Fires, floods and other disasters killed 5,286 Chinese miners in the first 11 months of this year, but safety in the industry is improving, the government said.
The figures were announced as the death toll in the latest disaster, a coal mine fire in central China, rose to 18.
PHOTO: AFP
The industry's death toll so far this year is 8 percent below the figure for the same period last year, due to a nationwide campaign, the State Administration for Work Safe-ty said on Tuesday.
But it said the fatality rate per tonne of coal mined is still 100 times that of the US. China says it accounted for 80 percent of all coal mining deaths worldwide last year.
Most of China's miners work in coal mines, but fatalities were also reported this year in gold, tin and other mines.
In the latest deaths, the bodies of 13 miners in the Xinli Coal Mine in Hunan province were found on Tuesday some 500m below the surface, Xinhua News Agency said. It said five were found earlier.
The agency quoted a survivor as saying the fire that broke out on Monday in the mine was caused by a faulty air compressor.
Accidents are often blamed on lack of ventilation and fire-control equipment, poor maintenance or indifference to safety rules.
The Chinese government says it has budgeted some 4 billion yuan (US$500 million) since 2000 to improve ventilation in mines and reduce other safety hazards.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching