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/ 18 December 2007
China, widely criticised for cruelty to animals bred for consumption, is drafting new standards on animal slaughter to make the practice more humane, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday. The central province of Henan has already adopted the measures, which include stunning the animals before killing them.
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/ 8 December 2007
The father of China’s latest bird-flu victim also has the disease, officials said on Friday, prompting World Health Organisation fears of possible human-to-human transmission. A Health Ministry statement said a 52-year-old man named Lu in the eastern city of Nanjing had the H5N1 strain, which killed his son on Sunday.
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/ 7 December 2007
The death toll from China’s latest major coal mine disaster rose to 105 on Friday, official media said, as hope for survivors ebbed and anger mounted over a litany of mistakes that compounded the tragedy. Twenty-six more bodies were recovered on Friday morning following a gas explosion at the mine in northern China’s Shanxi province.
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/ 6 December 2007
Ninety-six miners were feared dead after a coal-mine gas blast in northern China on Thursday, a grim toll likely caused by illegal mining and possibly made worse by delays reporting the accident, the Xinhua news agency said. Rescuers had found 70 bodies in the village-run mine by early evening and were searching for at least 26 more.
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/ 6 December 2007
At least 40 people were killed and 74 others trapped underground after an explosion at a coal mine in northern China on Thursday, with a group of rescuers among the missing, officials said. The gas blast occurred just after midnight at a mine in Linfen city, a coal-rich area in Shanxi province, the state administration of mine safety said.
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/ 5 December 2007
The Chinese military has added mobile showers to its ever more sophisticated arsenal, state media reported on Wednesday. The camouflaged vehicle can be set up in five minutes and allows 20 men to shower simultaneously within a narrow 10-square-metre space, the Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 27 November 2007
Several times this year, Tan Mingzhu had the terrible feeling her home in central China was about to collapse in on her family. Frightening tremors rocked their simple concrete dwelling 4km from China’s mammoth Three Gorges Dam, ripping floor-to-ceiling cracks in the walls, and she doesn’t hesitate in assigning blame.
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/ 24 November 2007
The bodies of 31 victims of a landslide in central China are so badly crushed that DNA samples may be needed to identify them, state media reported on Saturday. A long-distance bus was buried under an avalanche of boulders, earth and mud at the entrance to a railway tunnel being built in Hubei province near China’s massive Three Gorges Dam.
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/ 20 November 2007
One of the most popular tourist destinations in China is waging a week-long campaign to hunt down wild pigs that have been frightening visitors to its famed West Lake, state media said on Tuesday. Professional hunting teams from the West Lake district of Hangzhou, the capital of the coastal province of Zhejiang, were under orders to shoot to kill the animals.
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/ 15 November 2007
The death toll from a building site accident in eastern China when an elevator plunged more than 20 storeys has reached 11 after five of the injured died in hospital, state media said on Thursday. The accident happened at a nearly completed block of flats in Wuxi City in Jiangsu province.
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/ 5 November 2007
China’s maiden lunar probe successfully entered the moon’s orbit on Monday, officials said, a critical step in its year-long mission to photograph and map the surface of the celestial body. Chang’e I blasted off on October 24, signalling China’s rising space ambitions and Beijing’s participation in a renewed race to explore the moon.
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/ 24 October 2007
Asia’s space race heated up on Wednesday as China launched its first lunar orbiter, an event hailed in the world’s most populous nation as a milestone event in its global rise. China’s year-long expedition kicks off a programme that aims to land an unmanned rover on the moon’s surface by 2012 and put a man on the moon by about 2020.
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/ 22 October 2007
A fire erupted at a shoe factory in south-east China, killing 37 people in the latest industrial accident to hit the world’s fourth-largest economy, officials and state media said on Monday. The blaze at the Feida workshop, located near the city of Putian in coastal Fujian province, broke out at 9.50pm local time on Sunday and was extinguished an hour later.
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/ 12 October 2007
A South China tiger has been caught on camera by a hunter-turned-farmer, the first confirmed sighting for 30 years of a subspecies experts had feared was extinct in the wild, the Xinhua news agency said on Friday. Zhou Zhenglong took more than 70 snaps of the young tiger lying in the grass near a cliff.
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/ 11 October 2007
China is to relocate at least four million more people from the Three Gorges Dam reservoir area in the next 10 to 15 years to protect its ”ecological safety”. Senior officials who have defended the project as an engineering wonder now warn that areas around the dam are paying a heavy environmental cost.
Typhoon Krosa crashed into the Chinese coast on Sunday, forcing the evacuation of 1,4-million people, after killing five in Taiwan as it lashed the island with heavy rain and high winds. The typhoon made landfall near the borders of densely populated Zhejiang and Fujian provinces in south-east China at about 7.30am GMT, packing winds of up to 126kph, before weakening.
A strong typhoon headed for China on Sunday after killing five people, injuring 53 and cutting power to more than two million people in Taiwan as it lashed the island with heavy rain and high winds. Typhoon Krosa was on course to reach China at noon while continuing to dump rain on Taiwan, forecasters said.
Typhoon Krosa slammed into Taiwan with strong winds and heavy rains on Saturday forcing hundreds to evacuate and cutting power to thousands as it headed toward mainland China. In China, authorities in the eastern province of Zhejiang ordered officials back to work from their National Day vacation to prepare for the storm, the China Daily reported.
Typhoon Lekima lashed Vietnam and southern China with torrential rains and high winds, killing at least seven people, damaging hundreds of homes and disrupting air, sea and train travel. The storm, which killed at least five people in the Philippines at the weekend, swept into Vietnam from the sea on Wednesday night
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/ 26 September 2007
China’s huge Three Gorges Dam hydropower project could spark environmental catastrophe unless accumulating threats are quickly defused, senior officials and experts have warned. Dam officials warn that areas around the dam are paying a heavy, potentially calamitous environmental cost.
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/ 19 September 2007
Tropical storm Wipha lost much of its punch as it roared ashore over densely populated eastern China on Wednesday but continued to rake the region with heavy rains and high winds. The former typhoon had sparked the evacuation of more than two million people.
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/ 18 September 2007
China’s most populous city, Shanghai, and outlying areas were bracing for Typhoon Wipha on Tuesday, relocating hundreds of thousands of people to safer areas. The typhoon, a storm packing winds of more than 180km/h was expected to make landfall in east China around midnight, after gale-force winds and driving rains have first swiped northern Taiwan.
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/ 11 September 2007
A television reporter claims to have discovered China’s answer to the Loch Ness monster, state press reported on Sunday. Local journalist Zhuo Yongsheng shot footage of six "seal-like" creatures in the north-eastern Tianchi Lake, which local legend has long said is home to Loch Ness-style monsters.
At least 31 people died and nine more were missing after heavy rainstorms hit south-west China, state media reported on Tuesday. Xinhua news agency said 17 people were killed and three others were missing after the torrential rains in Sichuan province in the past several days.