A 6.5-magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of the South Pacific island of Vanuatu on Sunday, the Hong Kong Observatory said, but there were no reports of a tsunami warning.

The quake struck at 2210 IST around 81 kilometres southwest of the capital Port Vila. The shallow quake, which had a depth of four kilometres, was measured by the US Geological Survey as having a magnitude of 6 on the Richter scale.

Officials in southern China appear to have averted environmental calamity by halting the spread of a toxic metal that had threatened to foul drinking water for tens of millions of people, the state media reported Monday.

Officials said they had successfully diluted the concentration of cadmium, a poisonous component of batteries, that has been coursing down the Longjiang River in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

HONG KONG: Environmentalists on Wednesday expressed disappointment at new clean-air targets for Hong Kong, as research showed pollution-related illnesses killed more than 3,000 residents a year. In the face of mounting public criticism and allegations that it is soft on polluting industry, the government on Tuesday announced its first revision to air quality objectives (AQOs) in 25 years. But the tighter standards will not be implemented until 2014 and fall well short of World Health Organisation guidelines.

Health authorities in Hong Kong are urging residents to take steps to ensure personal hygiene, and the city remains on high alert following the bird-flu-related death of a man in mainland China.

Renewed fears in Hong Kong came as Chinese authorities said preliminary tests showed the Shenzhen man, who died Saturday and whose case was China's first reported human case of bird flu in 18 months, was infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus—as was a dead bird found in Hong Kong's New Territories before the holidays.

Health workers here began slaughtering more than 17,000 chickens on Wednesday after a carcass infected with bird flu was found at a poultry market, government officials said. It was the first large-scale culling in three years.

A Hong Kong school was closed on Friday after a dead bird found in the southern Chinese city was tested positive for the deadly H5 strain of the bird flu virus, health officials said.

The closure came after the school clerk, a 48-year-old woman, picked up the sick black-headed gull at the school on Tuesday, which died the next day and was tested positive for the H5 strain, a health department spokesman told AFP.

General Electric, the US conglomerate, is set to help build Mongolia’s first wind energy park in a $100m deal with Newcom, a Mongolian private investment company.

The agreement marks GE’s entry into a market it hopes will generate infrastructure contracts that could help make up for slower growth in mature markets.

“Our order volume in Mongolia exceeds $100m in the near term, with this project accounting for about half of that,” said John Rice, vice-chairman and chief executive of GE’s Global Growth & Operations.

With the Kyoto Protocol unlikely to produce a new set of targets, Carbon Forum Asia 2011 which concluded in Singapore last week, released IETA’s Greenhouse Gas Market Report for the first time in Asia Pacific, lending credence to the region’s increasing importance in the global emissions trading market.

Japanese and South Korean companies have won the highest marks in Asia for “responsible” investing, which remains in its infancy in these countries, in a new survey by Eiris, an environmental research house.

Companies based in Hong Kong, China and Singapore, meanwhile, failed to make progress in this arena, with companies across Asia outperforming their Chinese peers on all of the measures surveyed except for environmental management systems.

Bhopal : The Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan will be on a nine day visit to Republic of China from September 12 to 20, 2011 in order to participate in the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting being held at Dalian city of China from September 14 to 16, 2011. Chouhan will leave for New Delhi on Septembrr 11 and proceed to Hongkong reaching there on September 12. He will leave Hongkong for Dalian city of China the same day.