A woman who spent years petitioning the Chinese government for help against forced eviction has been sent to a labour camp for 18 months for posting articles on the internet detailing China’s abuse of petitioners, a rights group said on Thursday.
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/ 27 February 2004
China’s cultural minister has called for tighter controls on the internet, including 24-hour surveillance and urging people to tell on each other, state media said on Friday. China is second only to the US for the number of people online. The number of users rose to 79,5-million by December 2003 from 59,1-million in December 2002.
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/ 5 February 2004
China’s Agriculture Ministry on Thursday admitted problems in controlling an epidemic of bird flu, as it reported five new cases that took its total to 28 suspected or confirmed outbreaks. ”The way of [poultry] production is diversified, so this has brought some problems,” Vice-Minister of Agriculture Liu Jian said.
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/ 5 February 2004
More than 10Â 000 birds died mysteriously in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, dropping like rain from the sky, state media reported on Thursday. Farmers and other witnesses in Sangongdian village in Taizhou city saw flocks of bramble finch suddenly fall from the sky on Tuesday.
Coca-Cola and a Chinese competitor have failed to reach a court settlement in a dispute over the Chinese characters used in the names of their bottled drinks, company lawyers said on Friday. The lawyers’ statements contradicted extensive reports in China’s state-controlled media saying a settlement had been reached.
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/ 30 December 2003
A huge blast ripped through a northeastern Chinese fireworks factory on Tuesday, killing 29 workers and putting 19 others in hospital, state press reported. The explosion tore through two factory buildings of Changtu Safe Environment Color and Noise.
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/ 28 December 2003
Health departments throughout China stepped up measures to combat the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) on Sunday, a day after authorities announced the nation’s first suspected case of the disease since July. Shanghai has been placed on ”high alert”, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
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/ 26 December 2003
Rescue teams and technicians were on Friday feverishly working to contain the spread of toxic fumes after a blowout at a natural gas field left at least 191 people dead and hundreds more injured. More than 41 000 villagers were forced to flee from the danger zone.
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/ 8 December 2003
Four more bodies were found on Monday to take the toll from a gas explosion in a coal mine in northern China to 20, state media said. Nine workers were rescued from the Longtai mine in Zhangjiakou city, Hebei province, following the blast on Sunday, the Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 26 October 2003
Two strong earthquakes shook a remote region of northwestern China’s desertlands, killing at least eight people, the government said on Sunday. The quakes — magnitudes 6,1 and 5,8 — hit Gansu province within seven minutes, and damage to reservoirs left a large patch of land in danger of flooding.
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/ 17 October 2003
At least three people were killed and 26 injured when an earthquake measuring 6,1 on the Richter scale struck southwestern China’s Yunnan province on Thursday — an area that was struck by an earthquake measuring 6,2 on the Richter scale in July. More than 12 000 homes collapsed following Thursday’s quake.
Chinese Aids experts have said they believe people with Aids are less vulnerable to severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars).
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/ 31 October 2002
China’s young are grossly unaware of how Aids is spread. According to a survey, many believe people can contract the disease from mosquito bites.
Chinese scientists claim to have developed an Aids test that gives results in just three hours, a Hong Kong news report said.
US Internet giant Yahoo! is ”complicit” in rights abuses by the Chinese government after agreeing to a Beijing-backed self-censorship pledge for web pages, a human rights group has charged.
The centuries-old lifestyle of nomadic herders on the vast plains of northern Tibet could soon be under threat from a Chinese plan to push them into towns built along the route of a controversial new rail line.
Male giant pandas in a southwest China sanctuary are being fed Viagra in an attempt to get the notoriously sex-shy animals in the mood for mating.
If a country lives by its myths, then the myth of post-apartheid South Africa must be that it had become "the rainbow nation".