China, Asia | featured news

China, the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, is directly feeling the man-made heat of global warming, scientists conclude in the first study to link the burning of fossil fuels to one country's rise in its daily temperature spikes....

As cases of H7N9 continue to grow in China, one Chinese Air Force officer is blaming the outbreak not on genetic mutations – but on the United States government. In a post on his blog Saturday, People’s Liberation Army Sr. Col. Dai Xu accused the United States of causing the recent bird flu outbreak by releasing the H7N9 virus in China as an act of biological warfare, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

A strain of bird flu that has been found in humans for the first time in eastern China is not a cause for panic, the World Health Organization said on Monday, as the number of people infected rose to 21, with six deaths.

China's leaders issued thinly veiled rebukes to North Korea for raising regional tensions, with the president saying no country should throw the world into chaos and the foreign minister warning that Beijing would not allow mischief on its doorstep.

With confirmation that a sixth person has died from a mysterious avian-borne virus, Chinese officials escalated their response on Friday, advising people to avoid live poultry, dispatching virologists to chicken farms across the country and slaughtering more than 20,000 birds at a wholesale market in Shanghai where the virus, known as H7N9, was detected in a pigeon.

U.S. tech companies raised alarms about a provision in a government spending bill that makes it harder for some federal agencies to buy technology made in China.

North Korea's latest outburst of nuclear and military threats has given the U.S. a rare opportunity to build bridges with China - a potential silver lining to the simmering crisis that could revitalize the Obama administration's flagging policy pivot to Asia....

A middle-aged man who transported poultry for a living and another unidentified person have died from a new strain of bird flu, bringing the death toll to five among 14 confirmed cases in China, the government and state media reported Thursday. The 48-year-old man, who died in Shanghai, is one of several among the infected believed to have had direct contact with fowl. Until recently, the virus, called H7N9, was not known to infect humans.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is calling North Korea's development of nuclear weapons a "growing threat" to the U.S. and its allies. In a telephone call Tuesday evening to Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan, Hagel cited North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and said Washington and Beijing should continue to cooperate on those problems.

Chinese authorities tried to calm spreading health concerns Wednesday after a third person was reported to have died from a new type of bird flu. The emergence in China of the H7N9 strain of avian flu — a total of nine cases have been reported since it was revealed last weekend — are troubling because the strain has not previously been found in humans.