Briefs | Italian castle for sale on Taobao

The first step for anyone in China who fancies purchasing a million dollar property on the other side of the globe, could be as easy as ordering a shirt online. An auction of Italian real estate started yesterday on Taobao.com, one of China’s largest e-commerce platforms. According to the company, a USD27.9 million castle in Valpolicella will be auctioned tomorrow with a starting price of 100 million yuan (USD16 million). At the same time, 103 apartments in Milan will go under the hammer, said Taobao’s Lu Weixing. Online buyers can browse the apartments’ basic information and fees before paying a deposit to join the auction. It is the first time a castle has been the subject of a Taobao auction. Previous overseas property auctions included four islands in Fiji and hundreds of houses in the United States. Taobao plans more diverse auctions for consumers such as Australian ranches and French chateaus.

‘Breaking Bad’ professor arrested for leaking cannibal drug recipe

Police in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province have arrested 17 people for producing a psychoactive drug that has been linked to cannibalism, the local public security bureau announced yesterday. Police in Sanyuan County arrested a man surnamed Lu for helping provide the recipe for methcathinone, the drug nicknamed “bath salts” which drove a man to eat another’s flesh in the U.S.  Lu was a former chemistry professor at a university in Xi’an. They also seized 128 kilograms of the drug, 2,000 liters of semi-finished product and more than five million yuan (USD806,000). The psychoactive drug is quite cheap and highly addictive, and has been known to cause users to turn violent. According to an investigation, Lu provided the recipe for methcathinone in May 2013. A suspect surnamed Chen, who was in charge of drug production, was the head of a chemical plant in east China’s Jiangsu Province. Chen was once imprisoned for more than one year for producing a different drug, police added. The drug lab was busted in May 2014 with three suspects arrested at the scene. The rest of the gang was seized within six months, police said.