Fresh Start: Podcast News (10/9/2018 Tue.)

Welcome to Fresh Start.

This is People’s Daily app. 

Here are today’s picks from our editors.

57 million covered by new long-term care insurance

More than 57 million people in China are now covered by a new insurance program designed to provide care to those who have lost the ability to live alone, the National Healthcare Security Administration said.

By the end of June, more than 184,000 subscribers had received benefits from the insurance program, with average payments exceeding 5,400 yuan ($785) in the first half of the year. That covered more than 70 percent of their average nursing service expenses, it said.

China's population is aging rapidly. The number of people age 60 or above reached 241 million last year, accounting for 17.3 percent of the population, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In 2012, the proportion was 14.3 percent. (China Daily)

Chinese state councilor meets US state secretary, calls for win-win cooperation

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday met with visiting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, saying that China and the United States should "follow the right path of win-win cooperation, rather than go astray toward conflict and confrontation."

Wang said Pompeo proposed his visit to China, and the Chinese side was willing to arrange meetings.

"Recently the United States escalated trade friction with China, took actions that jeopardized China's rights and interests on the Taiwan issue and unwarrantedly condemned China on its domestic and foreign policies," Wang said.

Stressing that the moves directly impacted mutual trust and cast a shadow over China-US relations, Wang urged the United States to immediately stop making negative remarks. 

Pompeo said that despite obvious differences on many issues between the two sides, the United States does not mean to oppose China's development, and there is no policy to fully contain China. (Xinhua)

US 'green growth' duo win Nobel Economics Prize

US economists William Nordhaus and Paul Romer on Monday shared the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize for constructing "green growth" models that show how innovation and climate policies can be integrated with economic growth.

Working independently, they have addressed "some of our time's most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable growth," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

The academy said their models, both developed in the 1990s, have "significantly broadened the scope of economic analysis". (AFP)

Brazil Election 2018: far-right candidate Bolsonaro wins first-round

147 million Brazilian voters went to polling stations on October 7, which resulted in former army officer Jair Bolsonaro taking the lead in the first round of the presidential elections.

Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate from the Social Liberal Party, received 46.2 percent of votes. While his closest rival, the Workers' Party candidate Fernando Haddad, got 29.1 percent.

There is a total of 13 candidates. Since none of them got more than 50 percent of the valid ballots, a second round will be held on October 28. (People's Daily app)

Interpol president resigns amid corruption investigation: Chinese FM

Meng Hongwei, a senior public security official who is under investigation for bribery and other violations, has sent a letter to Interpol resigning his post as president of the global law enforcement organization, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced Monday.

Meng, a vice minister of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security as well as the former head of Interpol, is being investigated by China's National Supervisory Commission, according to an official statement released by the commission on Sunday. (People's Daily app)

China publishes first Mongolian-Mandarin law dictionary

A Mongolian-Mandarin dictionary of criminal law, the first of its kind in China, has been published in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, local authorities said Monday.

The dictionary, also China's first Mongolian-Mandarin law dictionary, contains over 25,000 entries, covering criminal law terms used in modern and ancient China.

The dictionary is expected to help provide legal services in both languages and is essential to litigations handled in Mongolian, according to Jirumtuu, one of the dictionary's compilers. (Xinhua)

SpaceX launches satellite, recovers rocket on land

US private spaceflight company SpaceX launched an Argentine Earth-observing satellite on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Sunday.

The launch of the satellite, dubbed SAOCOMM 1A, marks the company's first successful on-land landing of the recovered first stage of the rocket on the West Coast.

Following stage separation, the first stage of the rocket returned to land at SpaceX's Landing Zone 4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base. (Xinhua)

Thanks for listening and be sure to catch us tomorrow.

And now for the Question of the Day:

Which city is known as the "Tea Capital" of China?

(Answer: Hangzhou is known as the 'Tea Capital' of China. Hangzhou is also the birthplace of Dragon Well or Longjing tea.)

Today’s quote is from Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.

“Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.”

(Produced by Nancy Yan Xu, Ryan Yaoran Yu, Lance Crayon, Raymond Mendoza, and Grace Song.)