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/ 3 February 2006
A computer worm expected to begin corrupting files in infected machines around the world on Friday has so far caused no major damage in the Asian financial centres Hong Kong and Tokyo. Experts had warned earlier this week that the worm, known as ”Kama Sutra,” ”CME-24,” ”BlackWorm,” or ”Mywife.E,” could corrupt documents.
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/ 2 February 2006
China has banned Hollywood’s Memoirs of a Geisha a week before it was due to be released over fresh speculation that the Chinese actresses’ roles as Japanese courtesans could spark public controversy. The film tells the story of a girl from a poor Japanese fishing village who is sold to a geisha house and goes on to romance a rich businessman.
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/ 2 February 2006
A blast at a state-owned coal mine in northern China killed 23 workers and caused 53 others to be poisoned with carbon monoxide, the government said on Thursday. The blast occurred Wednesday at the Sihe coal mine in China’s Shanxi province when 697 workers were mining the pit, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
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/ 30 January 2006
Fireworks explosions killed 36 people and injured hundreds more in China as traditional Lunar New Year celebrations led to much mayhem as well as joy across the nation, officials and state media said on Monday. In the most serious accident, 36 people died when a storeroom full of fireworks exploded, Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 27 January 2006
International media rights groups condemned China on Friday over the jailing of journalist Li Changqing for three years on charges of providing ”alarmist information” to an overseas website. Li was sentenced on Tuesday by a court in Fuzhou in the southeastern province of Fujian for publishing an article about a local dengue fever outbreak.
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/ 27 January 2006
The frontman of United States rock band Nine Inch Nails has become the latest celebrity to speak out against Chinese cruelty towards cats and dogs, through an animal rights video launched on Friday. "Every year, millions of cats and dogs are killed for their fur," said Trent Reznor said.
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/ 26 January 2006
Google and other Western internet companies are competing in a ”race to the bottom” as they bow to Chinese censors in order to gain a slice of the world’s most promising market, critics said on Thursday. The Silicon Valley-based online search engine has agreed to censor websites and content banned by China’s propaganda chiefs.
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/ 25 January 2006
Mongolia’s Parliament elected Miyeegombo Enkhbold, the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party’s chairperson, as the country’s new prime minister on Wednesday, Chinese state media said. The election of Enkhbold (41) a former Ulan Bator mayor, marks an end to the political upheaval that emerged this month after his party withdrew from a coalition government with the Democratic Party.
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/ 25 January 2006
China is in the grip of a worsening HIV-Aids epidemic, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned on Wednesday, as new official figures showed earlier assessments had overestimated the number of cases. ”Make no mistake, China’s Aids epidemic is growing,” the WHO’s chief representative in China, Hank Bekedam, told a press conference.
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/ 23 January 2006
China’s economy likely became one of the world’s five biggest in 2005 as booming exports and surging investment again helped secure growth of well above nine percent, analysts said on Monday. Ahead of Wednesday’s release of China’s 2005 economic data, analysts expect the world fastest growing major economy to surge between 9,5 and 10,3% to surpass the two-trillion-dollar mark.
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/ 20 January 2006
The United States online auction service eBay on Friday scrapped all sellers’ transaction fees in China, in an effort to compete with local competitors offering free services, including Yahoo-invested Alibaba.com. The move means that sellers won’t get paid until the buyers receive and are satisfied with the products, it said.
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/ 18 January 2006
Chinese authorities banned 79 newspapers and seized 169-million publications deemed illegal in a nationwide crackdown last year, the country’s top propaganda official announced. Seventeen production lines making pirate compact discs were also shut down and 50 types of computer software games banned, said Liu Yunshan on Tuesday.
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/ 18 January 2006
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was reportedly heading home on Wednesday on a special train, ending a secretive week-long visit to China that apparently focused on nuclear weapons and economic reforms. Press reports said the famously reclusive Kim, who is afraid of flying, had left Beijing on Tuesday night and crossed the border back into North Korea on Wednesday morning.
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/ 13 January 2006
After days of frenzied speculation, a television station claimed on Friday to have captured proof of reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il living it up at a luxury hotel in China. The grainy footage broadcast by Japan’s Nippon Television station in Tokyo showed a bespectacled man with Kim’s trademark bouffant hairstyle surrounded by men in black as he got out of a limousine.
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/ 12 January 2006
The location of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il remained a mystery on Friday amid a series of rumours that he was in Beijing, possibly for nuclear talks. Other rumours, quickly picked up by global media outlets, had him in southern China near the border with Hong Kong staying at a luxury hotel while more speculation placed him in Russia.
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/ 11 January 2006
China’s foreign minister began a six-nation African tour on Wednesday, which analysts say will focus on boosting energy ties and forging stronger global political alliances to counterbalance United States dominance. Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing will visit Cape Verde, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Nigeria and Libya during the trip, set to end on January 19.
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/ 10 January 2006
An estimated 96-million people, or 7,4% of China’s 1,3-billion population, share the surname Li, state media on Tuesday quoted a survey as saying. The next-most-popular Chinese surnames were Wang and Zhang, at 7,2% and 6,8% respectively, the official Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 10 January 2006
A leading United States lawmaker warned Chinese officials on Tuesday that Beijing is risking a protectionist backlash in Washington if it doesn’t take steps to cut its -billion trade surplus with the United States. Without Chinese action, ”Washington may take measures to reduce the trade imbalance by reducing Chinese exports to the United States,” said United States Senator Max Baucus.
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/ 10 January 2006
China’s $2.3-billion Nigerian oil venture is a major step forward for the energy ravenous country as it seeks to power its fast-growing economy but analysts said on Tuesday the race was just heating up. China National Overseas Oil Corp’s purchase of a 45% stake in the Akpo field is the biggest overseas investment by Beijing since China National Petroleum Corp’s took over PetroKazakhstan for $4,18-billion in October.
Harbin’s popular annual ice festival has opened with an official declaring it free of the toxic chemicals that polluted the northern Chinese city’s water supplies late last year, state press said on Friday. The ice festival, which opened on Thursday, is one of the few tourism drawcards for Harbin, an otherwise bleak industrial city of nine million people.
Yao Wenyuan, the last surviving member of the Gang of Four, who has died aged 74, was a literary polemicist whose pen, under Mao Zedong’s patronage, launched the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76). His vitriolic essays provided ammunition for Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing (Madam Mao) in their campaign to destroy senior communist leaders.
Microsoft was under the spotlight on Friday over its blocking of a Chinese internet blogger, in the latest case of a major Western technology firm helping Beijing curtail free speech. The MSN Spaces-hosted web log, or blog, belonging to Beijing-based media researcher Zhao Jing was closed down this week after he posted articles critical of a management purge at the Beijing News daily.
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/ 30 December 2005
Chinese police have closed 598 websites in a crackdown on pornography, but online gambling and fraud are growing, state media said on Friday. The communist government encourages internet use for education and business but has launched repeated campaigns to stamp out material deemed obscene or subversive.
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/ 29 December 2005
China’s coldest restaurant is doing a roaring trade as deep winter sets in, with customers flocking to the all-ice building and its steaming "hot pot" meals, state press reported on Thursday. The restaurant can accommodate 100 patrons, who reportedly love the novelty of even the bar, tables and chairs being made from ice.
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/ 26 December 2005
A Christmas Day fire at an unlicensed bar killed at least 26 people and injured eight in a Chinese city near Hong Kong, the government said on Monday. The fire broke out at 11pm local time on Sunday evening in Zhongshan, which abuts the former Portuguese colony of Macau west of Hong Kong, the official Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 25 December 2005
A bus ran off a road in northern China into a freezing section of the Yellow River, leaving 28 people missing and presumed dead, official media said on Sunday. The accident occurred late on Saturday in Hanggin prefecture of the Inner Mongolia region, state-run China Central Television said.
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/ 23 December 2005
Ski season opened in China about a month ago, with skiers and snowboarders flocking to about a dozen stations on the weekends for a few days of carefree careening down the slopes — albeit slopes covered with artificial snow. Nanshan, a 10-slope village is run by private owners looking to cash in on the latest fad to captivate the country’s wealthy urban dwellers.
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/ 23 December 2005
A gas explosion inside a highway tunnel under construction killed 42 people and injured 11 others in south-west China’s Sichuan province, the government said on Friday. The explosion happened at an intersection of a highway being built to link the smaller cities of Dujiangyan and Wenchuan.
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/ 22 December 2005
The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) is likely to reduce its crude oil production after the high-demand northern-hemisphere winter, the group’s president said on Thursday. ”I expect Opec to decrease output for the second quarter,” Sheikh Ahmad Fahad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah said.
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/ 21 December 2005
A chemical spill from a zinc smelter has polluted the Beijiang River in southern China’s Guangdong province, forcing the suspension of water supplies in two cities, state media said on Wednesday. Cadmium levels reached 10 times the safety limit near Shaoguan city on the Beijiang.
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/ 19 December 2005
Chinese broadcasters have tidied up Wisteria Lane, the fictional suburban setting for the American comedy series Desperate Housewives, an official said on Monday. A Chinese-dubbed version of the show was to debut late on Monday on China’s state-run CCTV8 channel.
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/ 16 December 2005
Coffee grower Denis Cruz sniffs a handful of yellow-green beans produced from his Honduran farm and sighs. ”They would be worth more if I could sell them through Fair Trade,” he says, ”and the land would be healthier — there wouldn’t be the same pressure on it.”