China

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At least 10 people died when a hospital in north-east China’s Jilin province caught fire on Thursday, forcing desperate people to jump from the building to escape the flames, state media and officials reported. The fire started at the City Centre hospital, Liaoyuan city’s largest, at about 4.30pm local time.

The death toll in a massive coal-mining accident in northern China rose to 90, as the country’s Cabinet ordered the establishment of a special commission to investigate, state television reported on Saturday. A mixture of airborne coal dust and colourless, methane-laden gas known as fire damp ignited to cause the blast on Wednesday.

Divers have been recruited to search the flooded shafts of a northern Chinese coal mine for 42 missing miners, the government said on Wednesday. Rescuers have been working for days to locate the workers, who were trapped in an underground flood last Friday at the privately owned Sigou Coal Mine.

A city of more than half a million people was forced to cut off its water supply as a toxic slick slowly moved down one of China’s large rivers towards the Russian border, state media said on Monday. The taps were turned off Sunday in Jiamusi, home to 550 000 people, as the potentially lethal chemical pool approached along the Songhua river.

Forty-two miners were trapped for a second day on Sunday in a flooded mine in central China, as more than 200 rescuers raced against the clock to pump out water to save them, state media said. The miners have been trapped since shortly before midnight late on Friday when the Sigou mine suddenly flooded, according to the Xinhua news agency. The mine is located in Shisi township, Xin’an county, Henan province.