Oil price raised

THE price of packaged Arawana brand edible oil products have begun to rise in some cities after the rises were approved by the central government. The price of Arawana sunflower seed oil increased by 17.7 percent in Zaozhuang city, Shandong Province, and 16.5 percent in Suzhou city, Jiangsu Province.

Workers return

NEARLY 400 Chinese laborers working in Equatorial Guinea returned to Shanghai at the weekend after a clash during a dispute at a construction project site left two Chinese dead and four others injured, according to sources with China Southern Airlines.

Expensive cut

A BEAUTY salon in central China’s Henan Province has been fined 500,000 yuan (US$71,225) by the local pricing authority for charging two girls 6,000 yuan each for a haircut.

The Paul International Beauty Salon, registered in 2004 in Zhengzhou city, was fined Saturday for defrauding consumers by failing to publish price lists of its products and services. The 500,000-yuan fine was the maximum for the offence, a Zhengzhou municipal price bureau official said.

Language test

ABOUT 130,000 people from across the world took the Chinese language test in 2007, according to the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language yesterday.