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At a Glance

March CPITHE city’s consumer price index (CPI) decreased by 1.5 percent in March, up 4.5 percent year on year, accord-ing to the Shenzhen survey office of the National Bureau of Statistics.

Food prices decreased 4.3 percent compared to last month. Non-food prices declined 0.7 percent from last month. Service prices dropped 0.9 percent while consumer prices slipped 1.9 percent from last month.

Self-service checkSHENZHEN-BASED enter-prises can now check their registered records through the Shenzhen Municipal Market Supervision and Regulation Bureau’s website as well as “i深圳” app.

Enterprises only need to prepare digital certificates of their firms, legal repre-sentatives and individual shareholders, or instead use facial recognition technology when checking information.

A RENOVATION project has recently started on Meiguan Expressway to transform it into a two-way, 14-lane, urban high-way to be completed in the first half of 2024, Chinese-language media reported yesterday.

Meiguan Expressway extends about 8 kilometers from the former Meilin Toll Gate in Futian District in the south, to Qinghu Flyover in northern Longhua District. Seven new flyovers and nine pedestrian overpasses will be built along the expressway to ease traffic flow and separate slow traffic from fast traffic, according to Wei Min, a senior engineer with the city’s transport and public facility construction center.

Meiguan Expressway, which opened to traffic in 1995, is part of the G94 Expressway within the national network.

It is a north-south gateway to Longhua District and Ban-tian Subdistrict in Longgang District in the northern part of Shenzhen, where it con-nects to Shenzhen-Dongguan Expressway.

Traffic has become increas-ingly congested on the express-way since 2014 when tolls were abolished by the city government after purchasing the expressway from its operator to further push the city’s integration.

“I really hope that the road would become less congested after the renovation is com-

pleted,” said a Longhua resident surnamed Zhang, who works in Futian District.

He said he has often been stuck on the expressway for at least 30 minutes when com-muting between work and home during the morning and evening rush hours.

The separation of fast traffic and slow traffic, and of transit vehicles and urban commuters will be an effective solution to ease the traffic congestion on Meiguan Expressway, said Wei.

The renovation has started on the comprehensive corridor project and the auxiliary roads on both sides of the expressway, said Xie Chaoqun, deputy proj-

ect manager with China MCC 20 Group Corp. Ltd., the contrac-tor of the Meiguan renovation project.

He said a comprehensive pipeline network for water supply, drainage, power, gas and telecommunications will be installed on both sides of the expressway in order to avoid repeated excavations on the road for future pipeline inspections and other emer-gency repairs.

According to Xie, the stan-dards of a sponge city will also be implemented in the renovation project to make it an environmentally friendly smart traffic model.

(Wei Jie)

Renovation work starts on expressway

COURTS across the city have handled 20,379 cases pertain-ing to families over the past three years, with 20,020 cases concluded. Each family court judge closed 185 cases each year on average, according to a white paper on the reform of family trial (2017-2019) issued Tuesday by Shenzhen Interme-diate People’s Court.

The number of closed family cases increased slightly year on year, according to the paper.

Among the closed cases, 13,324 are related to divorce disputes. A total of 2,032 are concerned with post-divorce property disputes.

Some 980 cases involved dis-putes over child support while 950 cases are associated with issues concerning a change of nurturing relationships.

Over the past three years,

the city has established five litigation centers to specifically handle matters pertaining to families.

Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court has set up a collegiate panel exclusively for family cases.

Additionally, district courts have built three family courts and five teams consisting of 32 professional judges and 46 assistant judges to try family cases.

At the same time, the paper suggested that couples aged between 30 and 40 with a mar-riage lasting seven to 15 years contributed a larger proportion of divorce cases.

Some 55 percent of the divorce suits were initiated by couples in their 30s.

More and more women have filed for divorce to escape

unhappy marriages. The report said that 76.8 percent of divorce suits were filed by women.

There was also a certain number of divorce cases filed for couples in marriages lasting less than two years, according to the paper.

The most common reason behind most of the divorce pro-ceedings were due to family vio-lence, followed by extramarital cohabitation, extramarital affair and drug abuse, according to Shenzhen Evening News.

An increasing number of cases relating to habeas corpus have been seen in the city over the past three years, of which 93.2 percent of candidates seek-ing protection were women.

This trend was also presented in cases concerning post-divorce property disputes.

(Wang Jingli)

Over 75% of divorce suits filed by women

FIFTEEN suspects have recently been prosecuted in Shenzhen for smuggling a large number of wild pangolins and ivory products, Chinese-language media reported yesterday, citing sources from the city’s procuratorate.

The suspects were involved in seven separate smuggling cases, totaling 1,074 pangolins, 21.43 kilograms of pangolin scales and 7.98 kilograms of ivory products in all.

Many of the suspects are members of different organized smuggling rings that are capable of eluding investigators, said the prosecutors, adding that some other suspects were acting alone, crossing the border with pangolin scales for a chance to make a profit.

Two of the suspects, identi-fied as Ye and Li, worked with organized criminal rings in the border area of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to smuggle the endangered wild animals and sell them on the black market.

According to prosecutors, police only confiscated 51 pan-golins in a raid on a smuggling den, but were able to find more smuggled pangolins following further investigation.

“Hopefully, the prosecution will intimidate other people from attempting to smuggle pro-tected wild animals, and hence protect the ecological system,” said Liu Shanquan, one of the chief prosecutors of the city’s procuratorate.

The trial continues.The outbreak of the novel

coronavirus prompted China’s top legislature to roll out a swift decision to comprehensively ban the eating of terrestrial wildlife across the country earlier this year. The decision calls for harsh penalties for the hunting, trad-ing and transportation of wild animals on the protection list of existing laws. (Claudia Wei)

THE city has called for open ten-dering for the Shenzhen Natural History Museum’s schematic design and architectural design development from design teams at home and abroad, according to the Shenzhen Municipal Public Works Bureau.

The Shenzhen Natural His-tory Museum, one of the city’s 10 new cultural facilities and located in Pingshan District, aims to be a leading museum of its kind in China and first-class in the world.

It is designed to interpret the laws of natural evolution and show “geographies of Shenzhen and ecology in the global per-spective,” to become a natural history museum actively advo-cating science.

The museum will cover an area of 42,000 square meters, with a gross floor area of 100,000 square meters while the indoor exhibition area will be nearly 34,000 square meters.

It will exhibit animal and plant specimens, mineral specimens and fossil specimens.

Additionally, it will include programs to show the origin and development of life on Earth, the relationship between geological structures and geomorphology, as well as the development of ecosystems, according to Shenzhen Special Zone Daily.

Total investment is limited to 3.5 billion yuan (US$496 million) (excluding specimen collection cost), of which con-struction estimates are around 2.1 billion yuan.

The final project scale and investment is subject to gov-ernment approval, according to the information released on the museum’s official website.

(Wang Jingli)

15 stand trialfor smuggling pangolins, ivory products

New museum in city calls fordesign bidding

World’s largest charging station for electric vehiclesElectric vehicles are seen at a charging station in Minle, Longhua District, yesterday. Covering an area of some 20,000 square meters, the charging station has 637 fast charging poles that can serve nearly 5,000 electric vehicles every day. The charging station is report-edly the largest one of its kind in the world. As a pilot city for the promotion of new-energy vehicles, Shenzhen had installed 83,000 charging poles by the end of last year. Of all the charging poles, about 3,000 are fast charging poles catering to the needs of vehicles such as buses, taxis, dump trucks and app-based cars. The remaining charging poles are installed in residential areas.

Sun Yuchen