'Don't fear death': China's Xi urges blunt call to PLA

Agencies
January 5, 2018

Shanghai, Jan 5: President Xi Jinping has issued a blunt call for China's military to be ready for war and unafraid to die defending the country, as geopolitical tensions mount in Asia.

Xi's exhortation to the world's largest fighting force, parts of which were revealed only late Thursday, came during what state media characterised as a rare address by the Chinese leader to the country's entire military.

Xi cemented his status as China's most powerful leader in decades during an October Communist Party congress, and this week's rhetoric and images of massed soldiers and tanks seemed designed to back up his new strongman image.

China's military personnel should "neither fear hardship nor death," Xi told thousands of military personnel during an inspection visit Wednesday to the People's Liberation Army's Central Theater Command in northern Hebei province, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Xi also called for the military, a once-backward force whose rapid modernisation over recent years has raised alarm in Asia and Washington, to continue upgrading.

He urged the PLA to step up research into high-tech means of warfare and engage in "real combat training", Xinhua said.

"Create an elite and powerful force that is always ready for the fight, capable of combat and sure to win in order to fulfil the tasks bestowed by the Party and the people in the new era," he was quoted saying.

As head of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, Xi is commander-in-chief of China's more than two-million-strong armed forces.

Xinhua called Xi's address to the troops "the first time for the commission to hold a mobilisation meeting for the whole armed forces."

Other media reports said thousands of troops elsewhere in the country assembled at their installations to hear his speech.

Since taking office in 2012, Xi has pushed for a muscular China, including calls in October to develop a "world-class" Chinese army by 2050.

China's neighbours have watched warily as the PLA has upgraded its arsenal with increasing sophisticated weaponry and sought to create a more effective and professional fighting force.

Analysts say Xi is very unlikely to risk putting China's still-untested new prowess into an outright military confrontation.

But concerns have grown as Beijing has imposed increasingly assertive claims to vast expanses of the contested South China Sea, while engaging in confrontations with Japan over disputed islands in the East China Sea, and with India over Himalayan regions.

Temperatures also have risen over North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un thumbing his nose at the world by repeatedly testing his country's banned nuclear weapons and missiles, while exchanging tit-for-tat threats with US President Donald Trump.

During his visit to the military command, Xi was shown in combat fatigues inspecting troops, tanks, sniper training, and peering down the sights of an automatic rifle.

State media also said he paid a visit to an exhibit detailing the PLA's experience battling American-led forces during the Korean War.

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Agencies
January 20,2020

Wuhan, Jan 20: A 45-year-old Indian woman has become the first foreigner in China to have contracted a mysterious virus, which is suspected to be Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-like corona virus.

In 2002-2003, the SARS corona virus killed around 650 people in China and Hong Kong. This time, a new strain of virus with 62 cases have been reported in Wuhan and two in Shenzhen so far. 19 patients have been already cured and discharged, as per the Chinese media.

Official sources in Beijing said that the patient, Preeti Maheshwari, a school teacher at an international school, is undergoing treatment for the new strain of pneumonia outbreak, which has been spreading in two major cities of China - Wuhan and Shenzen. She has been on a ventilator in the intensive care unit.

Maheshwari was admitted to a local hospital after she seriously fell ill last Friday. Her husband, a businessman from Delhi, is allowed to visit her daily.

Following a second death due to the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, India on Friday issued an advisory to its nationals travelling to China. Over 500 Indian medical students are studying in Wuhan.

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News Network
January 2,2020

Washington, Jan 2: The number of people killed in large commercial airplane crashes fell by more than 50% in 2019 despite a high-profile Boeing 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia in March, a Dutch consulting firm said on Wednesday. Aviation consulting firm To70 said there were 86 accidents involving large commercial planes - including eight fatal incidents - resulting in 257 fatalities last year. In 2018, there were 160 accidents, including 13 fatal ones, resulting in 534 deaths, the firm said.

To70 said the fatal accident rate for large airplanes in commercial passenger air transport was just 0.18 fatal accident per million flights in 2019, or an average one fatal accident every 5.58 million flights, a significant improvement over 2018. The fatality numbers include passengers, air crew such as flight attendants and any people on the ground killed in a plane accident

Large passenger airplanes in the study are aircraft used by nearly all travelers on airlines worldwide but excludes small commuter airplanes in service, including the Cessna Caravan and some smaller turboprop airplanes, according to To70.

On Dec. 23, Boeing's board said it had fired Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg after a pair of fatal crashes involving the 737 MAX forced it to announce it was halting output of its best-selling jetliner. The 737 MAX has been grounded since March after an October 2018 crash in Indonesia and the crash of a MAX in Ethiopia in March killed a total of 346 people.

To70 said the aviation industry spent significant effort in 2019 "focusing on so-called 'future threats' such as drones." But the MAX crashes "are a reminder that we need to retain our focus on the basics that make civil aviation so safe: well-designed and well-built aircraft flown by fully informed and well-trained crews."

The Aviation Safety Network said on Wednesday that, despite the MAX crash, 2019 "was one of the safest years ever for commercial aviation." The 157 people killed in March on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 accounted for more than half of all deaths last year worldwide in passenger airline crashes.

Over the last two decades, aviation deaths around the world have been falling dramatically even as travel has increased. As recently as 2005, there were 1,015 deaths aboard commercial passenger flights worldwide, the Aviation Safety Network said.

Last week, 12 people were killed when a Fokker 100 operated by Kazakh carrier Bek Air crashed near Almaty after takeoff. In May, a Russian Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft caught fire as it made an emergency landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, killing 41 people.

The figures do not include accidents involving military flights, training flights, private flights, cargo operations and helicopters.

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News Network
May 24,2020

Beijing, May 24: The Chinese virology institute in the city where COVID-19 first emerged has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new contagion wreaking chaos across the world, its director has said.

Scientists think COVID-19 -- which first emerged in Wuhan and has killed some 340,000 people worldwide -- originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.

But the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told state broadcaster CGTN that claims made by US President Donald Trump and others that the virus could have leaked from the facility were "pure fabrication".

"Now we have three strains of live viruses... But their highest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8 percent," she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19.

US demands immediate start to WHO review

The United States called on the World Health Organisation on Friday to begin working immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its handling of the response to the pandemic.

One of their research teams, led by Professor Shi Zhengli, has been researching bat coronaviruses since 2004 and focused on the "source tracing of SARS", the strain behind another virus outbreak nearly two decades ago.

"We know that the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 is only 80 percent similar to that of SARS. It's an obvious difference," she said.

"So, in Professor Shi's past research, they didn't pay attention to such viruses which are less similar to the SARS virus."

Conspiracy rumours that the biosafety lab was involved in the outbreak swirled online for months before Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the theory into the mainstream by claiming that there is evidence the pathogen came from the institute.

The lab has said it received samples of the then-unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on January 2 and submitted information on the pathogen to the WHO on January 11.

Wang said in the interview that before it received samples in December, their team had never "encountered, researched or kept the virus."

"In fact, like everyone else, we didn't even know the virus existed," she said. "How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?"

The World Health Organization said Washington had offered no evidence to support the "speculative" claims.

In an interview with Scientific American, Shi said the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied.

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