China landslide kills 22, dozens more buried - Warnings' for China celebrities over censorship row

• 11/01/2013 - 10:52
  

  China landslide kills 22, dozens more buried

  
  

  11 Jan 2013
  BEIJING (AFP)

  

  A landslide in southwestern China on Friday killed at least 22 people, including seven from one family, with some two dozen others trapped, local authorities said.
  The landslide buried 16 homes in the village of Gaopo in the southern province of Yunnan, the provincial government said on its website.
  

  

  Photo taken on October 4, 2012 shows rescuers searching for victims after a landslide in Yiliang, southwest China's Yunnan province. A landslide in southwestern China on Friday killed at least 22 people, including seven from one family, with some two dozen others trapped, local authorities said.

  A total of 22 deaths had been confirmed so far, including the seven from a single family, it said, while 20 to 30 people were still buried. Emergency teams had rescued two villagers from the debris, it added.
  Photos posted on the website showed rescuers in orange uniforms digging in wide swathes of clumpy mud against a backdrop of snow-covered, terraced hills.
  A video posted on a Chinese social networking site appeared to show a group of villagers digging through thick mud and debris to uncover a body, which was carried away on a stretcher.
  Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar and Laos among others, is a relatively impoverished area of China, where rural houses are often cheaply constructed.
  Gaopo is in Zhenxiong county, about 550 kilometres (340 miles) northeast of the provincial capital of Kunming.
  The mountainous area is prone to landslides. One in a neighbouring county in October killed 18 children, while two earthquakes in Yunnan in September -- one of magnitude 5.7 -- left 81 people dead and hundreds injured.
  Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made an overnight trip to the quake zone at the time to comfort survivors, many of whom had taken refuge in tents erected on a public square.
  The province has experienced unusually low temperatures in recent weeks, as China suffers in what authorities have called its coldest winter in 28 years.
  
• 11/01/2013 - 10:26

  'Warnings' for China celebrities over censorship row

  
  

  11 Jan 2013

  BEIJING (AFP)

  

  Chinese authorities handed warnings to several celebrities who voiced support for a newspaper at the centre of a censorship battle online, newspaper reports and social media posts said Friday.
  Taiwanese singer Annie Yi, who works in mainland China, said on her social media account that she had been invited to "drink tea" with authorities, a common euphemism for being cautioned by authorities, the South China Morning Post reported.
  The warning came after Yi -- who has more than six million followers on Sina Weibo, a Chinese website similar to Twitter -- expressed support for Southern Weekly, a newspaper at the centre of protests over government censorship this week.
  Other Chinese celebrities, including the former head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, and property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang also said they received invitations to "drink tea", after posting messages in support of the paper, according to online posts.
  The two men have a combined 38 million followers on the site, which had more than 400 million registered users in 2012.
  Chinese activists have previously said that invitations to "drink tea" are extended by state security police, who use such meetings as warnings not to engage in anti-government activities.
  Several Chinese celebrities posted messages in support of the Southern Weekly this week, after journalists at the paper protested government censors' replacement of a pro-reform editorial.
  Yao Chen, an actress who has 32 million followers on her Weibo account, earlier posted the paper's logo and quoted Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world".
  Southern Weekly was published as scheduled on Thursday, after reports that newspaper staff had struck a deal with authorities that the paper would not be censored before publication.
  

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