Sumner Lemon

Authorities in Shanghai are investigating the attempted sale of babies on eBay Inc.'s auction site in China, the official China Daily newspaper reported.

An American convicted of DVD piracy and sentenced to jail in April by a Shanghai court has been deported, China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said Thursday.

Lenovo Group Ltd. is readying itself for a big push in the Indian market by creating a geographical division within the company that will focus exclusively on India, the company said Friday. The announcement is part of several steps being taken by the company to more tightly integrate its international and Chinese operations.

Google Inc. is unlikely to have a problem finding staff for a research and development (R&D) centre the company plans to set up in China, according to comments made by Kai-Fu Lee, the head of the company's Chinese operations, in an interview with the Chinese press. Google received more than 1,000 resumes within five hours of posting an online notice for available positions at the R&D centre, Lee said, according to a recent interview with the 21st Century Business Herald newspaper.

The Chinese government announced on Sunday a new set of regulations intended to tighten control over news reported on the Internet, but it was not immediately clear what, if any, effect the new regulations will have.

Once a U.S. judge ruled that he could begin work for Google Inc., former Microsoft Corp. executive Kai-Fu Lee didn't waste any time getting started on his search for researchers to staff Google's planned research and development (R&D) centre in China, a company spokeswoman said Friday. Last week, Judge Steven Gonzalez of the Superior Court of Washington State in King County ruled that Lee could begin work for Google to set up an R&D centre in China while a lawsuit over his hiring by Google awaits a trial that will start in January 2006.

Thirty-six per cent of the new customers that Sybase Inc. has signed up over the last year for its database software, ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise), are based in China, according to Marty Beard, the company's senior vice president of corporate development and marketing.

China United Telecommunications Corp. (China Unicom), the country's second-largest mobile operator, has begun tests of a service that combines mobile phone service with a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service, according to the U.S.-based company that supplied the technology for the project.