Construction officially started on Saturday after 28 years of negotiations between Russia and China. The new cross-border road bridge and its corresponding infrastructure will cost around $355 million and will be 19.9 km long. Some 6.5km of the bridge and road junctions will lie in China, and the remaining 13.5km in Russia, according to China's CNS agency. The length of the main suspension bridge will be roughly 1,300 meters and its width 14.5 meters.

“The bridge is an important link and part of the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor. It will strengthen cooperation between the two regions, it will break the bottleneck of local development,” Qin Enting, Heihe Communist Party Chief, said at the ceremony.

The territorial principle dominates the construction agreement, each country will construct the respective part of the bridge. Russian companies will make the connection between the two parts. When the construction is completed, the Russian side of the bridge will become the property of the Amur region, while the Chinese part will be owned by Heilongjiang Province. The bridge will contribute greatly to modernization of the transport system of the two regions, according to Heilongjiang Province Governor Lu Hao.

“Infrastructure projects are a priority and top leaders of our two countries are very supportive of such projects in the border area. Once completed the bridge will not only benefit the economy, but all aspects of exchange,” governor of the Amur region, Alexander Kozlov said.

The bridge is expected to be built in three years and will open late 2019. The bridge will greatly facilitate trade between the two countries, since the route will be roughly 3,500km shorter. By 2020,cargo turnover is expected to increase 10-fold, from 300,000 to 3 million metric tons.

The agreement on the bridge's construction was signed in September last year. Works were scheduled to start in July, but were postponed. After the completion of the road bridge, a railroad bridge will be erected next to it.

The new Amur bridge will be an impressive engineering masterpiece, comparable in several aspects with the under construction Crimea bridge, which is expected to be opened late in 2018.

China has made remarkable progress since it initiated a strategy to develop its vast western areas in 2000. The 13th Five-Year (2016-2020) Plan period is a crucial time for western regions to realize transformation and upgrading, Li said at a conference on Friday.

The country should push forward supply-side structural reform, expand demand moderately, boost innovation, continue to implement the west development strategy, and strengthen the coordination of it with other major strategies such as the Belt and Road Initiative and development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, he said.

The fundamental way to develop the regions is to enhance their endogenous growth through innovation and reform and opening-up, Li said.

More efforts should be done to streamline administrative approvals, reduce taxation and fees, cut transaction costs, improve business environment, promote entrepreneurship, encourage private capital to participate in the development of the western regions.

Li stressed the importance of infrastructure construction and ecological protection in promoting the western regions' sustainable development. He urged efforts to protect the environment, improve road and water infrastructure, and ensure the quality of drinking water for rural residents.

Environmentally-friendly industries that can employ a large workforce are encouraged to move to the western regions. Investors are also encouraged to build factories there.

Li called for efforts to develop advanced manufacturing sector and emerging sectors, and promote the development of industries with ethnic characteristics such as medicine and traditional handicraft.

He added that in order to improve people's livelihoods, targeted and precise measures should be adopted to alleviate poverty. More education and health care resources should be channeled to the western regions, and basic public services should be increased.

The west development strategy covers 11 provinces and autonomous regions including Gansu, Guizhou, Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Inner Mongolia and Guangxi, in addition to Chongqing municipality. The regions account for more than two thirds of the nation's territory, with a population making up over 20 percent of the nation's total.

The country's cabinet, the State Council, approved the western development five-year plan on Friday, according to a notice published by China's official government website late on Sunday.

China's rapid economic development over the past four decades has been skewed heavily toward the eastern coast.

Beijing has been trying to correct the imbalance not only in order to promote growth in politically crucial and energy-rich western regions such as Xinjiang and Yunnan, but also to ease environmental pressures in eastern regions, including the congested and polluted Yangtze and Pearl river deltas.

Premier Li Keqiang, who chaired the cabinet meeting, said China would continue to implement measures aimed at reducing the tax burden in the west to cut the cost of doing business.

He also said the west must promote new forms of urbanization and industrialization and pay attention to protecting the environment, particularly its scarce water supplies, which have constrained development in large parts of the region.

(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Eric Meijer)

The latest round for Koubei, which deals in local services such as food delivery, will surpass a $1 billion target with backing from China Investment Corp, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. The round also includes Yunfeng Capital, a fund backed by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, and values the two-year-old startup at about $8 billion, they said.

Silver Lake, the largest technology-focused private equity firm, was an early investor in Alibaba but typically eschews early-stage backing for Chinese startups. On-demand local services have attracted major spending in past years and have become a costly battleground for Chinese internet companies from Alibaba to Tencent Holdings Ltd, as more people turn to the web to order take-out, schedule beauty treatments and hire domestic helpers.

Beijing-based Primavera Capital Group and CDH Investments are also investing in Koubei's round, the people said.

Fred Hu, chairman of Primavera, confirmed the company is an investor in Koubei without elaborating. Silver Lake declined to comment while CIC, CDH and Yunfeng didn't respond to requests for comment.

Baidu Inc is the other big player in a loosely defined "online-to-offline" market that's expected to reach 7.28 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) by 2017. Chinese users of location-based services could rise 29 percent to 400 million people next year, according to Shanghai-based internet consultant iResearch.

The intense competition for online consumption requires billions of dollars in marketing, subsidies and other incentives to encourage spending. It's also heightening tensions between the country's largest internet players.

Bloomberg

Instead of applying liquid or powder to conceal spots or wrinkles, the new technology is based on the idea of wearing a tailor-made sheet produced by a special printer.

Panasonic Corp. is developing what it calls the “makeup sheet,” an ultra-fine film that the company says can mask a person’s skin problems by covering the face with it.

According to the company’s announcement on Dec. 1, a smart “mirror” developed for the makeup sheet system assesses five categories of the skin’s condition such as blotches, wrinkles and transparency with a built-in camera under a light-emitting diode (LED) light.

Within about two minutes of the analysis, the inkjet printer developed for the system prints a sheet up to 10 centimeters square that best matches skin color and the size of wrinkles.

Spraying water on one side of the sheet allows it to be stuck on to the skin, and other cosmetics can be applied on top of it, according to Panasonic. It can be easily removed with water.

Under the project, Panasonic draws on technology used in chips, organic electro-luminescence and other fields.

The company is looking for a cosmetics maker to translate the technology into a marketable product.

“We want to see the makeup sheet become part of our daily life by around 2020,” said Panasonic’s Sachiko Kawaguchi, who is in charge of the project.

Conventional ideas of skin-care products and cosmetics are undergoing transformation in other areas such as “cosmetics garments” that have already hit shop shelves.

Teijin Ltd., a leading fiber maker, announced in November last year that it has developed what it described as the country’s first cosmetics garments designed to keep the skin moist.

The product, named Raffinan, is made of fiber soaked in malic acid.

The company said it keeps the skin in the healthy condition of being mildly acidic by retaining moisture.

Teijin said the Raffinan material retains its ability even if it is washed 50 times or so.

Descente Ltd., a sportswear maker, has rolled out T-shirts and tank tops made of the material since March under the brand name Uroute.

State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd.’s board approved the purchase of an 80 percent stake in Gujarat State Petroleum Corp.’s deepwater block in the Krishna Godavari basin, it said in a statement on Friday. The New Delhi-based company will pay $995.26 million for the Deen Dayal West Field, the largest discovery in the KG-OSN-2001/3 block, with estimated natural gas reserves of 1.1 trillion cubic feet.

It will pay​ another $200 million for six other discoveries in the block located in the Bay of Bengal. The block has likely total reserves of at least 11.2 trillion cubic feet, according to GSPC’s annual report for the year ended March 31.

“The acquisition fits well with the strategy of ONGC to enhance natural gas production from domestic fields on a faster pace,” the company said, adding that trial gas production from Deen Dayal West Field has already started.

The deal will help expedite production of gas from the block critical to achieve Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of reducing import dependency of hydrocarbons by 10 percent by 2022.

The companies will share infrastructure and reduce costs in an area where both have spent or plan to spend at least $3 billion each. The deal is critical for GSPC, a company owned by the government of the western state of Gujarat, as it is at least four years behind schedule in starting commercial gas production despite having completed construction of a processing platform, gas pipeline and an onshore terminal.
ONGC said the acquisition will help it develop faster its discoveries in the Yanam and Godavari areas as well as gas discoveries in its KG-DWN-98/2 block.