Shanghai - France's Gilles Simon will get a test of fire in his opening group match at the Masters Cup starting on Sunday when he faces holder Roger Federer.

Simon only squeezed into the field on Monday when world number one Rafael Nadal withdrew with a knee injury, now diagnosed as tendinitis.

Federer has won the last two editions in Shanghai and hopes to end the four-year run in China for the year-end event with a trophy hat-trick.

The Swiss who quit the Paris Masters last week with back pains, has won five Masters trophies and is top seed at the 4.45 million-dollar showcase.

Andy Murray and Andy Roddick make up the remaining members of Federer's Red group.

Beijing - German chemical giant Bayer on Friday formally launched production at a new plant in Shanghai with the capacity to produce 350,000 tons annually of diphenylmethane diisocyanate (MDI).

   "The new world-scale plant is the largest MDI facility of its kind in the world," Bayer said a press release issued in Shanghai.

   It said it had also broken ground on the construction of another plant at its purpose-built Bayer Integrated Site Shanghai to produce 250,000 tons of toluene diisocyanate (TDI) per year by 2010.

Shanghai - The largest show for contemporary art in Asia opened its doors for an expert audience on Tuesday in Shanghai.

ShContemporay, with 150 participating galleries from 20 countries, is the most important of three art shows running this week in the eastern Chinese city.

The other two in the framework of the so-called Art Compass are the Shanghai Biennale, running until Tuesday and the Shanghai Art Fair, which is open until Saturday.

Beijing, Aug. 29: Shanghai will open the world's third-tallest skyscraper to the public tomorrow, 14 years after the project began.

Total investment in the 101-story, 492-meter-high landmark project, located in Pudong's Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, amounts to over eight billion Yuan (1.16 billion U. S. dollars).

According to Xinhua, its owner, Minoru Mori, Japan's biggest private real estate developer, has said that the building has been completed on time and will be called the Shanghai World Financial Center.

Beijing - Shares in China's main stock market lost

Shanghai, Apr 21: China will complete the construction of its first inland Antarctic research stat