The second Long March 5, China’s own heavy-lift launch vehicle (HLLV), has arrived at southern China’s Wenchang city, where it will be launched in June.

The rocket was transported from its factory in Tianjin to Wenchang by sea in six days, longer than expected as a result of a sudden weather change.

The rocket is scheduled to launch in June, sending the Shijian-18 communication satellite into Earth’s orbit.

Long March 5 has a payload capacity of 25 tons in low-Earth orbit, and 14 tons in geostationary orbit. Chinese people nicknamed the rocket “Chubby-5” for its large size.

The first Long March 5 was launched last November, also from Wenchang.

The space launch center in Wenchang is China’s fourth rocket launch site. It is where China’s first space cargo ship, the Tianzhou-1, was launched on April 20.

The photo taken by a netizen shows the recreational airplane before crashing into a tree, killing two people and injuring another on April 30, 2017, in north China’s Shanxi Province. [Photo: Wechat]

A small recreational airplane crashed into a tree, killing two people and injuring another on Sunday in north China’s Shanxi Province, local authorities said.

The accident occurred at 5:41 p.m., when the airplane carrying two passengers attempted to land following a sight-seeing trip above the Huihe reservoir in Quwo County, according to the county government.

A person on the ground was injured by the crash.

The cause of the accident is under investigation.

Police in southwest China’s Yunnan province have seized more than 12 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, said local authorities on Sunday.

According to a statement by the public security bureau of Ximeng Wa autonomous county, police found a man driving an unlicensed motorcycle last Wednesday who appeared suspicious. When police asked him to stop for a check, the man ran off.

Police didn’t catch him, but found a blue bag he dropped with 12.43 kilograms of the drug inside.

Police are still hunting for the man.

The Ximeng county, on the border of China with Myanmar, is close to the opium-producing Golden Triangle.

A 5.3-magnitude earthquake hit the sea area of Taiwan at about 9:57 a.m. Sunday Beijing Time, according to the measurement of the China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC).

The epicenter was monitored at 21.68 degrees north latitude and 121.54 degrees east longitude.

The world’s closest glacier to a city shrank quickly in the past year and may completely vanish in half a century, according to a Chinese scientist Saturday.

In the last 12 months, the east and west stretches of Glacier No. 1 in the Tianshan Mountains in northwest China, shrank by about 7.2 and 6.3 meters, respectively, according to a recent survey by researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Glacier No.1 is approximately 130 km from Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

“There has been a remarkable increase of polluting dust on Glacier No.1 in recent years,” said Li Zhongqin, head of CAS Tianshan Mountains Glacier Observation Station.

He said that the dust could come from mining, vehicles on a nearby national highway nearby or soil degradation due to overgrazing.

“Given climate change, if no measures are taken, the shrinking will accelerate and the glacier may disappear in 50 years,” he said. “If protection is strengthened, it could last for 70 to 90 years.”