China

Beijing, Dec 5 (PTI) Eighteen of the 23 workers were killed in a coal mine in China due to an excessive level of carbon monoxide, local officials said on Saturday.

The accident happened at around 5 pm on Friday at the Diaoshuidong coal mine in the district of Yongchuan in Chongqing Municipality, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong’s Legislative Council approved on Friday engineering and infrastructure studies for a government plan to build vast artificial islands in an effort to solve housing problems in one of the world’s most expensive property markets.

The plan, estimated to cost at least HK$624 billion ($80.51 billion), or close to a quarter of the city’s gross domestic product, would be Hong Kong’s most expensive infrastructure project, and would cover an area about a third of Manhattan’s.

Canberra, Dec 4 (AP-PTI) China's senior diplomat in Australia said Prime Minister Scott Morrison overreacted to a social media post about alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, adding that his actions drew more attention to the report.

Earlier this week, Morrison said that a Chinese official's tweet showing the fake image of an Australian soldier appearing to slit a child's throat was truly repugnant and merits an apology, which has not come from China.

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese spacecraft lifted off from the moon Thursday night with a load of lunar rocks, the first stage of its return to Earth, the government space agency reported.

Chang’e 5, the third Chinese spacecraft to land on the moon and the first to take off from it again, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a orbiter and rover headed to Mars.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Thursday that politicians in the United States are fabricating news of forced labour in the northwestern Xinjiang region, after Washington banned imports of cotton produced by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) alleged to use the forced labour of detained Uighur Muslims.

Speaking at a daily media briefing, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the U.S. practices undermined market principles and would deprive people of jobs.

BEIJING, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Wednesday emphasized the basic facts one more time, after the Australian and U.S. sides accused China of "fabricating an image" and launched false allegations on Xinjiang-related matters.

BEIJING (AP) — China said Thursday its latest lunar probe has finished taking samples of the moon’s surface and sealed them within the spacecraft for return to Earth, the first time such a mission has been attempted by any country in more than 40 years.

The Chang’e 5, the third Chinese probe to land on the moon, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a probe en route to Mars carrying a robot rover.

BEIJING, Dec 2 (APP): Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe’s visit to key neighbors – Pakistan and Nepal in the Southwest border were of practical meaning to safeguard regional security, according to observers.

Wei met with Pakistani President Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Imran Khan in Islamabad and discussed a wide range of topics, including the building of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and defense cooperation.

HONG KONG, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government on Wednesday vehemently refuted a report issued by a U.S. congressional commission and firmly opposed the sweeping attacks and unfounded accusations in the Chapter on Hong Kong.

A spokesman for the HKSAR government said the report by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission is another vivid example of the blatant interference by the United States in Hong Kong's affairs, following the U.S. Congress' successive passage of a host of laws against the HKSAR.

HONG KONG (AP) — Three prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activists were sentenced to jail Wednesday for a protest outside police headquarters as authorities stepped up a crackdown on opposition to tighten control by Beijing over the territory.

The activists — Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam — are among more than 10,000 people who have been arrested since June 2019 on charges related to protests against a proposed extradition law that expanded to include demands for greater democracy.