Beijing

A physically-disabled cigarette and beer salesman branded an internet dissident has been detained by Chinese police for threatening state security, a human rights group said on Thursday.

People across China have expressed outrage over the death of a three-year-old girl who was starved to death after police arrested her mother and left her locked at home with no food for 18 days, state press reported on Thursday.

Rights groups around the world have condemned the five year sentencing of an embattled Chinese webmaster who has launched an appeal against his conviction on charges of inciting subversion.

China’s judiciary issued an interpretation of the country’s infectious diseases law on Thursday that calls for execution or life imprisonment for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome patients who violate quarantine restrictions.

Scientists in Germany say an experimental drug for the common cold might also serve against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars), while thousands of Chinese turn to the occult to ward off the disease as it enters China’s vulnerable countryside.

Beijing yesterday imposed sweeping measures to close down theatres, discos, internet bars and other places of entertainment as the city’s total of Sars cases climbed higher.

North Korea on Monday sought to explain its interception of an American spyplane by four fighter jets in international airspace as a defensive act.

China has developed a ”mobile execution vehicle” to make capital punishment easier to deliver, state press said on Friday. China is also increasingly adopting lethal injections as a ”more humane” method of carrying out death sentences, the Beijing Today reported.

A leading Chinese space official confirmed that the country would go ahead with its first-ever manned space flight this year, despite the recent loss of the US shuttle Columbia, state press reported on Friday.

A wild Siberian tiger was photographed in northeastern China last week for the first time, a conservation group said -– an indication that the increasingly rare beasts are tentatively returning to areas they once roamed years ago.

A growing number of Chinese historians and archeologists are convinced ties with the West have a history of 5 000 years, rather than 2 000 years as previously thought, state media said on Wednesday.

More than 13 years after China’s students challenged communist rule in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the party’s red flags fluttered triumphantly on all sides last week. In the Great Hall of the People, a huge hammer-and-sickle looked down on the 2 100 delegates.

Tibetans should be allowed more say in the development of their homeland and the protection of their cultural heritage if Beijing wants increased foreign aid to the region.

A group of 28 factory workers in east China tried to commit mass suicide by jumping off a building in protest against poor retirement benefits, a rights group said on Tuesday.

People across China were warned on Tuesday to prepare for imminent flooding even worse than that thought to have killed almost 800 people last month, as the full force of the rainy season looms.

China may be planning to go to the moon in the course of the next decade, but an exhibition on Monday suggested it has far more ambitious goals — Mars.

China’s first national family planning law took effect on Sunday, with the aim of preventing families which violate China’s ”one-child policy” from facing unnecessarily harsh punishment and standardising policy.

The death toll in severe floods around China earlier this month has risen to more than 500, as the country braced for further downpours.

Almost 250 people are confirmed dead after a fortnight of torrential rains across large parts of China, state media said on Sunday.

China said on Friday it had removed the BBC World television news channel from its airwaves for ”infringing” broadcast rules

A section of the Great Wall of China that was lost beneath encroaching sands for centuries has been uncovered again, state media said on Wednesday.

China currently has around a million people infected with the HIV virus which causes Aids, a figure that could increase ten-fold by the end of the decade.

Twenty-one teenage pupils died and 47 more were injured in north China’s Inner Mongolia region when a guardrail collapsed causing a crush in a dark stairwell.

Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji has told the controversial Panchen Lama that China’s policies in Tibet are ”correct”.

A significant city of the Xiongnu culture — an Asian tribe of Huns — has been uncovered in northern China after being entirely covered with sand for more than a thousand years, China’s state news agency reported on Thursday.

A media freedom group has condemned China’s
”censorship” in blocking access to the popular US-based Google Internet search engine, in place since the weekend.

At least 50 convicted drugs criminals have been executed this week in China to mark Wednesday’s international anti-drugs day, with many others handed suspended death sentences or jail terms.

A northeastern China coal mine where a gas explosion killed 115 workers last month had been instructed to shut down at least seven times before the fatal accident.

Thousands of soldiers and paramilitary police have been dispatched to help fight widespread flooding in southern China’s Guangxi region.

China has held back from congratulating former US President Jimmy Carter for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, saying only that the prize should be awarded to someone who truly works for peace.

China’s fortnight-long block on the Google.com search engine has ended, Internet users said on Friday, adding to a chain of events which has mystified — and angered — many of the country’s web users.