Short circuit

A SHORT circuit has been blamed for a deadly hotel fire that had killed 20 people in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, investigators said Monday.

At around 4 a.m. Aug. 25, a fan short-circuited setting nearby plastic ornaments on fire at the Beilong Hot Spring Leisure Hotel in Harbin, the provincial capital, according to the investigation team.

Eight dead

EIGHT people have been confirmed dead with the last three missing bodies retrieved from a mudflow that occurred in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province last Wednesday, local authorities said yesterday.

The accident occurred in Mojiang County in the city of Pu’er as a mudflow poured into a tunnel construction site and carried away a work shed.

Four railway construction workers were killed on site by the mudflow, leaving four workers missing and two more injured.

During the search and rescue operation, the bodies of the four missing workers were recovered and identified by relatives and DNA tests, said the city’s publicity department.

The work shed belongs to a branch of the China Railway Construction Corp. Ltd.

5.5-magnitude quake

A 5.5-MAGNITUDE earthquake hit Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region yesterday morning, and no immediate casualties or damage to property have been reported, according to local government.

The quake jolted Jiashi County in Kashgar Prefecture in Xinjiang at 5:52 a.m. yesterday, according to the China Earthquake Networks Center.