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China said on Sunday it will loosen credit conditions, cut taxes and embark on a massive infrastructure spending program in a wide-ranging effort to offset adverse global economic conditions by boosting domestic demand.

This is a shift long advocated by analysts of the Chinese economy and by some within the government. It comes amid indications that economic growth, exports and various industries are slowing.

A stimulus package estimated at 4 trillion yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) will be spent over the next two years to finance programs in 10 major areas, such as low-income housing, rural infrastructure, water, electricity, transportation, the environment, technological innovation and rebuilding from several disasters, most notably the May 12 earthquake.

The policies include a comprehensive reform in value-added taxes, which would cut industry costs by 120 billion yuan.

Commercial banks’ credit ceilings will be abolished to channel more lending to priority projects, rural areas, smaller enterprises, technical innovation and industrial rationalization through mergers and acquisitions.

The decision was announced on Sunday by the State Council, or cabinet, after Premier Wen Jiabao presided over an executive meeting on Wednesday.

The meeting decided that credit expansion must be “rational” and “target spheres that would promote and consolidate the expansion of consumer credit.”

With 100 billion yuan from current-year central government funds and another 20 billion yuan brought forward from next year’s budget for post-disaster reconstruction, the fourth quarter is expected to see a total investment of 400 billion yuan across the nation.

The massive spending plan was expected to play a remarkable role in sustaining growth as 4 trillion yuan investment is an equivalent of one third of the nation’s total fixed asset investment last year, according to Zhang Liqun, researcher with the Development Research Center of the State Council.

“With the deepening of the global financial crisis over the past two months, the government must take flexible and prudent macro-economic policies to deal with the complex and changing situation,” said the meeting.

The meeting also announced that China will adopt “active” fiscal and “moderately active” monetary policies and map out more forceful measures to expand domestic demand, speed up the construction of public facilities and improve living standards of the poor to achieve “steady and relative fast” economic growth.

The active fiscal policy alone would not bear much fruit without the coordination of easing monetary policy. The two should work together to confront the economic complexity of home and abroad, said Yuan Gangming, researcher with the Center for China in the World Economy of Tsinghua University.

The policy change comes out in time as the global financial crisis begins to affect China’s real economy. The adjustment is more resolute and timely as China draw lessons from the Asian financial crisis in 1998, said director of the Research Institute for Fiscal Science of Ministry of Finance Jia Kang. He noted the easing policy was expected to prevent big ups and downs in the economy.

He said the value-added tax reduction would encourage enterprises to invest more in the long run.

The macro-economic policy changes announced on Sunday are one of only a few major shifts during the 30 years since the beginning of reform and opening up in 1978.

The most recent modification was in December, when the government resorted to a combination of “tight” monetary policy and “prudent” fiscal policy to fight inflation.

With the monthly consumer price index, the main gauge of inflation, expected to drop further through year-end — after plunging from a 12-year high of 8.7 percent in February to 4.6 percent in September — the focal task of macro-economic control has shifted from beating inflation to sustaining economic growth.

The past three months have seen a series of stimulus policies: interest rate cuts, lower bank reserve requirement ratios, tax changes, higher credit quotas and the injection of central government funds to infrastructure construction.

The meeting decided that higher investment must be able to facilitate economic restructuring, promote growth potential by channeling investment to where it’s most needed and spur private consumption.

Although the economy has maintained double-digit growth for years, fixed-asset investment and exports have dwarfed consumption as the two pillars of expansion. With global recession clearly in view, China must sustain itself by exploiting the domestic market to offset weaker demand abroad.

The meeting identified the ongoing world economic adjustment as “a new opportunity” for China to speed industrial restructuring, introduce advanced technologies and talents from abroad.

Despite challenges, China has a great potential to develop its domestic demand and a solid financial system, the meeting noted.

“As long as we take the right measures in a resolute and timely way to grasp the chance and rise to the challenges, we will surely secure steady and relative fast economic growth,” the meeting noted.

A lawsuit was filed here Thursday accusing California’s state government of failing to protect its 650,000 farm workers from heat-related death and illness.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) affiliates of Southern California and San Diego and Imperial counties, the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP announced that the landmark lawsuit was filed against the State of California and its Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (Cal/OSHA) for failing to live up to their constitutional and statutory duties to protect the safety of farm workers.

“Farm workers are literally dying because of the state’s broken system, which is designed in a way that ensures under-enforcement of the law,” said Catherine Lhamon, assistant legal director for the ACLU of Southern California.

“The state’s system is so full of loopholes that compliance is effectively optional, and employers flout the law with impunity,” he added.

The state itself has identified such serious noncompliance from agricultural employers that this summer it twice declared emergencies. But even then the state took no regulatory or legislative action to protect farm workers, ACLU charged.

“We are left with no choice but to ask the court to require that the state protect farm workers from serious heat-related illness and death, which is readily preventable with basic precautions,” said Brad Phillips, an attorney with Munger, Tolles.

California enacted its current heat safety regulation in 2005. At least 11 farm workers have died from heat-related illness since then, and farm workers have been pleading with the state for safety improvements all that time, according to ACLU.

Last year the agency conducted only 750 inspections among approximately 35,000 farms statewide and found that nearly 40 percent had violated mandatory heat safety regulations, according to ACLU.

ACLU charged that California is more committed to wildlife protection than to people, especially farm workers.

ACLU cited some heat-related death cases in the lawsuit.

Maria de Jesus Bautista complained of nausea, headache and cold sweats in July 2008 while picking grapes during extreme heat in Riverside County in Southern California. She died two weeks later. Bautista’s daughter, Margarita, is also a farm worker and still works in the fields of Riverside County. Having seen what happened to her mother, she fears for her safety during hot weather, but works out of economic necessity.

Socorro Rivera works for the largest grape grower in the United States, Giumarra Vineyards Corporation, which has vineyards in Kern and Tulare counties.

On hot days, the shade provided by Giumarra consists of a plastic tarp slung over three rows of vines. Workers do not take shelter under it because air doesn’t circulate under the tarp, and it’s hotter there than in direct sunlight, Rivera says. Giumarra’s training to prevent heat illness consists of a supervisor reading a list of heat illness symptoms for 10 minutes once a year.

But no meaningful enforcement action has been taken against Giumarra. That is only one example of a glaring problem: in addition to a scarcity of inspectors and inspections, even employers who are charged with violating existing regulations escape with little or no punishment, the lawsuit said.

Penalties for violations that have resulted in heat-related deaths average less than 10,000 dollars, and have dropped to as low as 250 dollars, according to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, hazardous conditions often continue uncorrected for years as the labor contractors typically targeted by the state fail to pay fines or to address violations, the lawsuit said.

In addition, the industry has no environmental “trigger” such as temperature, humidity or radiant heat exposure that would set in motion a series of mandatory protective measures, according to the lawsuit.

One provision of Cal/OSHA’s emergency proposals earlier this year was a requirement for employers to provide shade for workers when temperatures exceed 85 degrees Fahrenheit. But the proposals placed the burden for taking shade breaks on farm workers themselves.

Many workers say they are pressured to keep up with competing crews, and they are fearful of being fired if they take voluntary breaks to cool down, according to the lawsuit.

“If hundreds of thousands of white-collar employees had to work under dangerous and life-threatening conditions, the state would almost certainly take immediate action to protect their health and safety,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director for the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties.

“Low-income farm workers, who are overwhelmingly Latino, deserve no less,” he added.

The lawsuit charges that state officials have failed in virtually every possible way to create a system to protect these workers, who provide 90 percent of the labor for California’s multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, the nation’s largest that produces everything from grapes and strawberries to lettuce and tomatoes.

Perhaps most glaringly, Cal/OSHA has failed to establish common-sense regulations that would provide potentially life-saving water, shade and rest to workers who labor outdoors in temperatures that regularly top 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

In addition, the state requires that its existing — and deficient — heat safety regulation be enforced exclusively through Cal/OSHA, even though that agency has no practical ability to do the job, according to the lawsuit.

It can’t be just any old Arizona highway; you have to choose your route carefully. In my case it was US Highway 89, which starts in the sagebrush-covered desert northwest of Phoenix. Almost from the get-go, I was driving upwards, the wicked switchbacks that make Yarnell Grade one of Arizona’s most spectacular roads. Reaching the summit, the temperature sank and the dazzling show began—splashes of incandescent yellow, red and orange against dark evergreens and massive boulders.

After passing through Prescott—where Harley-Davidsons were parked in front of the bars around leaf-filled Courthouse Square—I followed 89 up and over snow-covered Mingus Mountain and down into the Verde River Valley with its canary yellow willows and cottonwoods. The coup de grace was pulling into Sedona, its autumn trees framed by red-rock cliffs and signs inviting me to get my chakra realigned.

Fall foliage road trips are almost a national rite of passage—a quintessentially American combination of the outdoors and the automobile. For many, losing oneself in a landscape of riotous reds, profound purples, and outrageous oranges can be a quasi-religious experience. From Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost to crooner James Taylor and funky Earth, Wind & Fire, generations of American artists have been inspired by the vivid season.

New England is still the holy grail of fall-foliage pilgrims. “The vibrancy of color in New England is a function of the mix of tree species that we have,” says Dr Kevin Smith, a plant physiologist with the US Forest Service in New Hampshire. “The reds from maples, oranges from sugar maples, yellows from birches, purple from beeches, all mixed in with the dark green of conifers like pine and hemlock.”

But as Smith and others point out, beautiful autumnal landscapes can be found in just about every corner of America, from the backwoods of Dixie and the High Sierra to the Great Lakes region and places where there aren’t even any trees.

Denali Highway in south-central Alaska fits the latter description, a 135-mile route through rolling alpine tundra terrain that morphs into a carpet of interwoven red, orange and purple the first few weeks of September. From Maclaren Summit you can look out over the always-snow-covered Alaska Range and the highest peak in North America (20,320-foot Denali). Those with a sharp eye and little bit of luck can often see moose, caribou and even the occasional grizzly bear wandering across the autumn landscape.

Like just about everything else in the Centennial State, Colorado has transformed fall foliage from a sedentary activity into active outdoor adventure. Snatch a bird’s-eye-view of the colors from hot-air balloons in Boulder or a zipline near Durango. Breckenridge offers autumn ATC tours and Grand Junction a 25-mile public bike ride (September 19th) that winds through the area’s vineyards and fruit orchards. Another cool way to catch the colors are llama pack trips in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Quaint traditions like roadside pumpkin wagons and charming villages marks a tour of Ohio’s Amish Country. Meanwhile, Michigan’s secluded Upper Peninsula, surrounded by three different Great Lakes, is still one of the wildest parts of the Lower 48. With more than seven million acres of forest, the U.P. is a natural when it comes to fall colors.

Timing is the key ingredient in plotting your autumn road trip, but it’s far from being an exact science. The annual turning of the leaves is triggered by a combination of day length and temperature. The ideal conditions for color change are warm sunny days followed by cool nights, with overnight temperatures between 32-45°F. Snow, rain, cloud cover and below-freezing temperatures actually decrease the color intensity. But scientists still don’t understand the entire process, which remains one of nature’s most compelling mysteries.

Among the excellent resources available to autumn leaf aficionados is the Forest Service’s fall foliage hotline (www.fs.fed.us/news/fallcolors or 800-354-4595) which offers region by region information, including predictions of leaf colors, foliage peaks and tips for scenic drives. Another great planning tool is The Foliage Network, which collects data from an army of volunteer foliage spotters twice a week during the fall, ensuring an up-to-date and very specific report for “leaf peepers.”

Planning ahead is also crucial for those looking for accommodation along the drive, especially along the more popular leaf-viewing routes through New England. Alternatively, you can cruise autumn roads in an RV, staying overnight at color-saturated campgrounds and moving through the landscape at your own pace. More people are also exploring leafy lanes via motorcycle and bicycle, either solo or on organized tours.

Road Trip USA author Jamie Jensen offers more advice. “Get out of the car!” he urges. “Keep a lookout for ‘scenic viewpoints’ and trailheads and soak it up with all of your senses. Smell the pines, listen to the winds and the water flowing past, feel and hear the crackling of leaves as you tread over them.”

Vehicles also help set the mood. There’s nothing like a convertible—country western tunes blasting out the open top—when driving sunny Arizona in the autumn. An eco-friendly Prius seems just right for ultra-green Oregon, a Corvette best for whipping around those curves in California’s High Sierra. And you wouldn’t want to challenge the rugged Denali Highway without a sturdy 4×4 (maybe even a GMC Denali?).

Finally, don’t neglect those grander, metaphysical sensations. As Smith puts it, “autumn is a time for reflection, or a certain nostalgia for things that are over—intimations of mortality. We see such real gloriousness in nature, and know that that gloriousness is a prelude or harbinger of winter to come.”

An international butterfly museum will be built in Pyin Oo Lwin, a northern city of Myanmar, in December this year, aimed at promoting tourism industry of the country, sources with the National Kandawgyi Garden (NKG) said on Wednesday.

Over 40,000 butterflies and insects from home as well as those from China, Africa, Malaysia and Thailand will be kept in the museum established in the NKG’s orchid garden, the sources said, adding that butterfly fossil from across the country will also be shown there.

There is a national wildlife park in snow-capped region in Myanmar where wildlife and rare animals, including butterfly, takes anctuary. The wildlife park lies at Putao between Mularoti and Zayar mountains.

Meanwhile, a huge flower festival is scheduled to take place in the NKG in the first week of December this year.

Over 50 kinds of flowers, which broom in the cold season, are to be displayed in the third festival of its kind.

The first such flower festival was held at the NKG in December 2006 to mark its diamond jubilee while the second was in December 2008.

The NKG was established in 1915 as a botanical garden and was later expanded in different areas reaching 177 hectares in 2000 which comprises lake, natural forest, observation tower and rose, orchid and bamboo gardens.

Statistics show that about 400,000 people have visited the NKG annually since it was reopened in 2001.

Pyin Oo Lwin, lying 69 km east of the second largest city of Mandalay and at over 1,000 meters above sea-level, enjoys cool and pleasant weather all year round. The flower city is well known for its pine trees, eucalyptus and silver-oak abounding in town.

Chen Ming narrates his own story: I’m Chen Ming, now a grade 5 student at the Jiaxiaozhuang Elementary School in Xining City. My parents came to settle down in Xining when I was 4 years old, and I have been living in the city for 7 years.

Xining is a very beautiful city, as my siblings come here from Wenzhou for a cool and cozy summer season every year. My parents run a business of kitchenware, they have to leave home for the sake of business quite often every month. When they are absent, only grandma takes care of me at home. How I hope my parents can stay at home for more days and take me out for outing on holidays. I love basketball and Yao Ming most, and enjoy playing basketball on holidays. My biggest dream is to watch an NBA match on site in the United States. I’m also infatuated with science fiction, and never miss an episode of Harry Potter.

Victoria’s Secret was started in San Francisco, California, in 1977 by Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus Roy Raymond, who felt embarrassed trying to purchase lingerie for his wife in a department store environment. He opened the first store at Stanford Shopping Center, and quickly followed it with a mail-order catalog and three other stores. The stores were meant to create a comfortable environment for men, with wood-paneled walls, Victorian details and helpful sales staff. Instead of racks of bras and panties in every size, there were single styles, paired together and mounted on the wall in frames. Men could browse for styles for women and sales staff would help estimate the appropriate size, pulling from inventory in the back. In 1982, after five years of operations, Roy Raymond sold the company to The Limited.

The Limited kept the personalized image of Victoria’s Secret intact. Victoria’s Secret was rapidly expanded into the U.S. malls throughout the 1980s. The company was able to vend a widened range of products, such as shoes, evening wear, and perfumes, with its mail catalog issued eight times annually.

By the early 1990s, Victoria’s Secret had become the largest American lingerie retailer, topping one billion dollars.

On July 10, 2007, Limited Brands sold 75% of The Limited clothing chain to firm Sun Capital Partners to focus and boost sales growth on Victoria’s Secret lingerie stores and Bath & Body Works units, which provided 72% of revenue in 2006 and almost all the firm’s profit. There are 1,000 Victoria’s Secret lingerie stores and 100 independent Victoria’s Secret Beauty Stores in the US, mostly in shopping centers. It sells brassieres, panties, hosiery, cosmetics, sleepwear, and other products. Victoria’s Secret mails more than 400 million of its catalogs per year. Under pressure from environmentalist groups, Victoria’s Secret’s parent firm and a conservation group have reached an agreement to make the lingerie retailer’s catalog more environmentally friendly in 2006. The catalog will no longer be made of pulp supplied from any woodland caribou habitat range in Canada, unless it has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. The catalogs will also be made of 10 percent recycled paper from post-consumer waste.

Victoria’s Secret is now attempting to build its image with a fairly conservative, middle-class shopper in mind, avoiding any connotations of sleaziness that lingerie might carry.

The company gained notoriety in the early 1990s after it began to use supermodels in its advertising and fashion shows. Throughout the past decade, it has turned down celebrity models and endorsements.

For men, Victoria’s Secret launched a “Very Sexy For Him” set, which includes cologne and aftershave.

Victoria’s Secret makes use of a rigorous customer service model, stressing upselling, frequent staff attention, and signing up customers for a store credit card that provides discounts for frequent shoppers in the way of coupons by mail and free merchandise.

Victoria’s Secret Angels

Victoria’s Secret Angels on a commercial for the Secret Embrace line.”Victoria’s Secret Angels” are the brand’s most visible models and spokeswomen. The VS Angels made their début in 1999 in the fourth annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Daniela Pestova, Karen Mulder, Laetitia Casta, Heidi Klum, Stephanie Seymour, and Tyra Banks are among the “Angels” from the original promotion. In May 2007, the Victoria’s Secret Angels, including Adriana Lima, Selita Ebanks, Alessandra Ambrosio, Izabel Goulart, and Karolina Kurkova were chosen to be part of People Magazine’s annual “100 Most Beautiful People in the World” issue. On November 13, 2007, Victoria’s Secret Angels became the first trademark awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The ‘Angels’ are among the world’s best-paid models.

A Chinese official Monday denied allegations that demand for ivory from Chinese workers is a main contributor to rising elephant poaching in Kenya.

Wan Ziming, director of enforcement and training at the endangered species’ office of the State Forestry Administration, said illegal ivory imports to China have declined significantly since 2000, despite smuggles from individual workers or travelers to Africa.

The country used to be the world’s largest ivory importer and ivory products exporter before the global ban in 1998.

“Now the amount of illegal ivory brought to China has been far less than many other countries,” Wan said.

He added about 30,000 kg of ivory was illegally traded to Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines last year, while China seizes about 300 kg of illegal ivory each year.

Wan’s remarks came in response to the latest blast from a Kenyan non-governmental organization.

Paula Kahumbu, director of Wildlife Direct, a Kenya-based non-government organization, was quoted by Reuters as saying that elephant poaching is rising in Kenya due to demand from an influx of Chinese workers into Africa.

Chinese nationals working on projects in Africa were placing orders for tusks with poachers, she said.

“There’s a massive influx of people, who are not very wealthy, who can afford to buy ivory at local prices and who make a lot of money out of it when they get it back to China,” she said.

East Africa is still recovering from extensive poaching in the 1960s and 1970s before the global ban.

Elephants endangered

In 1989, poaching had reduced populations to about 17,000 elephants.

Locals have received orders from Chinese people working on a road in northern Kenya, she said.

“I’ve been told up to 90 percent of seizures of ivory in this country are currently (from) Chinese nationals. To me, it’s very clear that there’s a link.”

Wan admitted the domestic price of ivory products is higher than in other countries, which might contribute to smuggling. He added the home market is also being powered by the rising demand of wealthy Chinese, he said.

The country is home to 20 to 30 ivory processing companies and more than 100 designated sales places, he said.

But Wan stressed China has cracked down on the illegal trade of ivory with great effort and has strictly followed international conventions. Last July, China became the second legal importer of Ivory after Japan, according to the committee of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

In China, laws prohibit transporting elephant ivory and perpetrators can be punished by up to 12 years in jail.

In August, Guangzhou Customs seized two passengers from Ethiopia carrying 8 kg of ivory products, marking the 139th and 140th ivory smuggling cases at Guangzhou customs this year.

By August, Baiyun airport customs in Guangzhou had seized 138 cases of ivory smuggling, totaling more than 182 kg, up by 90 percent year on year.

The 8 million yuan of seized ivory, including bangles, bracelet, sculptures, pen vase and chess, all came from African countries, the custom said.

Kunming seized Asian ivory of 36 kilograms worth 7.75 million yuan last December.

The court sentenced smugglers Wang Jinkai and Wang Jinfu to 12 years in jail and a fine of 12,000 yuan.

Ivory imports banned

Xu Hongfa, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) TRAFFIC East Asia China Program said many Chinese working in Kenya are not aware that they should not take ivory back to China, despite government calls for banning ivory imports.

“So far WWF has not received any reports or evidence to accuse Chinese workers as the main driving force to the rising elephant poaching,” he said.

“In Kenya, ivory can be sold at local markets,” he said. “When Chinese workers brought it back, they did not know they were violating the law.”

Xiong Lei, a Chinese who traveled to Kenya last month, said tourists were told many times by their tourist guide “absolutely no purchasing of any ivory in Kenya”.

She said shop owners told her the ivory-like products on the shelves are “bones”, not ivory.

“But we did not even dare to buy any bone products,” she said.

The annual autumn conference of the British Conservative Party opened on Monday in Manchester in preparation for the next general election.

It is the last autumn conference of the Conservative Party before Britain’s next general election probably to be held in the first half of next year.

The four-day conference will discuss a series of topics including the economic recovery, the labor market, foreign and home policies, energy and climate change, parliamentary expenses — topics that were also hot in the ruling Labour Party’s annual conference which ended on Oct. 1 in Brighton, southern England.

The autumn conference of the Conservative Party is held at a time when the ruling Labour Party is mired in difficulties such as economic recession and increasing casualties in Afghanistan, and the Conservative Party is well ahead of Labour in opinion polls with the election less than nine months away.

However, Conservative Chairman Eric Pickles opened the annual conference with a warning that, despite the polls, his party still had “a mountain to climb”.

“Be under no illusion, the general election is not in the bag,” he said. “To form the next government, we need to gain 117 seats — something not achieved by the Conservative party since 1931.”

The annual autumn conference of the British Conservative Party followed the annual meeting of Liberal Democrats held in Bournemouth last month and the Labor Party conference which ended a few days ago.

Australian police revealed on Wednesday that eight people have now been arrested in relation to robberies of international students in areas near the University of Newcastle campus.

A 19-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy were charged with four counts of attempted robbery.

“Police are continuing their investigations into several matters, and we are not ruling out further arrests,” Newcastle Police Superintendent Max Mitchell said.

Police said the accused first targeted a 22-year-old Chinese woman who was hauling a trolley of groceries, running up and stealing her handbag on Aug. 23.

Less than five hours later, the pair threatened a Newcastle man with a stick and demanded he hand over all his money, but the intended victim was able to get away.

A short time later, they approached an international student leaving a nearby mosque and demanded the man’s wallet.

Mitchell said police were taking a tough stand against such attacks.

“Police will not tolerate this type of criminal activity, and anyone we catch committing such offenses can expect to be dealt with swiftly and to the full extent of the law.”

Greece seems to have successfully resisted pressures from an international credit crisis, with economic growth at 3.5 percent in the first half of 2008, Greek Economy and Finance Minister George Alogoskoufis said on Tuesday.

“But there is no room for complacency, instead we must move on with reforms and structural changes,” Alogoskoufis told a conference on Banking on Greece.

The Greek minister acknowledged that the Greek banking system would be affected by the international credit crisis, but reassured that the Greek banking system is and will remain safe.

Commenting on the crisis, Alogoskoufis said that despite liquidity injections by central banks, negative impressions have intensified in the last few months regarding higher interest rates, higher bond prices, higher yield margins and the closure of markets.

He stressed that new pressures in interbank money markets further pushed interest rates higher, burdening households.

Alogoskoufis said the crisis coincided with higher international inflation trends. The impact on the EU economy came earlier than expected, he added, and was stronger, resulting in additional pressures on both state and household debt.