Society

An injured man receives medical treatment at the People's Hospital in Changzhi of north China's Shanxi Province, Aug. 20, 2011. A boiler exploded early Saturday in the Chengqu Hospital in Changzhi, leaving three people dead and 17 others injured.

Three people were killed and 17 others injured, two severely, after a blast ripped through a boiler room in a hospital in northern Chinese city of Changzhi Friday, local authorities said.

China's state news agency said Monday that 11 people died and at least 120 were sickened after consuming vinegar that had been put in barrels once used to store toxic anti-freeze.

The Xinhua news agency said residents of Sangzhu village in China's northwest Xinjiang region consumed the vinegar during a large Ramadan feast on Saturday, following a day of fasting. All the victims were ethnic Muslims. Xinhua said children as young as six were among the dead.

China started building 7.218 million units of low-income housing in the first seven months of this year, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development said Friday.

Construction of such houses accelerated significantly in July, the ministry said in a statement on its website. The statistics did not include the number in Tibet Autonomous Region, it added.

The government vowed to start construction of 10 million units of low-income housing this year, part of the five-year plan to build 36 million units by 2015.

The government hopes such affordable houses can stabilize the country's runaway property prices.

China Mobile will invest 13 billion yuan ($2.02 billion) in Shanghai for building broadband networks, which coordinate GSM, TD-SCDMA, TD-LTE and WLAN technologies, within three years, Sohu reported.

By the end of 2013, its WLAN access points will exceed 90,000 and international bandwidth will reach 300G.