Hundreds of thousands of people in China were in coronavirus lockdown yesterday as the country battled its worst outbreak in months, while India reported most new cases in three weeks and US intensified vaccination efforts in the face of a Delta variant-fuelled surge.

Authorities estimate overall economic losses at nearly 90 billion yuan ($14 billion), a devastating blow to the province’s heavily agrarian economy after the torrent of rain last week burst dams and collapsed bridges.

Antibodies triggered by Sinovac Biotech’s Covid-19 vaccine declined below a key threshold from around six months after a second dose for most recipients, although a third shot had a strong booster effect, according to a lab study.

Journalists from several media outlets covering recent floods in China were harassed online and by local residents, with staff from the BBC and Los Angeles Times receiving death threats, according to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC).

Rancour marked the start of yesterday’s talks between Beijing and the highest-level US envoy to visit under President Joe Biden’s administration, as Beijing urged Washington to stop “demonising” China while the US made a “forceful” case against China’s human rights violations.

Chinese tech giant Tencent must relinquish its exclusive music label rights, the market regulator said Saturday, after finding that the firm had violated antitrust laws.

A warehouse fire in northeastern China yesterday left at least fourteen people dead and twelve seriously injured, state media reported. 

Beijing has announced sanctions on seven American citizens and entities in response to a US advisory on deteriorating freedoms in Hong Kong, just days ahead of a visit from a senior Biden administration official.  

China shut down ports and railways yesterday as it braced for Typhoon In-Fa as parts of the country struggled to recover from devastating floods earlier this week. 

A top Chinese official said yesterday that political tensions between Beijing and Australia were not behind a Unesco recommendation to place the Great Barrier Reef on its endangered list.

China launched its long-awaited emissions trading system yesterday, a key tool in its quest to drive down climate change-causing greenhouse gases and go carbon neutral by 2060. 

Nine more people have been confirmed dead in the collapse of a budget hotel in eastern China, bringing the final toll to 17, as state media yesterday announced the end of search and recovery efforts.

China’s culture ministry is seeking to expand its regulatory authority to livestreaming stars and other online influencers by targeting for the first time the agencies that help personalities monetise themselves online, a move that could shape the future of the booming livestreaming industry that so many Big Tech companies, from ByteDance to Tencent Holdings, have come to rely on for growth.

Part of a hotel collapsed in the Chinese city of Suzhou killing eight people and rescue workers were searching on Tuesday for nine people missing in the ruins, state media reported.

Just 25 big cities – almost all of them in China – accounted for more than half of the climate-warming gases pumped out by a sample of 167 urban hubs around the world, an analysis of emissions trends showed. 

China criticized hasty withdrawal of troops by Washington as Afghan authorities yesterday prepared to retake a key border crossing seized by the Taliban in a sweeping offensive that the insurgents claim has helped capture a vast swath of the violence-wracked nation. 

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged the international community on Saturday to build a "Great Wall of Immunity" to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.

President Xi Jinping hailed China's "irreversible" course from colonial humiliation to great-power status at the centenary celebrations for the Chinese Communist Party yesterday, in a speech reaching deep into history to remind patriots at home and rivals abroad of his nation's -- and his own -- ascendancy. 

Hong Kong police arrested a former senior journalist with the now-closed Apple Daily newspaper on a suspected national security offence as he was trying to catch a flight out of the city, media reported.

The first two generating units of the world’s second-biggest hydroelectric dam were officially turned on Monday in southwestern China, the government announced.