Beijing has never fully co-operated with international investigators, impeding the search for a definitive answer. But scientists continue their quest to establish the causes of a global health crisis that killed millions of people, caused trillions of dollars of economic damage and increased fears over the risks of virus research.

China offered deep condolences over the Washington air disaster, the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a post on Friday on its official website.

Brazil’s slow soybean harvest means that supplies are not reaching buyers as quickly as they might have hoped.

On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump talked tough about imposing tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese goods and threatened to renew the trade war with China that he launched during his first term.

E VEN AS AMERICA’S relationship with China enters a new, less predictable era, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping see the value in talking. On January 17th the leaders had a “very good” phone call, wrote Mr Trump on social media.

U.S. companies were spooked when the Chinese startup released models said to match or outperform leading American ones at a fraction of the cost.

It was the latest thaw in relations between the two countries, whose troops were involved in deadly skirmishes high in the Himalayas in 2020.

Chinese state-linked social media accounts amplified narratives celebrating the launch of Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI models last week, days before the news tanked U.S. tech stocks, according to online analysis firm Graphika.

Under international law, countries are obligated to receive their own citizens who are deported by another country. But in practice, there are often ways to push back. Countries can block deportation flights from landing, decline to issue travel documents to their citizens and refuse to acknowledge that the deportees are their citizens.