The death toll from a rare spate of hornet attacks in central China has reached 41 people, local authorities said Wednesday.

The Shaanxi provincial government said in a statement that the attacks had plagued not only the city of Ankang, where 19 died as reported by the official Xinhua News Agency, but had killed 22 others in two adjacent cities in the province’s south.

All told, more than 1,600 people have been injured, and 37 of them are in critical or serious condition in hospitals, the provincial government said.

It said it has mobilized a special medic team and trained more medical personnel to treat victims, and an Ankang official told Xinhua that firefighters have been removing hornet nests.

The provincial government said hornets are most aggressive in behavior when they mate and migrate in September and October. Local officials have also said drier and warmer weather this year has contributed to the ferocity of attacks.

A 5.9-magnitude earthquake killed at least four people Saturday morning in southwestern China, state media reported.

Officials reported 10 injuries as emergency teams began to respond, the Xinhua News Agency said.

The state-owned news agency quoted Yunnan provincial officials as saying that 600 residential units collapsed. An additional 55,000 residential units were damaged, and 9,200 people had been forced to relocate, Xinhua reported.

The quake — with a depth of 10 kilometers — hit in remote areas near the border of the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Roads were blocked in some villages by boulders rolling down mountains, and 17 people on three tourist buses were trapped by landslides, Xinhua said.

The Civil Affairs Ministry in Yunnan province was sending tents and clothing, Xinhua said.

On Wednesday, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake hit the same region.

Internet users in China were met with sluggish response times early Sunday as the country’s domain extension came under a “denial of service” attack.

The attack was the largest of its kind ever in China, according to the ChinaInternetNetworkInformationCenter, a state agency that manages the .cn country domain.

The double-barreled attacks took place at around 2 a.m. Sunday, and then again at 4 a.m. The second attack was “long-lasting and large-scale,” according to state media, which said that service was slowly being restored.

Official state media said the attack targeted websites with the .cn country domain, as well as the popular microblogging site Sina Weibo.

Denial of service attacks aren’t technically “hacks,” since they can be done without breaking into any systems. Typically, DoS attacks overwhelm a website’s servers by flooding them with requests. That makes websites unreachable or unresponsive.

It’s unclear whether the attack is related to political events in China, which appears to be in the midst of carrying out a crackdown on Internet dissent.

Flooding in China’s north and south caused by heavy rain has left at least 107 dead and inundated roads and farmland, the government and state media said.

Three provinces in China’s northeast bore the brunt of the floods with 85 dead and 105 missing in Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning as of 4pm on Monday, the government said.

A total of 37 million residents in that region were affected by flood waters, Xinhua said, which were described by a local newspaper as the worst in 50 years in Liaoning province.

More than 787,000 hectares of farmland in the region, a major grain growing area, were flooded and pictures showed roads in many urban areas looking more like rivers.

Xinhua said that the People’s Liberation Army had been mobilized to carry out rescue work.

Some internet users criticized the official response to the floods.

At least 25 people have died in storms and floods in China’s northeast in the past week, local authorities and state media reported.

Civil affairs officials in Heilongjiang province said late Friday that the disasters killed 11 people and left three missing in the province.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the death toll had risen to 14 Saturday in the neighboring province of Jilin.

Flooding following heavy rain is common in China, but Xinhua said the flooding in the region was the worst in decades.

Authorities said the floods had forced the relocation of hundreds of thousands of residents, suspended industrial operations, disrupted railway transportation, cut off highways and caused power outages.

Apple in China has posted instructions on how to tell an official power adapter from a fake one, after a number of iPhone owners claim to have been electrocuted by their handsets.

The page shows images of chargers for each Apple device, including the iPhone 5 and the iPad 2, with the safety notices underneath.

The recent electrocutions took place in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Xinjian, putting one man into a coma and killing another woman.

The site reads: ‘This overview will help you identify genuine Apple USB power adapter.

All iPhone and iPads are sold with official Apple chargers, although fake replacements can be bought online.

Earlier this week a Chinese man reportedly fell into a coma after suffering an electric shock as he plugged in his iPhone 4 in to charge.

An Apple spokesman said: ‘It was with great sadness we learned through press reports that a Beijing customer was injured while using a “knock off” or counterfeit charger and we are looking into this further.

‘Our customers’ safety is very important to us and we have carefully designed all Apple products to meet government safety standards. We recommend our customers only purchase Apple products from Apple or authorized Apple resellers.’

An explosion rocked the arrival area of Beijing’s InternationalAirport today after a man set off a homemade bomb, according to Chinese news media.

The explosion took place at about 6:24 p.m. local time, according to China’s state run newscaster, CCTV, which cited witness reports.

Photos posted on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, showed a portion of terminal 3 filled with smoke after the blast.

Both domestic and international flights take off and land in terminal 3.

Chinese police have identified the alleged bomber as Ji Zhongxing. He was the only one injured in the blast.

Police said Zhongxing is a petitioner — a citizen with a grievance against government officials or police — though they did not say what Zhongxing’s grievance is.

Less than two hours after the explosion, airport officials said operations are back to normal and no flights were affected.

A woman who fell through a narrow gap between two walls was left stuck there for seven hours because locals thought her screams for help were a ghost.

The woman, who has not been named, was taking a short cut home in Feidong in China’s Anhui Province, and had squeezed her way through a tiny gap between two brick walls.

But she hadn’t realised that the gap became narrower the further down she went and she soon became stuck.

Unfortunately when she called out for help, the homeowner living on the other side of the wall assumed she was a ghost and was too terrified to investigate further.

The trapped woman had to endure an entire night trapped between the walls as he cries for help went unanswered.

She was finally spotted by passers-by the following morning. The fire brigade was called and quickly arrived to cut her free.

It took around 20 minutes for them to break down part of one of the walls enough for her to squeeze out.

He is a beloved fictional bear described as having ‘very little brain’ who lives on a diet of honey and is best friends with a piglet.

But when a trivial comparison was made between China’s President Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh, the country’s strict censorship laws swung into action.

A picture of Xi Jinping walking with Barack Obama at a California summit was published on the Chinese social media site Weibo.

It was placed next to an illustrated image of Winnie the Pooh and his pal Tigger, who have been drawn in a similar pose to the politicians.

Comments that were posted on the blog were removed and the picture was deleted by website monitors.

Despite being removed form the site, the images went viral, with critics saying over-zealous censors had misread the frivolous comparison.

The Communist Party’s censors are known for interfering with even the most minor of government criticism on social networking sites.

The blogger, called Nicaragua Rabbit posted the two pictures on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, on Tuesday.

A passenger jet was forced to make an emergency landing after a mysterious mid-air collision with a ‘foreign object’ at 26,000ft severely dented its nose cone.

The front of the Air China Boeing 757 had been pushed in and scratches and scraped paintwork  were clearly visible when it landed.

The plane was climbing over China when a large bang was heard from the front of aircraft.

The pilot said the aircraft was struggling to perform and he immediately called air traffic controllers, according to reports.

Experts said investigations into the suspected crash have raised suspicions that the aircraft was hit by a ‘foreign object’.

However, they do not believe it was caused by a bird strike as no blood or feathers were visible on the dented nose cone.

The pictures have prompted online speculation that it was caused by a UFO or a drone strike.

Other theories posted on the Aviation Herald include pressure from rapidly heated and expanded air.

Former government UFO investigator Nick Pope told The Sun that an examination of the nose cone should reveal what hit it.

However, he questioned whether the ‘secretive’ Chinese would reveal the cause.

Mr Pope told The Sun: ‘Cases like this show that whatever people believe about UFOs, there are serious air safety issues here.