New China News Agency

A military transport helicopter crashed in China's earthquake-devastated south-central region with 14 people aboard, the official news agency said today. The New China News Agency's report gave no word on any survivors or casualties. The report said the helicopter crashed Saturday afternoon in fog and strong turbulence. The aircraft was carrying a crew of four and 10 people who had been injured in the earthquake. The news agency said a search and rescue operation was underway.

China berated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), saying she was ignoring the truth about Tibet. Pelosi's visit to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, on Friday was the first by a major foreign official since Tibetan protests broke out in China this month. The Democratic leader said if people didn't speak out against China's oppression in Tibet, "we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world." China's official New China News Agency accused Pelosi of ignoring the violence caused by the Tibetan rioters.

The U.S. military has shipped thousands of jackets, blankets and boxed rations to help victims of China's worst winter storms in more than 50 years, the official New China News Agency reported. The supplies were handed over in Shanghai to the People's Liberation Army, which forwarded them for distribution to parts of the country's hard-hit eastern and central regions. The U.S. aid worth $820,000 included 6,000 winter coats, 1,657 blankets and 87,552 ration packets, the news agency said.

At least 25 people were killed as a bus plunged off an icy roadway in China, the latest casualties in a surge of severe winter weather. The bus veered off the road into a valley in mountainous Guizhou province, the New China News Agency said. Bad weather also left about 500,000 people, mostly migrant workers, stuck in the southern city of Guangzhou, railway officials said. The workers were trying to head home for the Chinese New Year, which falls on Feb. 7.

A small Chinese high-tech firm is suing Microsoft Corp., saying the software giant has stolen its creation that allows Internet users to type Chinese characters. The lawsuit puts Microsoft, which countered the claim, in the unfamiliar position of defending its intellectual property practices in China after years of fighting piracy of its software there. Zhongyi Electronic Ltd., a 100-employee firm, alleged that Microsoft has used its inputting technology and fonts in Windows operating systems without commercial agreement for a decade, the official New China News Agency reported.

Chinese officials detained four people over the beating death of a man who had recorded a clash between villagers and authorities, state media said. Wei Wenhua, 41, was driving by Wanba, a village on the outskirts of Tianmen in Hubei province, on Monday and stopped when he saw villagers squaring off against 50 urban inspectors, his family and state media said. After Wei took out his cellphone to record the demonstration, officials turned on him, the New China News Agency said. The agency cited Tianmen's vice mayor as saying that those under investigation included a leading city bureaucrat.

Shanghai, China's financial capital, is to launch an English- and Japanese-language television channel on Jan. 1 as part of an effort to become an "international and cultural metropolis," the New China News Agency reported. International Channel Shanghai will cover news, information, fashion, entertainment, foreign TV shows and movies. It will air in English and Japanese, with Chinese captions, for 19 hours a day.

Protesters in Chinese-controlled Tibet were arrested during a riot that erupted after two Buddhist monks were taken into police custody, according to the government's news agency. The monks were arrested after a dispute with a shopkeeper, and the subsequent unrest triggered a crackdown, according to the New China News Agency. The incident occurred in mid-November but was only recently reported in China.

An explosion tore through a coal mine in northern China on Wednesday, killing at least 74 workers, the government said. The explosion occurred at the privately run Liuguantun Colliery in Tangshan, a city in Hebei province, said a city official who would only give his surname, Zhang. Eighty-two miners escaped on their own, and 32 were immediately rescued, but three of those later died, the official New China News Agency said.

An earthquake hit parts of central China on Saturday morning, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 450, the government said. The official New China News Agency said the magnitude 5.7 quake was centered near the city of Ruichang, in Jiangxi province. The U.S. National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., recorded the magnitude at 5.5. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed.