Society

In the morning of 22th February, on Guangxi highway a 49-seats-bus' accident cause 12 death. the rest 39 were sent to the nearest hospital.

 

A gas explosion ripped through a coal mine in northern China on Sunday, killing at least 74 miners and trapping dozens, state media said. It was the country's deadliest coal mine accident in more than a year.

China's mines are the world's most dangerous with more than 3,000 deaths a year in fires, floods and explosions.

The pre-dawn blast occurred while 436 workers were in the Tunlan Coal Mine in Gujiao city near Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

At least 74 miners died and 114 others were hospitalized, including six in critical condition, Xinhua said. It did not say how many workers remained trapped in the shaft but earlier reports said 65 were still underground.

Most of the injured miners were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, Xinhua said, citing doctors at a nearby hospital. Exposure to carbon monoxide, an odorless, colorless gas, can lead to death.

Xinhua said about 80 rescuers were searching for survivors.

State television CCTV showed rescuers in orange suits and red helmets with headlamps entering an elevator to be lowered into the mine shaft, while others emerged from the mine carrying workers on stretchers toward waiting ambulances.

A rescuer said in a phone interview with CCTV that some sections of the mine remained inaccessible to emergency teams because of high levels of carbon monoxide.

A rescued miner, Xue Huancheng, was quoted by Xinhua as saying while lying in a hospital bed that he remembered being ordered to flee because the ventilation system had broken down.

"At that time power supply underground was cut off and we had to walk," he said, adding that he fainted as he was about to reach the exit after walking about 40 minutes.

A State Administration of Work Safety duty officer who would only give her surname, Zhang, said the cause of the explosion was still being investigated.

The mine is owned by Shanxi Coking Coal Group, China's largest producer of coking coal, which is used in the production of steel. The company operates 28 mines.

The Tunlan mine has some of the best facilities in the country and had not reported any major accidents in the past five years, Xinhua said. It produces 5 million tons of coking coal a year.

The death toll was the highest in a coal mine accident since December 2007, when a gas explosion at a mine in Linfen city in Shanxi province killed 105 miners, according to the State Administration of Work Safety. That blast was triggered by an accumulation of gas in an unventilated tunnel.

The government has promised for years to improve mine safety, but energy-hungry China depends on coal for most of its power.

More than 1,000 dangerous small mines were closed last year, but the country's mining industry remains the world's deadliest. About 3,200 people died in coal mine accidents last year, a 15 percent decline from the previous year.

While China's overall coal mining safety record is abysmal, the numbers mask great disparities. Large, state-run mines tend to have safety records approaching those of developed countries while smaller mines have little or no safety equipment and weak worker training.

Government figures show that almost 80 percent of China's 16,000 mines are small, illegal operations.

If at the age of 14, when he dropped out of school because his farmer father could not afford his education, someone told Cao Dewang that he would one day be one of China's richest men, he probably would have laughed it off as a joke.

Donating billions of yuan to charity wasn't even a thought to comprehend. But then, he didn't know what destiny had in store.

Ranked by Forbes the 53rd richest man in China in 2008, the business tycoon from Fujian province, whose Fuyao group manufactures windshields for world-renowned carmakers like Volvo, Audi and Bentley, has decided to give away 70 percent of his shares in the firm to charity.

The shares amount to a staggering 4 billion yuan ($585 million).

"I have decided to set up a charity fund, named after my father, He Ren, for which I will donate 70 percent of my shares in the Fuyao group," Cao was quoted as saying in the Beijing Morning Post yesterday.

He said the charity fund would aim to cover "educational programs, disaster and poverty relief, and religion", the report said.

It the authorities give Cao's proposal a green light, the 63-year-old will become the country's most charitable person, surpassing fellow entrepreneur Yu Pengnian.

Cao said he will submit a formal application to the authorities next month, and expected the charity fund to be established by the end of this year.

Before Cao joined the Fuyao group (formerly known as Fuqing Gaoshan Glass) in 1983, after winning the contract to run the company, he worked as a herdsman and tobacco seller. By 1993, Fuyao had taken up 40 percent of China's market share.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs recently bestowed Cao with the title of one of "China's Top 10 Charitable Persons". So far, he has donated 200 million yuan to various charities, including 20 million yuan for the May 12 earthquake disaster relief last year.

Cao said that to ensure the stability of Fuyao shares, "the amount of operational shares is about 10 percent of its total sum".

In a Sina.com Internet poll, in which 21,416 people participated, 84 percent said successful entrepreneurs should give something back to society in charity. More than 96 percent hailed Cao for his charitable acts.

Farmers in earthquake-devastated southwest China beat a village chief and clashed with police this week after they claimed they were cheated out of quake relief subsidies, state media said.

Wednesday's clash in Anxian county — one of the hardest-hit areas from last May's quake — left an unspecified number of farmers and police injured and calm was restored after 100 police were brought in, the official Xinhua News Agency said late Friday.

Xinhua reported that tensions flared after five villagers said they were denied subsidies and beat the head of Yongquan village. After some of the farmers were detained for the beating, 20 more villagers then surrounded the local police station.

An official in Anxian county's propaganda office played down the conflict but confirmed that a dispute occurred over relief subsidies. The official said farmers were dredging sand from a river bed for construction and when local officials tried to stop them, they raised the issue of quake subsidies.

"Police from neighboring areas gathered to maintain the order, (but) no clash broke out in the township," said the official, who would only give his surname, Xi.

The misuse of relief supplies and funds has been a constant problem since only a few days after the 7.9-magnitude earthquake jolted Sichuan province and surrounding areas on May 12, leaving 90,000 people dead or missing and 5 million homeless. Victims complained that local officials were giving tents and relief supplies to relatives and friends, rather than to people most in need.

The authoritarian government in Beijing has allocated 70 billion yuan ($10.2 billion) for reconstruction and has vowed to monitor carefully how funds are spent to prevent corruption. Disaster relief funds have been a favorite target of local officials. In 2007, some 258 million yuan in disaster relief funds were diverted to construct government buildings or spent on administration, according to a government audit.

In the Anxian county dispute, Xinhua said the local government is investigating whether subsidies were misallocated.