Daily News Channel
the early 1960s, china was in the throes of economic catastrophe and widespread famine–both resulting from the radical political and economic experiments of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. As opposition to Mao’s leadership grew, the Chairman left Beijing in late 1965 for Hangzhou, where he would map out his last assault on the Communist Party’s revisionist leadership–the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
Last year’s inaugural Prix Pictet photography award for environmental sustainability produced a stunning shortlist of photos. This year is no different with 12 photographers in the running for the first prize of 100,000 CHF ($97,500).
In the tree of life, we often envision evolution working like a patient gardener, pruning species that don’t quite fit, bit by bit. But that’s not how extinction works in practice. Throughout our planet’s history, mass extinction has occurred five times — most recently 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs finally died out — taking out vast amounts of life all at once, usually due to a catastrophic and sudden climatic change
Fans of old Shanghai style rejoice: another of the city’s Art Deco beauties has been buffed, polished and restored to its former shine, this time by Langham Hotels. The onetime Yangtze Hotel on Hankou Road — now called the Langham Yangtze Boutique — was built 75 years ago to cater for the city’s Chinese élite
The Irrawaddy, one of the world’s rarest species of freshwater dolphins, have been found in surprisingly large numbers deep in the waterlogged jungles of Bangladesh. Conservationists thought the Irrawaddy had dwindled in number to just a few hundred, but they have now counted almost 6,000 of them in the Sundarban mangrove forests and the adjacent waters of the Bay of Bengal. The forests of the Sundarban — Bengali for “beautiful forest” — lie at the delta of the Ganges and two other rivers on the Bay of Bengal.