Following a timely drizzle on Tuesday that delighted most Beijingers, weather forecasters yesterday said the cooler weather stems from a cold current from Inner Mongolia that will ensure a cloudy weekend.

Lei Zhenfa, director of Beijing Observatory Station, said cloudy weather and casual showers are predicted for the weekend. The temperature could range from 20 to 33 degrees Celsius, much cooler than the 36-plus degree weather that dominated the past two weeks.

The forecaster said the type of hot weather seen since June 24 will not return in the immediate future. But, he said he was not sure whether it will reoccur at some point again this summer.

For residents, especially the 50,000 high school students who are busy taking the annual college entrance examination, Tuesday's drizzle felt like a blessing as the city's temperature plunged to 25 degrees for the first time in weeks.

Farmers, however, are disappointed since the rainfalls has only amounted to 5 centimetres, much less than they had expected and needed to revive such scorched crops as corns, peanuts and beans.

The group, established on the basis of the old People's Insurance Company of China (PICC) on August 21, 1996, had three subsidiaries _ PICC Property, PICC Life and PICC Reinsurance.

These have been renamed as the People's Insurance Company of China(PICC), China Life Insurance Company and China Reinsurance Company.

All the liabilities and creditors' rights from the insurance business of the old PICC and its subsidiaries will be taken over by the three new companies.

Meanwhile, overseas assets of the PICC Group will be transferred to the new PICC.

The old PICC, established in 1949, was the State dinosaur in China's insurance market.

The Chinese Government decided to break it up in October last year to make its subsidiaries independent companies.

Experts called the move a major shake-up in China's insurance industry which could make it more suitable for the market-oriented economy.

The three new companies are wholly State-owned commercial insurers. They must put profitability top of their agenda and establish fully professional management systems to minimize financial risks.

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It is the first time a large non-state-owned high-tech company clearly defined its operators' property rights, which used to be totally under State ownership.

"The central goal of Stone's reorganization is to enable the company's operators to truly play their role in offering high level stimuli and exercising final control over growth," Duan Yongji, president and CEO of Stone, was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

In an effort to avoid disputes over the quantitative distribution of the stock assets, the group has registered a new entity, Beijing Stone Investment Corp, which distributed the group 's property rights to its 616 employees. Among them, Duan will personally have the highest share, 7.2 percent, of the new company.

Stone Investment will raise funds and purchase the main existing information technology businesses of the Stone Group, including electronics, electrical engineering and system integration.

"After buying over the mother company, Stone Investment will be listed at home or abroad within two years," said Duan.

Duan and other founders of the Stone Group started from scratch in 1984 with a loan of 20,000 yuan (about dlrs 2,410).

Fifteen years have passed and Stone has become one of the country's largest IT company, emerging as a red chip company along with China Telecom and Legend Group in Hong Kong.

"It's urgent to initiate creative measures which can combine the personal interests of managers and engineers with the company' s performance in the IT industry, which focuses on talent competition," Duan said.

The city introduced mobile phone services in July 1995, with the number of users surging dramatically over the ensuing four years, according to a local telecommunications official.

Guangzhou's installed capacity for mobile phones has reached 1. 4 million lines, said the official, adding that the network's operation quality continues to improve at a rapid rate.

Beijing and Guangzhou are the only two Chinese cities with over one million mobile phone users.

People can find a wide range of choices there, like the IBM users Guide: Challenging Y2K, solving Y2K in IBM products, and emergency solutions on the company's web site: http:// www.ibm.com. cn.

The Y2K or millennium bug problem refers to troubles expected to be caused by the fact that computers only recognize the last two digits in their year recognition programs and therefore will be wrong about the year 2000.

An IBM China Corporation executive says that the Chinese home page is a part of the firm's world-wide efforts to solve the Y2K problem. (Xinhua)

Dalian Copyright Bureau organized this training in a bid to let the dealers know how to distinguish between the piratical and the original, how to keep away piratical products and what legal responsibilities should be shouldered by a dealer if he deal in piratical products.

It is hoped that through the training, piratical products will disappear on the counters of the big shopping malls of Dalian, since they damage the image of both the shopping malls themselves and the city of Dalian as a modern city.

This is the cumulative result of the monthly record high throughput of Dalian Port of the first six months this year.

This record makes Dalian Port the fourth on the list of all China¡¯s ports, while last year it was fifth.

Throughput of passengers and cargo roll-on-roll-off transport and finished-petroleum increased sharply by 1 million tons and 2.36 million tons respectively.