Arrest near Air Force One downplayed
Armed 23-year-old arrived at N.C. airport just after president left
NBC, msnbc.com and news services
ASHEVILLE, N.C. - Official concern is very low over the Ohio man who was charged after authorities spotted him with a gun in a North Carolina airport parking lot as Air Force One was departing Sunday.
Authorities arrested Joseph Sean McVey, 23, at the Asheville Regional Airport and charged him with going armed in terror of the public, a misdemeanor, Asheville Regional Airport Police Capt. Kevan Smith said.
Based on the airport police report, it appears that McVey pulled into the rental car parking lot about a minute after the president's plane left. His appearance provoked curiosity, because his car was loaded with police scanners and antennas. He had flashing police-style lights and a siren. And he was carrying a sidearm.
However, officials say he had a license to carry the gun and was apparently the kind of person who likes to hang around cops and help out, in parades with crowd control, for example.
This morning, one official familiar with the investigation says McVey heard the president's plane was at the airport and wanted to see it take off.
McVey has been charged with a misdemeanor, common law public nuisance violation, but there's nothing to indicate that it's going to go much further. He is to appear in court on Monday.
Security was heightened at the airport because President Barack Obama was leaving after spending the weekend vacationing in Asheville. He was headed to a memorial service for 29 West Virginia coal miners killed in an explosion.
Interest in law enforcement
McVey gave authorities an Ohio driver's license, but a computer check failed to show the number was valid, police said. His hometown of Coshocton is about halfway between Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio.
In his profile on the law enforcement community website policelink.monster.com, McVey wrote that he "plans to become a police officer of some sort."
He listed hobbies such as shooting, fishing, hunting, piano, trumpet and voice.
McVey graduated from West Liberty University in West Virginia and, according to his MySpace profile, he majored in music technology, the local Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper reported.
The newspaper surveyed a number of different social networking sites and blogs of which McVey is a participant, and reported that he marked as favorite on his YouTube account a video that allegedly shows U.S. soldiers accidentally killing civilians in Iraq.
The Asheville Citizen-Times reported that none of the websites examined by the paper include any mention of the president.
When Officer Kaleb Rice asked him what he was doing at the Asheville Regional Airport parking lot on Sunday, McVey told him he heard the president was in town and wanted to see him.
Rice removed the firearm and took McVey into custody.
The investigation into what McVey was doing with a gun, with formulas for rifle scopes and why his car was equipped with police gear was continuing, Smith said. The Secret Service had no comment on the arrest, deferring to airport police.
A jail officer said it didn't appear McVey had an attorney.
NBC's Pete Williams and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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London Times
Launch of secret US space ship masks even more secret launch of new weapon
Michael Evans, Pentagon Correspondent
The X-37B sits on top of an Atlas V rocket
Somewhere above earth is America’s latest spaceship, a 30ft craft so classified that the Pentagon will not divulge its mission nor how much it cost to build.
The mysterious X37B, launched successfully by the US Air Force from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, using an Atlas V rocket, looks like a mini-Space Shuttle — but its mission is top secret.
It is officially described as an orbital test vehicle. However, one of its potential uses appears to be to launch a surge of small satellites during periods of high international tension. This would enable America to have eyes and ears orbiting above any potential troublespot in the world.
The X37B can stay in orbit for up to 270 days, whereas the Shuttle can last only 16 days. This will provide the US with the ability to carry out experiments for long periods, including the testing of new laser weapon systems. This would bring accusations that the launch of X37B, and a second vehicle planned for later this year, could lead to the militarisation of space.
US defence officials, who would not say how much the project had cost, insisted, however, that it was “just an updated version of the Space Shuttle activities”.
Thursday’s launch was more about testing the craft, a new generation of silica tile and a wealth of other advances that make the Shuttle look like yesterday’s space technology.
Nasa’s X37B programme began in 1999 and ran until September 2004 when it was transferred to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency before being taken over by the US Air Force.
The flight of the X37B is being managed by the US Air Force Space Command’s 3rd Space Experimental Squadron.
“This bird has been through all of the shake, rattle and roll, the vibration tests, the acoustic tests that any spacecraft would go through,” said Gary Payton, Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programmes.
With all the focus on the launch of the secret X37B, another space launch by a Minotaur IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base in California received less attention.
It was carrying the prototype of a new weapon that can hit any target around the world in less than an hour.
The Prompt Global Strike is designed as the conventional weapon of the future. It could hit Osama bin Laden’s cave, an Iranian nuclear site or a North Korean missile with a huge conventional warhead.

As Tower Rises, So Do Efforts to Buy In

By CHARLES V. BAGLI
The planned skyscraper once known as the Freedom Tower was scorned for years by urban planners, downtown residents and real estate executives who regarded it as an oversize and unnecessary exercise in waste and hubris.
But the acrimonious debates, cost overruns and lengthy delays in building the tower appear to be over. More than 1,400 workers are pouring concrete and installing girder upon girder. And with the red steel latticework for the obelisk-shape building now rising more than 240 feet at ground zero, it has turned into an object of desire.
Four major real estate developers are vying to buy a minority stake in the $3.1 billion project and to take over the leasing and operating of the skyscraper. This week, the developers submitted their final offers to the owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which plans to pick a winner by June.
“The building has real international significance, and it’s important for New York,” said Stephen M. Ross, chief executive of Related Companies, one of the four companies competing for the $100 million deal.
Despite the recent Cinderella-like transformation of Freedom Tower, now known as 1 World Trade Center, it still faces a daunting challenge: whether it can attract private companies or will remain a heavily subsidized “government” building.
The Port Authority and its advisers at Cushman & Wakefield are pitching it as the most modern addition to the city’s skyline, with first-class restaurants and an observatory at the top that will attract business leaders and tourists alike.
The developers seem to agree. Even Douglas Durst, the chairman of the Durst Organization, whose family opposed both the original World Trade Center and the version being built, has jumped into the competition for the tower, along with Hines, an international real estate developer, and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the chairman of Boston Properties and the owner of The Daily News.
Vornado Realty Trust, a publicly traded company, and Brookfield Properties, the largest downtown landlord, have already been eliminated from the competition.
The competing developers acknowledge the immediate challenge of finding enough tenants for the building. But they say that a stake in 1 World Trade Center is a long-term investment in the future of the building and of Lower Manhattan. They said they were confident the area would rebound as both a residential and a commercial community, and some said they were also seeking the cachet of being associated with an internationally known skyscraper.
“You have to take a patient approach to your capital on this,” said Tommy Craig, a senior vice president for Hines. “It’s possible to structure the investment so that the risk that’s inherent is potentially offset by the return opportunities.”
One World Trade Center was a centerpiece of the master plan drawn up in 2003 by the architect Daniel Libeskind. Gov. George E. Pataki added to its patriotic patina by dubbing it the Freedom Tower. David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill turned the drawing into a glass tower. But after the Police Department raised security concerns, he was forced to redesign it in 2005.
In turn, corporate tenants and government workers declared they had no desire to move in. Some real estate executives railed against building so much expensive office space downtown without any tenants. Eliot Spitzer referred to it as a white elephant while he was running for governor but ultimately authorized its construction.
Initially, the building was “laden with negative symbolism and emblematic of the delays at ground zero,” said Julie Menin, the chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Manhattan, whose district includes the trade center site.
“Now,” she continued, “all these developers are vying for the site.”
The 104-story glass tower will sit on a 186-foot pedestal of prismatic glass covering a concrete-and-steel protective structure at the northwest corner of the 16-acre site. A 408-foot spire will rise from the top, bringing the total height to a symbolic 1,776 feet.
In an effort to kick-start the building, federal and state officials promised to lease a total of 1.2 million square feet, or about 40 percent of the tower. Since then, Vantone, a Chinese real estate company, has signed a lease for 190,000 square feet.
“The developers wouldn’t be interested in the building if they thought it was going to be all government,” said Tara Stacom, vice chairwoman of Cushman & Wakefield. “They, too, are convinced that this building will lease to private companies, professional and financial services.”
Even so, some developers acknowledge, a rent check from a government agency is as good as one from a private company — perhaps even more so, since it is usually reliable in coming.
Mr. Durst, one of the final bidders, said 1 World Trade Center was “ going to be the best building downtown and the only building you’ll be able to rent in; we thought we’d go for it.”
Mr. Durst’s remark about the “only building” was a reference to the competition — Larry Silverstein, who is known as an inexhaustible negotiator and is building 4 World Trade Center. The two buildings, which will be chasing the same tenants to fill more than one million square feet each, are set to open in 2013.
Mr. Silverstein’s tower also has government tenants — the Port Authority and city agencies. And Silverstein executives say their building, on Church Street, is closer to Wall Street and the financial district and, therefore, more likely to attract financial firms.
“I do think they need to attract private companies,” Ms. Menin said. “Why should taxpayers have to pay so that various government agencies can have 60-story views at astronomical rents?”
Executives at the authority, who are optimistic about the tower’s prospects, said they had the expertise to build the tower themselves but were inviting developers in so they could have a partner, with a financial stake in its fate, who could skillfully deal with tenants and their needs.
They have hired two real estate companies, Cushman & Wakefield and Jones Lang LaSalle, for advice, and have brought in a marketing and branding firm based in London, Wordsearch, specializing in real estate.
“We believe that a private-sector partner with real estate expertise will best operate the building and maximize its value,” said Anthony Coscia, chairman of the Port Authority. “But we want to do this in a responsible manner that protects the long-term interests of the authority.”

Plan for 34th St. Puts Buses and Feet First

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM NY TIMES
From the city that has banned cars from broad swaths of Broadway and put picnic tables in Times Square, here comes another great reshaping of New York’s streetscape.
The Bloomberg administration is moving ahead with what amounts to a radical, river-to-river reimagining of another major corridor: 34th Street, the Midtown thoroughfare that is home to Macy’s — and some of the city’s most congested traffic.
Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Herald Square and the Empire State Building.
The result would be a street effectively split in two.
On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River. Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier.
A public hearing on the plan was held on Wednesday, and officials from the Transportation Department met with business leaders last week. The intent is to create more space for pedestrians and to speed up bus trips on the street’s crosstown routes, which are among the slowest in the city.
The plan was proposed in 2008 by the department, but the drive to put it into effect has recently accelerated. The city completed a study of the proposal in February, and is now preparing the environmental and design reviews.
The final design for the plaza and traffic changes is expected in fall 2011, with the street ready for use by the end of 2012. The redesign is expected to cost a minimum of $30 million, and officials said they would continue to tweak the plan based on public reaction and in-house studies.
“It’s going to improve the mobility along the corridor,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner. “We expect the bus travel times to improve by up to 35 percent, which is something that up to 33,000 passengers that currently travel crosstown will appreciate.”
Ms. Sadik-Khan said a city study showed that only one in 10 people travel along 34th Street by car, including taxis; the rest walk or use mass transit. Faster buses would benefit “the majority of the people who are actually using the street,” she said.
With the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, tourist attractions like Macy’s, and major transit hubs (including a ferry terminal and helipad), 34th Street has some of the highest transportation demands in the city — and it does not benefit from crosstown subway lines as 42nd Street does.
Officials have long viewed the street as a prime candidate for an experimental bus lane that would be separated from regular car traffic. Bus lanes would bisect the pedestrian plaza and carry tourist buses and some private lines as well as those operated by New York City Transit. Buses would run in both directions along the entire length of 34th.
Transit buses using the lane would also benefit from other new initiatives: passengers will be able to pay for bus tickets at sidewalk kiosks before boarding, and electronic devices on buses could signal traffic lights to remain green as the buses approach intersections.
Officials decided to make car traffic one-way to make it easier and safer, rather than requiring pedestrians to navigate across both east-west bus lanes and east-west car lanes.
It remains unclear how the plan might affect car traffic in the surrounding area.
As well as being a hub for commuters and tourist buses, 34th Street acts as a critical conduit for travelers who use the street to travel between the Lincoln Tunnel and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Drivers seeking a route across town might be forced onto nearby cross-streets; 36th Street is a popular eastbound approach to Queens, and 33rd and 35th Streets may be common westbound routes, traffic experts said.
Transit advocates were nearly universal in their praise of the program, saying it would encourage use of mass transit and make 34th more palatable to pedestrians.
And they noted that the pedestrian plazas in Times Square had allowed New Yorkers to acclimate to street designs that were once considered alien.
“Maybe three years ago, it was radical, but not today,” said Veronica Vanterpool, associate director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit policy group that supports the plan.
People attending the hearing on Wednesday, however, said they had concerns that they feared would not be addressed by the city.
“It’s a project that seems a fait accompli,” said Iris Steinhardt, a Murray Hill resident who arrived at the public hearing with several residents of her building on East 34th Street.
Ms. Steinhardt is worried that the bus lanes, which abut the sidewalk, will destroy the loading zone in front of her building, making it hard to get deliveries. She said a flier about the plan posted in their building lobby was the first she had heard about it.
Dan Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership, a Herald Square business group, supports the plan for the most part, save for a few quibbles. But he has told his members to review the plan quickly.
“Please complain right now, or within the next few weeks,” Mr. Biederman said he told them. “This is not your father’s D.O.T. This agency says they do something and they do it.”

San Francisco Detours Into Reality Tourism

By JESSE McKINLEY
SAN FRANCISCO — Visitors know all too well this pretty city’s sights, what with the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and the clang-clang-clangy cable cars.
But now San Francisco’s civic boosters have decided they want to add a highly unlikely stop to the tourist itinerary: the Uptown Tenderloin, the ragged, druggy and determinedly dingy domain of the city’s most down and out.
And what is the appeal?
“We offer a kind of grittiness you can’t find much anymore,” said Randy Shaw, a longtime San Francisco housing advocate and a driving force behind the idea of Tenderloin tourism. “And what is grittier than the Tenderloin?”
Indeed, after years of neglect and bitter battles over its gentrification, the Tenderloin remains one of the most stubborn challenges in San Francisco, a city that prides itself on its looks, its way of life and its bold solutions to social ills, whether they involve offering universal health care (the city was the first to do so) or banning plastic bags (ditto).
So it is that armed with a recent listing on the National Register of Historic Places, community and city leaders are readying the Tenderloin for its big moment, complete with plans for a new museum, an arts district and walking tours of “the world’s largest collection of historic single-room occupancy hotels.” And unlike, say, the Tenement Museum in New York, which offers tours of a long-unused Lower East Side apartment building, a trip to the Tenderloin could go a step further.
“We can bring people into an SRO and show them where people are living now,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to the single-room occupancy dwellings, or residential hotels, in the area. “And that’s a real plus.”
Mr. Shaw’s plan has the backing of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who announced a city grant last month to help promote “a positive identity for the Tenderloin” and to draw tourism to the area, in part by posting hundreds of plaques on buildings throughout the neighborhood “to create great visual interest for those walking down the community’s streets.”
And oh, what streets those are. Wedged between tourist-friendly Union Square and its liberal-friendly City Hall, the Tenderloin is one of the mostly densely populated areas west of the Mississippi, officials say, with some 30,000 people in 60 square blocks, almost all of which have at least one residential hotel. The district’s drug trade is so widespread, and so wide open, that the police recently asked for special powers to disperse crowds on certain streets. Deranged residents are a constant presence, and after dark the neighborhood can seem downright sinister, with drunken people collapsed on streets and others furtively smoking pipes in doorways.
All of which, Tenderloin fans contend, is as much a part of San Francisco as flashier, decidedly less seedy attractions like Chinatown or Coit Tower.
“I think a lot of San Franciscans appreciate the Tenderloin,” said Don S. Falk, the executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that has renovated and operates 15 residential hotels in the Tenderloin. “It’s part of their identity.”
Encouraging adventure-seeking San Franciscans to visit may be easier than selling the Tenderloin to tourists, city tourism officials say. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the recent efforts “a step in the right direction,” but added that it was a “very, very long road” to make the neighborhood appealing.
“At this point in time, there aren’t many reasons for visitors to go there,” Ms. Armstrong said. “We don’t really point people away from there, but our job is to point people to things that they can do. And there’s so many things to do in San Francisco.”
But Mr. Shaw begs to differ, saying the area is chockablock with historical nuggets, like the Hotel Drake, where Frank Capra lived as a starving young director in the early 1920s, or the Cadillac Hotel, built a year after the great 1906 earthquake and fire and where Muhammad Ali later trained. Jerry Garcia also lived at the Cadillac, and he and the Grateful Dead recorded several albums in the area at what is now Hyde Street Studios, as did other Bay Area bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane.
“And when Miles Davis came to town,” Mr. Shaw said, “he played in the Tenderloin.”
Mr. Shaw, who plans to open a $3 million museum in the Cadillac, believes that baby boomer music fans — and particularly baby boomer Deadheads — will be a core demographic for the Tenderloin, as well as those interested in the neighborhood’s “rich vice history,” which includes gambling dens, speakeasies and pornographic-movie houses.
“Most of which are gone,” the museum’s brochure notes, almost sadly.
Experts agree that the neighborhood has historical value, in part because its entrenched poverty and the city’s own prohibitive zoning have prevented development.
“Money sometimes is the enemy of historic preservation,” said Jay Correia, a historian with the California Office of Historic Preservation, which recommended the Tenderloin to the national register. “The irony is because the Tenderloin was economically disadvantaged, there were no funds to modernize.”
And while battles over maintaining low-income housing derailed some past efforts to develop the neighborhood, even Mr. Falk, of the nonprofit housing development corporation, says a little new development would not be a bad thing.
“In 1981, gentrification was the most important issue; in 2010, quality of life is the most important issue,” Mr. Falk said. “People with disposable income help local businesses be successful, and those local businesses help support homeless people.”
In addition to tourism — visitors spent nearly $8 billion in San Francisco in 2009 — city officials are also trying more traditional approaches, including applying for a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for public art on the neighborhood’s western border and backing a proposed 250,000-square-foot retail project on its eastern flank.
Mr. Shaw hopes to break ground on his museum by next year and will start posting promotional placards — inviting visitors to “walk, dine, enjoy” the Uptown Tenderloin — this summer. And more plaques are to be mounted on more buildings soon.
Whether posters and plaques are enough to conquer poverty remains to be seen. Chris Patnode, a ruddy-faced self-described wanderer who is staying in a local SRO, said he liked the idea of Tenderloin tourism and seemed to be willing to welcome outsiders. Just as long, of course, as they know when to come knocking.
“In daylight, it’d be O.K.,” said Mr. Patnode, 48. “But people aren’t going to want to come down here at night. I don’t even want to be here at night. And I’m staying here.”

H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip

By JOHN MARKOFF NY TIMES
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday are to report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the atomic scale.
The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.
They are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in the absence of an electrical current and, according to a report in Nature, can be used for both data processing and storage applications.
The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits.
Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said.
“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”
In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes.
That is a significant hurdle to overcome, indicating that it is now possible to consider memristor-based chips as an alternative to today’s transistor-based flash computer memories, which are widely used in consumer devices like MP3 players, portable computers and digital cameras.
“Not only do we think that in three years we can be better than the competitors,” Dr. Williams said. “The memristor technology really has the capacity to continue scaling for a very long time, and that’s really a big deal.”
As the semiconductor industry has approached fundamental physical limits in shrinking the size of the devices that represent digital 1’s and 0’s as on and off states, it has touched off an international race to find alternatives.
New generations of semiconductor technology typically advance at three-year intervals, and today the industry can see no further than three and possibly four generations into the future.
The most advanced transistor technology today is based on minimum feature sizes of 30 to 40 nanometers — by contrast a biological virus is typically about 100 nanometers — and Dr. Williams said that H.P. now has working 3-nanometer memristors that can switch on and off in about a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second.
He said the company could have a competitor to flash memory in three years that would have a capacity of 20 gigabytes a square centimeter.
“We believe that that is at least a factor of two better storage than flash memory will be able to have in that time frame,” he said.
The H.P. technology is based on the ability to use an electrical current to move atoms within an ultrathin film of titanium dioxide. After the location of an atom has been shifted, even by as little as a nanometer, the result can be read as a change in the resistance of the material. That change persists even after the current is switched off, making it possible to build an extremely low-power device. The new material offers an approach that is radically different from a promising type of storage called “phase-change memory” being pursued by I.B.M., Intel and other companies.
In a phase-change memory, heat is used to shift a glassy material from an amorphous to a crystalline state and back. The switching speed of these systems is slower and requires more power, the H.P. scientists say.

From The London Times
Chinese Party lothario took kickbacks to finance his dream of 800 lovers
Jane Macartney

Beijing A Chinese official who set out to bed 800 women has become the latest Communist Party mandarin to face disgrace and possible jail because of his sexual adventures.
The middle-ranking official from a commercial department in the city of Anqing, Anhui province, central China, is accused of taking bribes to finance his exploits.
Identified only by the pseudonym Wang Cheng, his affairs came to light last month after his wife found diaries in which he recounted in minute detail his search for sex, his conquests and the bribes that he had raked in to pay for them.
Mr Wang, 47, rose quickly through the bureaucracy from a rural county job to a more powerful role in the city. The local Xin’an Evening News said that he seemed to be enjoying an ideal life with a successful career, a child at university and a wife who was working in a similar department.
His downfall came when he began to stay late at the office. Then he told his wife that he had to go out in the evening for social engagements. When he began to spend the whole night away from home she became suspicious.
On a visit to her parents-in-law last month she found an IOU slip for 660,000 yuan (£63,600) written out to Mr Wang from a woman she did not know, along with several of her husband’s diaries and computer discs.
In the diaries she found detailed accounts of her husband’s sexual escapades. He had also made video recordings of his trysts. His wife confided in a friend, who reported Mr Wang to the authorities.
On March 21 Mr Wang was detained at his office and taken for questioning. Faced with so much evidence, written in his own hand, he quickly confessed, the newspaper said. He told investigators that local businessmen gave him money in return for his using his power to help them. He admitted buying numerous properties with the bribes, as well as paying women.
His diaries showed that since 2003 he had mapped out targets for this supplementary income to pay for his conquests. In 2003, he wrote, his monthly salary was 1,600 yuan and he planned to supplement this with 8,000 yuan a month in extracurricular funds, with a goal of amassing 100,000 yuan a year.
“He was busy eight hours a day seeking bribes and eight hours a day as a hooligan seeking sex,” the report quoted a prosecutor as saying.
On the first page of his diary Mr Wang wrote: “In 2003 I want to have sex with at least 56 women and keep two mistresses from respectable families.”
He more than fulfilled his goals. Three diaries showed that he had sex with about 500 women — although he fell short of his ultimate aim of “between 600 and 800 women”.
China has introduced regulations since 1988 to deter officials from taking a mistress, but these have failed to curb abuses by government servants.
Last month an official was sacked and arrested after his diary detailing sexual exploits and bribery was splashed across the internet.