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The Zhuque-2 rocket lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Wednesday China said the rocket completed the flight mission. Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua via EPA-EFE July 12 (UPI) -- A methane-fueled rocket, launched by China, has reached orbit for the first time, beating out potential competitors from the United States and indicating a renewed effort by that nation to land astronauts on the moon with a more powerful spacecraft. Built by Landspace, a private Chinese company, the 164-foot Zhuque-2 rocket lifted off from its Jiuquan launch complex, in China's Inner Mongolia, on Wednesday morning local time, Chinese...

While the COVID-19 pandemic has not ceased, the bubonic plague continues to rage in Inner Mongolia. Now a suspected case of bubonic plague has also been reported in Yunnan Province. The local area has activated a “level 4” alert for plague prevention, and has conducted massive testing on patients with fever.The Plague Prevention and Control Headquarters of Menghai county, Yunnan Province issued a notice on Sept. 25, reporting that mice with unknown causes of death were found in Bianyuan village of Xiding township, Menghai county. The mice were tested by the Provincial Endemic Disease Prevention and Control Center and the...

First coronavirus, then murder hornets, now bubonic plague?! Authorities in China have responded to one confirmed case of the black death and another suspected case. Both cases emerged in the semi-autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. According to Chinese Communist Party reports, a herdsman in Bayannur contracted bubonic plague and is in quarantine and in stable condition, the BBC reported. Officials also said they were investigating a second case.That case involves a 15-year-old patient who came down with a fever after close contact with a marmot hunted by a dog. #Mongolia discovered another suspected patient infected with the bubonic plague. The...

On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn. (snip) Vast fortunes are being amassed here in Inner Mongolia; the region has more than 90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of rare earth metals, and specifically neodymium, the element needed to make the magnets in the most striking of green energy producers, wind turbines.

It had been thought that the deserts in northern China are one million years old, but a new study of the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia suggests that its desert is only 4,000 years old. Xiaoping Yang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Louis Scuderi of the University of New Mexico, and their colleagues examined the patterns of dunes and depressions in the region and lake sediments, and they dated quartz from the region with a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence. They found that Hunshandake had deep lakes and rivers beginning some 12,000 years ago. "We're amazed by...

Caterpillars stop train in China Tags: caterpillars, News, train, World, Oddly enough, China Jun 2, 2011 00:48 Moscow Time Caterpillars. Photo: EPA In the north of China a train ground to a halt due to hordes of caterpillars crossing the railroad tracks in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The freight train was forced to slow down first, and then stop for three hours. According to Xinhua agency, the caterpillars had covered about a kilometer of the tracks. The train was able to move only after road workers resorted to shovels and brooms to clear the rails from this unexpected impediment....

Report: Some areas in China under martial law after protests By Eve Bower, CNN May 29, 2011 -- Updated 0210 GMT (1010 HKT) (CNN) -- In an apparent response to days of protests, Chinese authorities have declared martial law in parts of the northeast's inner Mongolia autonomous region, according to Amnesty International. The region has long been the scene of ethnic tension between Mongolians, who have lived in the area for centuries, and the Han people, who arrived in larger numbers after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Han people are the majority ethnic group in...

HUAIAN COUNTY, CHINA—So you think struggling home from Ontario’s cottage country was tough? Think again. And consider, if you will, the case of Chinese trucker Pang Laisuo. On Sunday his coal-laden transport truck was caught in a traffic jam near here, about 240 kilometres north of Beijing. Pang knew he’d have something of a wait. What he didn’t know was that it would last 18 hours. “Everyone who pulled up at 4 o’clock Sunday afternoon ended up being stuck there until 10 o’clock Monday morning,” says Pang, a lean and grizzled man in his 50s speaking at a roadside stop...

The only Catholic church in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, was demolished overnight Monday and the parish priest and a lay leader detained by police. The demolition is believed to have been carried out pursuant to a court order, ucanews.com reports. Parishioners later set up camp near the ruins to try to prevent any new construction on the site. They had arrived for morning Mass on June 8 to a pile of rubble littered with pieces of the altar and five-meter cross. Church sources told ucanews.com that about 100 people arrived around midnight on June 7 to demolish the Dongsheng Church belonging...

Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) city ruins have been discovered in Wuyuan County, Hetao Plain, China's Inner Mongolia. It's said that the scale of the city ruins is rarely seen in Hetao Plain. The city ruins are located in Taal Town of Wuyuan County, Bayannaoer City in China's Inner Mongolia and once covered with grassland. The city wall was about 2 km long and 1 km wide and is made up of compressed earth. The east wall is 2 meters high and remarkably preserved, while, the south wall has already collapsed and is now a road base 80 centimeters high...

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Nepali police began hunting on Saturday for a teenaged boy who some people believe is an reincarnation of Buddha after he disappeared from the site where he had been meditating for almost 10 months. Fifteen-year-old Ram Bahadur Bamjon has not been seen since early Saturday, said Hari Krishna Khatiwada, a district official of Bara, 150 km (95 miles) southeast of Kathmandu. The boy had been meditating there without food or water since May. Some of his followers are also missing. "So far we have found no trace of them," Khatiwada said. Sitting cross-legged beneath a "pipal" tree,...

DHARMSALA, India - The Dalai Lama said Friday that he has asked China to let him to visit the country for the first time since he fled Tibet nearly a half-century ago. His comments came in an address to thousands of followers on the anniversary of the 1959 uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule, which marked the beginning of his exile. The supreme Tibetan spiritual leader, 70, did he did not specify an itinerary, but said he wanted to make a pilgrimage. His envoys, who recently returned from talks with officials in China, had conveyed his request to the Chinese...

China has hit back at US criticism of its human rights record by releasing its own document of alleged US abuses. Washington said in its annual rights report that China was one of the world's "most systematic" offenders. In return Beijing urged the US to "look squarely" at its own problems, such as a high murder rate and jail population. While China often rejects US criticism of its rights record, this exchange is especially sensitive due to President Hu Jintao's visit to the US next month. The report issued by China's cabinet, the State Council, on Thursday listed "a multitude...

Aerial photography sheds light on Kublai Khan's capital BEIJING, Oct. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- Aerial photography has helped shed new light on the capital of Kublai Khan's empire, also known as Xuanadu in Marco Polo's Travel Notes. The description of the metropolis Shangdu (Xuanadu) by Marco Polo some 700 years ago has somewhat been confirmed by aerial photography, Yang Lin, director of the center of remote sensing and aerial photography of China's National Museum, told Xinhua on Saturday. "We can see the spectacular city with its scale and the density of buildings," Yang said. The ruins have been overgrown with...