Showers should diminish today and tomorrow, and the sky is forecast to turn overcast to cloudy tomorrow afternoon, said the Shanghai observatory. Sunday will be mostly cloudy, and the sun should show up again on Monday, the observatory said.

The high should gradually climb up over the weekend and reach 28 degrees on Monday.

"The rain belt is moving east over the weekend and the rain should gradually stop on Saturday," said Zhang Ruiyi, a chief service officer of the observatory.

"The temperature difference should also increase with the rising of the high, and residents might want to be aware of it."

Shanghai's cool weather should remain today, with a low of 18 degrees Celsius and a high reaching 23 degrees. The mercury is expected to reach 25 tomorrow.

The city's recent cool wave has stranded the city's entry into summer. Summer is announced when the average 24-hour temperature reaches 22 degrees Celsius for five consecutive days after li xia, a solar term of the Chinese lunar calendar that usually occurs around May 5.

A local university researcher is leading the translation team for the World Health Organization's International Classification of Traditional Medicine project, the university's officials announced yesterday.

Commissioned by the State Food and Drug Administration, Li Zhaoguo, deputy dean of Foreign Languages College of Shanghai Normal University, has made the national standards translation for thousands of TCM terms. The Chinese standards have been submitted to the WHO to make the international standards, Li said.

Experts from different countries often differ about translation of TCM concepts, and Li discusses the standard translation with experts.

The Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau yesterday announced new criteria to decide whether a low-income family or resident is qualified to get the monthly government living subsidy. The revised system adds to what should be counted as applicants' personal properties.

Antique collections and stocks should be reported together with savings and stable incomes. Moreover, not only a car but also a car license plate will now be considered part of the applicants' property for evaluating their qualification for the basic living allowance. The allowance for a downtown resident is 505 yuan per month, with 323,600 local residents benefiting last year.

The new rules reflect the harsh reality that a local car plate, a de facto registry permit only to license an automobile, has turned incredibly costly. The monthly car plate auction is a unique Shanghai practice. The city government launched it in 1994 to control the number of private cars on local streets.

The price of a car plate has turned from only hundreds of yuan to about 64,000 yuan (US$10,112) last month.

The 38-year-old woman, Zhou Ying, had to seek police protection as she stayed at a police station throughout the night because she dare not confront the crowd of angry cat owners waiting outside, wanting to beat her, on Wednesday evening.

Zhou walked out of the station yesterday evening and returned home for a short time to pack up her things before leaving in a rush, said an animal welfare volunteer who waited at her rented apartment.

On Wednesday night, over 50 cat owners, most of whom had given kittens to the woman in the past two years but learned that she actually killed them all, gathered at her apartment in a complex on Jiaocheng Road, Zhabei District, demanding an explanation.

Caphy Yang, 24, one of the cat owners, told Shanghai Daily they gathered after a middle-aged woman complained that Zhou adopted a cat from her but its body was later found thrown onto the lawn in front of her apartment.

Zhou wrapped the cat in plastic bags, choking it half-dead, then stepped on it to break its bones. Finally she threw the cat in the bag out the window from the sixth floor, the cat owner told others. The cat owners said the woman has been doing this for about 10 years.

"It's so sickening as I still remember the day in November last year when Zhou came to my apartment to adopt the cat," said Yang.

"She held the cat in her arms to kiss it in front me, wearing such a kind-hearted face and kept calling it 'my dearest baby,'" said Yang. "When I wanted to pay a visit to my kitty, I called her 20 times but she never picked up the phone."

Yang and the other 50-plus cat owners rushed to Zhou's apartment about 6pm yesterday, kicked the door open and searched for their kittens, but no one found any. All they found was that the woman lived in a rather small rented apartment, despite her claims that she lived in a luxury villa.

Cleaning staff workers at the complex told the cat owners that they often found the bodies of cats, many of which didn't even have their heads, in the garbage bins.

Some other cats with broken bones after being thrown to the ground were often seen dying, the workers said.

Some neighbors of the woman told the cat owners that they sometimes heard screaming of the cats late at night, Yang said.

"How can she do this! I've lived with the cats for many years and treat them more like relatives. What if the woman abused your relative to death?" asked a man among the cat owners.

Zhou and all the cat owners were taken to a police station for investigation. Zhou denied that she abused the cats to death, Yang said.

But in China where cats and dogs are not protected by any laws, the woman would not receive any punishment in any case.

Police told the cat owners they won't do anything about the incident.

The unidentified suspect allegedly attacked his neighbor about 8am in a house on Danshui Road near Fuxing Road M. The victim, surnamed Wang, 41, died of knife wounds at the scene, police said.

The suspect "complained it was our pet dog that defecated at his door. In revenge, he put the poop onto our window and that irritated my husband," said Wang's wife.

Local patients can speak to doctors and nurses at the reception desk and out-patient clinics in Shanghai dialect. For doctors who don't speak Shanghai dialect, nurses can be the interpreter.

Hospital officials said the new effort aims to make visiting doctors more convenient for local patients, especially the seniors many of whom can't speak fluent mandarin.

Doctors said good communication is the base of effective treatment and speaking Shanghai dialect can help with such communication during the medical check.

Some other hospitals have also realized the problem. Huadong Hospital has offered courses to teach its medical staff Shanghai dialect.

Prosecutors said Huang bought sevens sets of the fake coins from a street vendor in the city's downtown Huangpu District and sold five sets of them to Chen at 2,600 yuan per set.

Chen, 22, then sold three sets of the fake coins online at 3,000 yuan to 3,300 yuan each during February. Chen was caught on February 15 after the victims reported to police.

In court, the pair pleaded guilty and Chen asked for lenient sentence noting the fact that he was still a student.

"I started the business because I noticed commemorative coins are very popular and some have soared in value these days," Chen told the court.

The court said commemorative coins were also official currencies. Any dealing in counterfeits of the official commemorative currency is against law.

The souvenir coins marking the Year of Dragon were issued last October by the nation's central bank. Each set contains 15 coins including eight gold coins and seven silver coins in various shapes.