Science News

A news report says the death toll from flooding and rain-triggered landslides in southern China has climbed to 53 after the bodies of all missing people were recovered.

Meteorologists are expecting more heavy rain in the region through Thursday.

The official Xinhua News Agency says three days of heavy rain that began May 31 destroyed 11,000 homes and forced the evacuation of 200,000 people.

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A torrent of floods caused by heavy storms have killed 115 people in southern China, with 21 people still missing as weather reports show rains beginning to subside.

But one official said Tuesday that the worst may be over.

Emergency rescue teams have been dispatched across southern China to help the 685,000 people evacuated as a result of the flooding, which has caused $2.

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Commerce Secretary Gary Locke called on Beijing to give U.S. clean-energy companies greater access to its market to help combat climate change.

“American companies have the solutions that China needs,” Locke told a business group in Beijing on Friday. However he said “too many government policies openly or implicitly discriminate against foreign firms.

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China plans to build a center where giant pandas born in captivity will be trained to survive in the wild, state media reported Thursday.

The facility is expected to house three to five giant pandas when it is completed within five years. The center will include 21.5 acres (8.7 hectares) of an experimental zone, along with 2,800 acres (1,128 hectares) of woodlands, Zhang said.

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Lui Sang, now 81, was diagnosed with leprosy as a boy shortly after his older brother came down with the same infection, notorious for centuries for causing disfiguring skin lesions and stigma.

“My brother, 4 years older, died of starvation in the 1960s because nobody took care of him. I was sent to this colony,” Lui said, referring to a village in Lianjiang in southern China where lepers in the area were interned in the past.

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More than two million Chinese youths die each year from health problems related to indoor air pollution, with nearly half of them under five years of age, state media cited a government study as saying.

This indoor pollution causes respiratory and other conditions that kill 2.2 million youths each year, one million of whom are under the age of five, the report said, citing the study released on Sunday.

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A once minor pest has ravaged fruit orchards and cotton fields in China after farmers stopped spraying insecticide in crops of a genetically-modified type of cotton resistant to bollworms, experts said.

“Entire swathes of agricultural land that never had any problem with this pest are facing a major problem,” said Kongming Wu at the State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests in Beijing.

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As world powers wrangle this month at the United Nations about how to handle Irans nuclear plans, China is attempting to balance its thirst for Iranian oil and natural gas with its ambition to be a diplomatic heavyweight.

China , the worlds second-largest consumer of oil, gets about 11 percent of its oil imports from Iran and has signed billions of dollars in contracts for Iranian oil and gas projects.

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The death toll from fierce storms and torrential rains that ravaged southern China this week has risen to at least 58 people with tens of thousands left homeless, state media reported on Friday.

The southwestern municipality of Chongqing was the worst hit after a tornado and gale-force winds killed 29 people, destroyed homes, uprooted trees, flooded roads and caused landslides.

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A tornado and strong winds in southwestern China killed 25 people and injured more than 150 early Thursday, state media reported.

The director, who gave only his surname Ma, disputed a China News online report that 1,000 homes had collapsed. “It’s definitely not that many,” he said.

Several homes collapsed in the city of Chongqing, but the number was still being tallied, said the disaster relief director at the Chongqing civil affairs bureau.

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