Communist candidate Anatoly Lokot won 43.75% of the vote to secure victory as mayor of Novosibirsk, according to preliminary results after all ballots were counted. He defeated acting mayor, Vladimir Znatkov, a member of United Russia, in the election. No other candidate achieved more than 4% of the vote and 2.01% of ballots were found invalid.

A government critic and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, Mr. Hao signed Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto modeled on Charter 77, the 1977 document that helped usher in the end of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia. He has participated in forums about democracy and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where his cousin died from a bullet wound.

Supporters of China's disgraced senior politician Bo Xilai, who has been jailed for corruption, have set up a political party, two separate sources said, in defiance of a decades-old de facto ban on new political parties. The Zhi Xian Party, literally "the constitution is the supreme authority" party, was formed on 6 November, three days before the opening of a key meeting of top Communist Party leaders to discuss much-needed economic reforms, the sources said.