Beijing Times, February 14, 2008

It's Valentine's Day, which means that many of China's metro dailies feature lovers, hearts, or flowers on the cover. Beijing Times has a photo of a bouquet of special 7-color roses, created by applying Dutch technology to a white rose base. They sell for around 200 yuan apiece. Another holiday speciality is a "proposal" bouquet of 999 normal roses that sells for 19,000 yuan.

Today's top headline announces that mobile phone roaming fees will be capped at 0.6 yuan a minute for calls made out of area and 0.4 yuan for calls received out of area. Although the new plan, jointly proposed by the Ministry of Information Industry and the National Development and Reform Commission, cuts prices by more than half of what they currently are, many people were hoping that roaming fees would be eliminated altogether; a public hearing last month ended inconclusively, so the government worked out its own plan, which will go into effect between March and May. (Xinhua link)

The second headline reports that an investigation into the poisoned dumplings that made at least ten Japanese consumers ill has revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine called allegations that Chinese workers poisoned the dumplings nothing more than speculation. (AP link)