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/ 13 September 2005
Xiong Xianghui, a former assistant to Chinese premier Zhou Enlai who was involved in the rapprochement between Beijing and Washington in the early 1970s, has died of lung cancer, state media reported on Tuesday. He was 86. An official funeral was to be held at Babaoshan Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery in Beijing.
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/ 12 September 2005
Last-minute preparations were under way on Monday ahead of the resumption of talks aimed at denuclearising the Korean peninsula, with the United States and North Korea showing few signs of relaxing their positions. Despite a flurry of diplomatic activity during five weeks of recess, no clear signals have emerged that the fourth round of talks restarting on Tuesday will be any different from the past ones, which all ended inconclusively.
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/ 12 September 2005
The communist heirs of Mao Zedong and the capitalist successors of Walt Disney will share the stage in Hong Kong today with a near ,8-billion monument to globalisation: China’s first Disneyland. The meeting of the world’s biggest communist party and the planet’s best-known entertainment corporation would have been unthinkable to their founders.
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/ 10 September 2005
Next year, residents of Beijing will be able to again enjoy their centuries-old custom of setting off fireworks during the Chinese Lunar New Year, a news report said. Beijing’s municipal legislature on Friday lifted a 12-year ban on fireworks during the Chinese Lunar New Year, also called the Spring Festival, in the Chinese capital.
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/ 8 September 2005
A restaurant in north-east China has been raided and closed for listing stir-fried tiger meat on its menu, a dish that turned out to be donkey dressed with tiger urine. The Hufulou restaurant in Hailin city in Heilongjiang province is located barely 1km from the Hengdaohezi Siberian Tiger Park.
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/ 7 September 2005
In Buddhist teachings, making money is an unlikely path to nirvana, but in increasingly iconoclastic China it just may well be a leap of faith. Taking a page from their Communist Party brethren, 18 monks in Shanghai have signed up for master of business administration classes in hopes of better managing their temple.
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/ 7 September 2005
Internet giant Yahoo! supplied information to the Chinese government that led to the jailing of journalist Shi Tao for 10 years, international watchdog Reporters sans Frontières said on Wednesday. The California-based company’s Hong Kong subsidiary gave details to China’s state security, which helped to identify and convict Shi (37) the group said.
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/ 7 September 2005
China could move ahead the launch of its next manned space mission to as early as this month, a state newspaper reported on Wednesday. ”The launch time for the Shenzhou VI is around September or October,” Zhang Qingwei, president of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told the Shanghai Morning Post.
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/ 7 September 2005
Seventeen miners died, mostly from burns or suffocation, in a gas explosion at an illegal coal mine in northern China’s Shanxi province, state media said on Wednesday. The miners were killed when the blast happened on Tuesday in the Zhike Town Coal Mine in Zhongyang county, Luliang city, the Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 5 September 2005
The European Union confirmed on Monday that a deal has been reached to end an impasse that has left millions of Chinese-made textiles blocked at European ports. "They have reached an agreement today [Monday]. This is what I have heard," Leonor Ribeiro Da Silva, spokesperson for European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, told reporters.
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/ 3 September 2005
China on Saturday raised the death toll from Typhoon Talim to at least 54, while 23 more people were listed as missing, state media reported. The death toll shot up after authorities in the eastern province of Anhui said 39 people, perhaps more, had lost their lives in the powerful typhoon and that nine were missing.
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/ 3 September 2005
The number of dead left in the wake of Typhoon Talim rose on Saturday to 18 on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported from the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. Meanwhile, powerful Typhoon Nabi was churning on Saturday toward the southern Japanese island of Okinawa.
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/ 2 September 2005
Fourteen people died and 15 were missing on Friday after Typhoon Talim’s whipping rain and winds walloped China’s east coast and Taiwan, causing widespread damage. Meanwhile, an extremely strong typhoon is churning towards Japan and is on course to hit the nation’s main southern island next week.
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/ 1 September 2005
World number five Retief Goosen blazed a first-round 64 to stamp his authority on the Volkswagen Masters-China golf tournament in Beijing on Thursday. Two eagles and five birdies against one bogey put the South African on top of the leader board at eight under par, two shots ahead of Canada’s Darren Griff.
A Chinese researcher has warned of a new threat to public health and morality — naked internet chatting. Up to 20 000 Chinese log on to chat rooms each night in various states of undress and communicate using web cams, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said on Tuesday.
A rare Chinese tiger born in a zoo in China and sent to South Africa to be trained for a life in the wild has died, threatening a wildlife protection programme, an animal rights group said on Tuesday. Hope, a four-year-old male, died of pneumonia and heart failure on Saturday at the Laohu Valley Reserve in South Africa.
A crocodile that fled an abandoned wildlife park for a day at the seaside caused beachgoers to panic at a popular south China resort on Sunday, state media said. The croc surfaced at Beihai city’s Silver beach in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, scaring off many swimmers, Xinhua news agency reported.
Chinese sports fans are hailing the man they call ”Flying Spectacles Man” as their newest star. Hu Kai, nicknamed for his ever-present gold rimmed glasses, has dominated the front pages of Chinese sports newspapers since winning the men’s 100m sprint at the University Games in Izmir, Turkey, on Sunday.
Rising steel prices in China have added new impetus to the regional phenomenon of drain-top theft and manhole mishaps, forcing municipal authorities to get tough on this type of highway robbery. Missing manholes have long been a hazard throughout Asia, but escalating steel prices have exacerbated the menace.
An earthquake measuring 5,3 on the Richter scale shook south-west China’s Yunnan province on Saturday, toppling houses and causing several injuries, state media reported. ”Injuries have been reported in seven townships of Wenshan county,” the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Floods and related disasters have killed 910 people in China so far this year with another 218 missing, the International Red Cross said on Friday as it launched an emergency appeal for ,4-million in aid. Most of the deaths occurred since May, when the flood season kicked in.
At least 22 people have been killed and about a quarter-million evacuated in rain-induced floods hitting large parts of western China, state media said on Thursday. The toll could rise further with two people reported missing after a massive landslide in rural Sichuan, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Rescuers on Wednesday recovered the body of one miner from a flooded southern China coal shaft as hopes of finding 122 still trapped underground faded, state media reported. Authorities also suspended two mayors who had jurisdiction over
mines in the area, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The death toll from Typhoon Matsa that ripped through eastern China rose to 10 on Monday with seven of the casualties reported in Shanghai, state media said. Matsa slammed into coastal areas over the weekend, tearing up roads, reservoirs and houses, causing -million of damage in China’s glitziest city, Shanghai, alone.
Four Chinese airline companies have agreed to buy 42 Boeing 787 jets for a total of $5,04-billion, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Monday. The purchase comes ahead of an expected visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to the United States and is a coup for Chicago-based Boeing over European arch-rival Airbus SAS.
Rescuers were on Monday scrambling to save more than 100 workers trapped deep underground in a flooded coal mine in southern China as their chances of survival faded and water levels continued to rise. The accident happened on Sunday afternoon at the Daxing coal mine about 265km northeast of the provincial capital Guangzhou in Guangdong province.
North Korean, Russian, United States and South Korean delegates discussing ways to scrap North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programme returned to the main talks venue late on Wednesday, fuelling speculation they would meet overnight to try to agree on basic principles for ending the three-year stand-off.
North Korea said no progress was made in talks on Tuesday over the dismantlement of its nuclear-weapons programmes but insisted it is still working to find a solution. Deputy chief United States envoy Joseph DeTrani said the talks will continue into a ninth day on Wednesday.
Officials from six nations held a seventh day of talks on Monday, after China presented a second draft joint statement of principles on ending North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programme. United States negotiators held more bilateral talks with North Korea and plan to continue talks on Tuesday, a US official said.
The United States said on Wednesday that fundamental differences remain with North Korea over its nuclear-weapons drive but it does not believe the issue of uranium enrichment will prove a stumbling block to progress. Highly enriched uranium can be used to produce nuclear explosive devices.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on Wednesday said he was overjoyed at his red carpet welcome by China, as other countries pressed for a United Nations Security Council meeting on his slum demolition drive. Mugabe is on a six-day visit to China and has been warmly greeted as ”an old friend” by President Hu Jintao.
Six-nation talks aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff between North Korea and the United States will resume on Tuesday amid the highest hopes for a breakthrough since the process began two years ago. But the delegates gathered in Beijing know this fourth round of talks may represent the last as well as the best chance.