one of the world’s most ancient therapies－with the world.

According to university president Hu Gang, more than 26,000 foreign students from about 90 countries and regions have majored and trained in traditional Chinese medicine since 1957.

“We have established traditional Chinese medicine centers in countries such as Australia, Switzerland and France,” says Hu. “It has gradually changed local people’s opinion about TCM and more people are willing to accept it.”

Huang Guicheng, vice-president of the university, says that more than 10 countries have legally recognized TCM and more foreigners now use TCM.

“We have cooperated with a German medical center for 18 years,” he says.

“Local people visit the center and seek TCM treatments.”

He says TCM also can treat post-traumatic stress, which may lead to mental illness and insomnia.

A local doctor, who received TCM training at the Nanjing university in 2008, gave the refugee children in Munich the medicine that they later called “magical tea”.

“Many foreign hospitals even use acupuncture in surgeries,” he says.

Huang says that TCM is popular due to its effectiveness and minimal side effects.

“We have received invitations from many foreign institutions to co-found TCM research centers in their countries,” says Huang.