Beijing

China has banned a Nike television commercial showing United States basketball star LeBron James in a battle with a cartoon kung fu master, saying the ad insults Chinese national dignity. The commercial was broadcast on local Chinese stations and on state television’s national sports channel before being pulled last month.

At least eight miners were confirmed dead and rescue teams were battling to reach a further 78 workers trapped underground after a fire at five iron-ore mines in northern China, officials and media said on Sunday. By early Sunday, 20 miners had been rescued from the blaze at the mines in Baita township in Hebei province.

A passenger plane carrying 53 people crashed on Sunday in a lake in northern China immediately after takeoff, killing all aboard, the government said. The plane crashed into a frozen lake in Nanhai Park ”only about a dozen seconds” after it took off. Police and firefighters were breaking the ice on the lake to search for victims.

A homeless teenager who hid in the landing gear of a passenger plane survived a 700km flight across south-western China, but his companion fell and probably died, state media reported on Friday. The 14-year-old boy was found by airport porters after the plane landed.

Another day of unrest and violent clashes resulting in deaths and injuries were reported on Tuesday by local residents in China’s south-western province of Sichuan after more than 20 000 farmers protested against a dam project. Officials are putting ”the money into their own bag” said a farmer.

At least eight people have died from an outbreak of bubonic plague in north-western China but authorities said the disease has been brought under control, state media reported on Wednesday. The plague outbreak was controlled after local health authorities took swift measures to contain the disease.

Rescue workers recovered more bodies on Friday from a coal shaft where at least 66 miners died and 82 were missing with little hope of survival after a gas explosion in central China’s Henan province on Wednesday. Officials said 29 miners were trapped by floods on Wednesday at another coal mine in neighbouring Hebei province.

An underground gas explosion has ripped through a mine in central China, killing at least 56 workers and leaving nearly 100 missing in one of the worst mining disasters in recent memory, officials said on Thursday. The shafts of the Daping coal mine near Xinmi in Henan province were packed with about 450 workers when disaster struck.

A fossil of an apparently sleeping dinosaur found in north-eastern China may provide new evidence that dinosaurs had similar behaviour patterns to those later evolved in birds, the British-based magazine Nature reports. The Mei Long fossil is a young dinosaur curled up in what appears to be a sleeping position typical of birds.

Authorities in south-west China on Wednesday appealed for medicine, food and water as they struggled to cope with the aftermath of ferocious storms that left 169 people dead, 67 missing and thousands sick or injured. Meanwhile, an earthquake measuring five on the Richter scale struck north-western China’s Gansu province.

At least 90 people were killed and 77 were missing in torrential storms lashing south-west China, disaster relief officials said on Monday. At least 66 were killed and 50 were missing in Sichuan province while 24 people died and 27 were missing in Chongqing municipality.

Three people were killed and 34 others, many of them children attending the first day of school, injured when a man set fire to explosive materials inside a minibus in central China on Wednesday, state media said. The man committed suicide after carrying out the attack, the Xinhua news agency said.

The death toll in an earthquake in southwest China rose to four, officials said on Wednesday as hospitals struggled to cope with the nearly 600 injured and rescuers continued searching for survivors. The quake, which measured 5,6 on the Richter scale, ripped through Ludian county in Yunnan province late on Tuesday.

An earthquake measuring 5,6 on the Richter scale rocked south-west China on Tuesday, leaving three people dead and more than 250 injured, officials said. Two earthquakes measuring 5,1 and 5 on the Richter scale hit the same area on November 15 and 26 2003, killing four and injuring 120.

An internet engineering firm sent 10 new sales staff to beg on a main shopping street as part of their training in Changchun city, in northeastern China’s Jilin province, state media said on Tuesday. Company owner Li Jinghua said the exercise was designed to teach the new staff to be thick-skinned.

A court on Friday convicted 52 members of a baby-trafficking gang that smuggled 118 infants for sale in southern China, sentencing the ringleaders to death or life in prison. The case included a highly publicised incident in March in which 28 baby girls were found hidden in nylon tote bags aboard a long-distance bus.