Free Republic

Up to 95 per cent of plastic polluting the world’s oceans pours in from just ten rivers, according to new research. The top 10 rivers – eight of which are in Asia – accounted for so much plastic because of the mismanagement of waste. About five trillion pounds is floating in the sea, and targeting the major sources – such as the Yangtze and the Ganges – could almost halve it, scientists claim. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt flew in coach-class seats on at least two trips home to Oklahoma when taxpayers weren’t footing the bill, despite claims he...

Beijing (AFP) - China has begun building a 314-metre (1,030-ft) high dam which will be among the world's tallest, officials said, as the country massively expands hydropower. The Shuangjiankou dam on a tributary of China's mighty Yangtze river will be completed in 2022, the environmental ministry said on its website Tuesday. The facility, costing 36 billion yuan ($5.8 billion), will be higher than the world's current tallest dam, the 305-metre Jinping-1, also in China. China has been expanding its hydropower electricity generating capacity as it seeks to reach a goal of obtaining 20 per cent of its power from non-fossil...

BEIJING — Most of the 458 passengers aboard a chartered cruise ship were still missing on Tuesday morning more than 12 hours after it sank during a storm along the central Yangtze River, according to a report by Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency. Fewer than a dozen people had been rescued, local news media reported, indicating that this could be the worst such disaster in East Asia since the sinking of the South Korean ferry Sewol last year.

Although M. tuberculosis probably first emerged some 40,000 years ago in Africa, the disease did not take hold until humans took to farming... A previous analysis by his team had shown that the common ancestor of all the M. bacterium strains circulating today began spreading around 10,000 years ago in the ancient Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to the Nile Delta that was a cradle of agriculture... 4,987 samples of the Beijing lineage from 99 countries... the information to date the expansion of the lineage and show how the strains are related... the Beijing lineage did indeed emerge...

The other samples containing the deadly H7N9 virus were collected from two marketplaces selling agricultural products in the down river Yangse delta, Shanghai. After gene sequence analysis, the national avian flu reference laboratory concluded that the strain of the H7N9 virus found on those 19 samples was highly congenetic with that found on a pigeon on Thursday. The ministry ordered Shanghai to shut down the marketplace and cull all (living poultry) chickens, ducks, geese and pigeons.

China's Yangtze river closed to ships by severe drought The Yangtze river, the longest waterway in Asia and China's most important shipping route, has been closed by the worst drought in 50 years that has left cargo ships stranded and 400,000 people without drinking water. Chinese fishing boats berth on the dried river banks as the annual dry winter season caused the water level along the Yangtze river to be so low By Peter Foster, Beijing 2:26PM BST 12 May 2011 Follow Peter Foster on Twitter Water-levels have sunk as low as 10ft in the main thoroughfare of the 3,900-mile...

China has announced $1 billion in funding to help farmers fight the country's devastating droughts, according to The Guardian. The country is facing its worst drought in 60 years right where it hurts the most, the wheat producing province of Shangdong.

An enraged dolphin has been terrorising the French Atlantic coast for several weeks, attacking boats and knocking fishermen into the sea. "He's like a mad dog," said Henri Le Lay, president of the association of fishermen and yachtsmen of the port of Brezellec, in Brittany. "He has caused at least 1,500 euros ($2,530) worth of damage in the past few weeks." The dolphin, named Jean Floch, has destroyed rowboats, overturned open boats, flooded engines and twisted mooring lines. Two fishermen were knocked into the sea after the dolphin overturned their boat. Jean Floch has been a popular and familiar sight...

The first species to be erased from this planet’s great and ancient Order of Cetaceans in modern times is not one of the charismatic sea mammals that have long been the focus of conservation campaigns, like the sperm whale or bottlenose dolphin. It appears to be the baiji, a white, nearly blind denizen of the Yangtze River in China. On Wednesday, an expedition in search of any baiji, run by Chinese biologists and baiji.org, a Swiss foundation, ended empty-handed after six weeks of patrolling its onetime waters in the middle and lower stretches of the river, the baiji’s only known...

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Beijing, China, Dec 15: An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team`s leader saying one of the world`s oldest species was effectively extinct. The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction. A few baiji may still exist in their native Yangtze habitat in eastern China but not in sufficient numbers to...

The Yangtze River dolphin enjoys a rare and depressing distinction, according to new research. The grey white, long-beaked animal is the world's first cetacean -the order of whales, dolphins and porpoises -to be made extinct by man, concludes an international team that has conducted comprehensive surveys of its habitat. The demise of the near-blind mammal also represents the first extinction of a large vertebrate (backboned animal) for more than 50 years, since overhunting claimed the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. A zoologist said it was a "shocking tragedy." The paper, lead-authored by Dr Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society...

Today's dogs are all descended from a pack of wolves tamed 16,000 years ago on the shores of the Yangtze river, according to new research. It was previously known that the birthplace of the dog was eastern Asia but historians were not able to be more precise than that. However, now researchers have made a number of new discoveries about the history of man's best friend - including that the dog appeared about 16,000 years ago south of the Yangtze river in China. It has also been discovered that even though the dog has a single geographical origin it descends...

(BEIJING) -- Water is a daily necessity for most people, but it is a constant companion to primary school student Sun Yao in southwest China's Sichuan Province. He has lived alongside Baicao River, a tributary of the Yangtze, the largest river in China and the third longest in the world, for more than 12 years. At the upper reaches of Yangtze, the Baicao River provides drinking water to the 6,600 inhabitants of Piankou Town, Beichuan County, which was among the most severely damaged during the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake that claimed more than 80,000 lives. However, the Mother River has...

(BEIJING) - China has completed a road tunnel beneath the Yangtze River in the central city of Wuhan, marking the first such project on the river, known for having its waters controlled by the Three Gorges Dam. The 3.6-km tunnel will cut travel time between the city's business district and the government and university district to seven minutes from half an hour, the official Xinhua news agency cited vice mayor Yin Weizhen as saying. The tunnel will be opened to the public late this year, Xinhua said, adding that it would be able to withstand an earthquake of up to...

China has done its best to ruin the scenery on the Yangtze River. Smog blots out the sun. Factories dot the shores. And the construction of a giant dam has flooded the Three Gorges, the famed river passage through towering limestone and sandstone cliffs. And yet, one afternoon last spring, a friend and I were staring in quiet wonder from a cruise ship sailing up the Yangtze. We were in a world of green, gliding past cliffs covered in rain-slicked trees and bamboo bushes. Slender waterfalls churned into the jade-colored river. "It is really beautiful. I can only imagine what...

Dry, polluted, plagued by rats: the crisis in China's greatest riverShips stranded as Yangtze reaches a 142-year low Jonathan Watts in Beijing The Guardian, Thursday January 17 2008 A river bed is exposed as water levels fall along the Yangtze river near Wuhan, central China's Hubei province. Photograph: AP The waters of the Yangtze have fallen to their lowest levels since 1866, disrupting drinking supplies, stranding ships and posing a threat to some of the world's most endangered species. Asia's longest river is losing volume as a result of a prolonged dry spell, the state media warned yesterday, predicting hefty...

SIERRA VISTA — Four years before Pearl Harbor was attacked, a local man sailed on a U.S. Navy ship that was bombed and sunk by Imperial Japanese warplanes. The incident happened on Dec. 13, 1937, as the USS Panay was evacuating U.S. embassy personnel from Nanking, China’s capital of that era. It was a city under siege whose downfall became the infamous Rape of Nanking. The Panay was a gunboat that belonged to the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, whose 1930s peacetime mission included protection of American lives and property from pirates along the lawless Yangtze River, under a treaty with the...

Yu Falun is a retired metals factory worker, and I met him on the banks of the Yangtze River above Yibin, picking colored stones from the water. He is 63, has a winning smile and collects the stones as a hobby -- a peaceful pastime that gets him out by the river for hours at a time. For him the Yangtze is a geologic marvel, water wearing down stone for millennia, its slow changes over time producing smooth pebbles for someone with the patience and interest to find them. When I told him I had come to China to see...

(HEFEI) -- A 100-meter stretch of the Yangtze River embankment in east China's Anhui province collapsed on Saturday, an official with the local waterway administration said. The accident occurred early on Saturday in the marshlands near the river outside the city of Wuhu and resulted in more than 6,000square meters of land falling into the river. About ten warehouses belonging to a shipyard, a few cranes and a barge fell in the water. No casualties were reported but an elderly couple was rescued from the barge before it toppled into the river. Hu Guangjin, an official with the Wuhu Yangtze...