China will encourage ships flying its flag to take the Northwest Passage via the Arctic Ocean, a route opened up by global warming, to cut travel times between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a state-run newspaper said on Wednesday.

• April 20, 2016

Oil prices jumped more than 3 percent on Tuesday after a strike by workers in Kuwait nearly halved the OPEC member's crude production, overshadowing bearish sentiment after Sunday's failure by producers to agree to freeze output levels.

• April 19, 2016

China and other major steel-producing countries failed on Monday to agree measures to tackle a global steel crisis as the sides argued over the causes of overcapacity and whether Beijing is keeping loss-making producers afloat.

• April 18, 2016

China's South China Sea fleets have conducted training drills with upgraded methods that resemble actual combat conditions to increase the fleets' combat effectiveness, according to an article published by the PLA Daily on Sunday.

• April 17, 2016

There are no plans to storm the Syrian city of Aleppo despite thousands of Al-Nusra militants massing around the city, the Russian military general staff, which is providing air support to the Syrian army, said on Monday.

• April 11, 2016

A former vice governor of China's populous southwestern province of Sichuan has been put under investigation for suspected corruption, the ruling Communist Party's graft-busting body said late on Saturday.

• April 10, 2016

Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq are netting between $150 million and $200 million per year from illicit trade in plundered antiquities, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations said in a letter released on Wednesday.

• April 6, 2016

Oil prices edged higher on Tuesday after Kuwait's insistence that major producers will agree to freeze output this month even as Iran balks at the plan.

• April 5, 2016