This portion of the Great Wall, located in Liaoning Province, was covered with a cement screed in as a restoration. 
The Great Wall of China will have seen some great things! It will have been attacked and destroyed by bad weather, looted for its stones and flanked by inadequate tourist infrastructure. Latest outrage:a portion of the wall - out of the 20,000 kilometers that Unesco counts for it - has been consolidated with an ugly cement screed. The restoration work was immediately mocked by the public as sketchy and crude. A senior Cultural Heritage Administration official has since acknowledged that the repairs had "severely compromised the pristine and natural historic features of the Great Wall", according to the website of China Daily . Conservation projects are underway in the 15 provinces crossed by the monument. Will there be any more nasty surprises?
Bangladesh:why the Sundarbans ecosystem is more important than a power station
The future coal-fired power plant at Rampal, the site chosen on the edge of the Sundarbans mangroves in Bangladesh, is spill a lot of ink. This buffer forest protects the country from cyclones and the vagaries of climate change. The coal-fired power station, if it were to see the light of day, would supply electricity to an economically underdeveloped region. The ecosystem being classified by Unesco, it demands accountability from the State. The Bangladeshi Daily Star opens its pages wide to debaters. On September 17, during a meeting organized by the same daily, a government economic adviser suggested that critics of the project present their arguments on a scientific basis. Since then, the columns and interviews of scientists - botanists, hydrologists, conservation specialists - follow one another in the pages of the Daily Star . And to fire any wood, critics also rely on the anti-pollution technologies of the future plant.
Japan:Roman coins in an Okinawa castle
This is the first time according to the Japan Times article that Roman coins have been found in the ruins of a Japanese castle on the island of Okinawa. The coins date from the reign of Constantine 1
st
. An X-ray scan identified the profile of the Christian emperor of the 4
th
century. Japanese archaeologists interviewed by AFP are skeptical, how did these Western pieces end up in a stronghold erected at 12
th
century, in the extreme south of the Japanese archipelago? These coins are not proof of a direct link between Japan and the Western world, nor even that they were used for commercial transactions.
India:in search of a mythical medicinal plant
Repeated forest fires in the Indian state of Uttarakand worries the latter's health minister . What if among the plants that went up in smoke, disappeared forever the plant that all Indian traditional herbalists have heard of but never seen? The mrit sanjivani or plant that breathes life plays its part in the epic Ramayana. It is the monkey god Hanuman who is responsible for finding her on the slopes of the Himalayas. A cryptobotanical quest told by an article from the New York Times , which will still cost taxpayers a whopping 3 million euros. Some are already petitioning…
China:a former nuclear site turned into a tourist attraction
The former military nuclear site 816 in Chongqing in China's Sichuan province has been open to the public again since this end of September. Construction of the top-secret underground base began in 1966. The plant's reactor was to produce plutonium-239 for military use. Relations with the Soviet big brother were deteriorating and mastery of the nuclear industry became a guarantee of security. However, the factory has never housed any radioactive material according to the China Daily website. . Partially reopened in 2010, the disused site has now been converted into a nuclear and history museum. And this time, foreign tourists are welcome. Three hours of visit in the maze of tunnels, streets and underground rooms dressed in light.