Fifteen people died in China after the fall of a bus off a cliff

Fifteen people died and another 20 were injured after a bus fell into a ravine in northern China, local authorities said.
The incident occurred Saturday on a road in Shanxi Province. At least 15 people have died on impact and another 19 were hospitalized.
China's roads are considered dangerous. According to official statistics, about 200 people die daily in road accidents in China.

Tropical storm causes losses of $480m: China

China said a tropical storm caused losses of about 3.1 billion yuan ($480 million), destroying hundreds of homes as it battered the country's east coast before slamming into North Korea on Tuesday.

The Chinese weather agency said it had downgraded Tropical Storm Muifa to a depression after it made

landfall in North Korea early Tuesday, avoiding a feared direct hit on China's densely populated commercial capital Shanghai further south.

The National Disaster Reduction Committee said 1.35 million people were evacuated, 600 houses destroyed and another 4,800 damaged as Muifa skirted China's eastern coast.

There were no confirmed deaths in China, but one person was missing after a boat sank, and four people were killed in neighbouring South Korea.

North Korea's state-run news agency, KCNA, reported heavy rain but gave no details of any damage or casualties.

In Shanghai, hundreds of flights had to be cancelled and thousands of fishing boats were called back to port over the weekend.

US oil giant ConocoPhillips said the storm had forced it to suspend clean-up operations on a two-month-old oil spill off the coast of Shandong province.

Authorities had expressed concern that Muifa could cause destruction similar to that unleashed by Typhoon Saomai in 2006, which was the worst to hit China in 50 years and killed at least 450 people.

On Monday there was a brief scare after the storm destroyed a dyke protecting a chemical plant from the sea on the north-east coast but China later said workers had managed to repair it.

Thousands of soldiers were on standby to conduct rescue and relief work after the storm passes, the official Xinhua news agency said.

In Dandong, on the China side of the border with North Korea, authorities have set up more than 750 temporary shelters that are capable of accommodating more than a million people, Xinhua reported.

China Blames Extremists for Xinjiang Attack

China blamed Muslim extremists for a deadly attack on Sunday in its northwestern Xinjiang region, saying the assailants' leaders were trained in camps in Pakistan.

The government in Kashgar, a city near the border with Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan, said that an "initial probe"

had shown that the heads of the group that carried out Sunday's attack, in which 11 people died, had received explosives and firearms training from Pakistan-based camps of the group East Turkestan Islamic Movement before entering Xinjiang to organize the attacks.

The city government said in a statement Monday that its information was based on a confession by a suspect in the attacks. It also said that four suspects had been shot dead at the scene of the attacks Sunday, and a fifth had died in the hospital from gunshot wounds.

The government on Monday also issued arrest warrants for two other suspects who it said fled the scene of Sunday's attack. It identified them as 29-year-old Memtieli Tiliwaldi and 34-year-old Turson Hasan, and said both were members of Xinjiang's indigenous Uighur ethnic minority. The police have offered 100,000 yuan, or about $15,540, for information leading to their arrests.

Sunday's attack came a day after nine people were killed, including one suspected assailant, and 27 injured in a separate attack in Kashgar. The government's statement Monday didn't assign responsibility for that attack.

The weekend's incidents in Kashgar were part of a sharp escalation in violence in recent weeks in Xinjiang, where Uighurs have long chafed at Communist Party rule. Uighur groups have for decades waged a sporadic, sometimes violent, struggle for independence from Beijing, which they accuse of plundering the oil-rich region's resources, suppressing religious freedoms, and swamping it with ethnic Han Chinese migrants.

The latest attacks came just under two weeks after police shot dead 14 Uighur rioters in the city of Hotan, also in Xinjiang, after they attacked a police station, setting fire to it and killing two police officers and two civilians, according to state media. It also comes as party leaders grapple with resurgent ethnic unrest in recent months in neighboring Inner Mongolia and continuing tensions in Tibet.‬

Monday's statement said the assailants in Sunday's attack set off an explosion that triggered a fire in a restaurant, then started attacking civilians with eight different knives. Six civilians were also killed, and 15 people injured, including three police. The 12 civilians wounded were members of China's majority Han ethnicity, the statement said. The government had earlier said that three people were killed.

Beijing regards Uighur separatists as part of a terrorist organization with links to al Qaeda, and has courted international support for its campaign against them. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government, as well as by Beijing.

China's state-run Xinhua news agency on Monday quoted Pan Zhiping, a researcher with the Central Asia Studies Institute under the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, as saying that ETIM is based somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Xinhua quoted him and other experts as saying that ETIM has traditionally trained members for suicide bombings and car bombings, but recently has used the Internet to spread bomb-making information across borders.

Bullet train crashes in China; at least 35 killed

At least 35 people were killed and scores were injured Saturday when a bullet train in eastern China lost power after being struck by lightning and was rear-ended by another train, state news media reported.

The crash sent two passenger cars careening off an elevated track in Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang province.

State television showed video of rescue workers in a steady downpour pulling bloodied passengers out of a car standing on its end and leaning against a bridge.

Six cars were derailed in the two trains, one of which originated in Beijing and the other in Hangzhou, state media reported.

The collision is the first major incident in China's massive high-speed rail network, set to reach 10,000 miles by 2020.

The newest line in that network, a Beijing-Shanghai corridor, has been beset by electrical glitches in recent weeks because of poor weather, officials said.

The safety of the national network was also called into question when the head of the railway ministry was removed in February because of a corruption scandal believed to have led to shoddy construction.

The ministry has since decreased top speeds on the system as a precautionary measure.

It was unclear how fast the trains in Wenzhou were traveling before they crashed.

Known as dongche, the trains were part of China's first generation of high-speed rail. Top speeds reach 155 mph. By comparison, the speed on the Beijing-Shanghai line is 186 mph.

China releases dissident artist Ai Weiwei

High-profile artist Ai Weiwei has been released on bail in China after nearly three months in detention, but says he is unable to talk about his ordeal.
The influential dissident was arrested in April and accused of tax evasion.
The detention of the famous avant-garde artist sparked an international outcry, with the United States, Australia, Britain, France and Germany joining Amnesty International and other rights

groups in calling for his release.
His supporters said the arrest had nothing to do with tax but was because of his support for activist campaigns in China and his criticism of the ruling Communist Party.
Ai investigated school collapses in the 2008 quake in the south-western province of Sichuan, and launched a "citizen's probe" into a Shanghai fire that killed 58 people in November last year.
The state-run Xinhua wire service said Ai was released partly because he was willing to pay the tax he owed, partly because he had a "good attitude in confessing his crimes", and partly because he suffers from a chronic disease.
Contacted by the media at home after his release, Ai said he could not talk to reporters.
"I cannot give any interview, please. So sorry," he said. "I cannot say anything. I'm on bail."
Born in 1957, Ai came to global prominence after contributing to the design of Beijing's Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium, and his work was shown in London's Tate Modern gallery this year.
He was taken into custody at Beijing's airport in April during the government's biggest crackdown on activists in years.
John Connell is the organiser of a protest group made up of Australian artists calling for Ai's release.
He says the artist's experience is similar to that of many other imprisoned Chinese dissidents.
"The conditions of many journalists and thinkers in China is not a free one, so Ai Weiwei's release, we can look on that as a positive, but it's also a further call for more action."