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Promoting travel to the U.S. as a job creator, President Barack Obama wants to make it easier for people from other countries to visit the 50 states and spend money at their hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions and other businesses. Obama planned to discuss the economic benefits of tourism to the U.S. and the latest steps he is taking to boost it at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, on Thursday. Obama acted two years ago to speed the processing of tourist visas for visitors from China and Brazil, steps that have dramatically reduced the length...

Amid a bitter crisis in relations with the West over Ukraine, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has turned to China to form a new alliance. Putin, who called Russia’s biggest neighbor his “reliable friend”, is in Shanghai to agree on a widely anticipated multibillion-dollar natural gas sale. A deal would give Moscow an economic and political boost at a time of Western sanctions, although China has been warned by the US to avoid taking steps that might offset the ban. …

More than 1,000 dog deaths may now be linked to toxic jerky treats according to the Food and Drug Administration. And the agency says since 2007, there have been almost 5,000 complaints of pet illnesses related to the treats.

Chinese police broke up a dinner party attended by activists in the eastern city of Hangzhou Tuesday night and detained a dozen people, according to an activist who attended the dinner. Activist and blogger Wang Wusi said he and another 10 people were released after spending about two hours in police custody. He said police held Wen Kejian until Wednesday morning, when he was released although without his cell phone or computer. Wen is a signatory of Charter 08, a document calling for democracy and the end of one-party rule in China. …

Demolition teams began destroying parts of a Chinese church that has become a symbol of resistance to the Communist Party’s draconian clutch on religion, activists and witnesses said on Monday. Sanjiang church in Wenzhou, a wealthy coastal city known as the “Jerusalem of the East”, made headlines earlier this month when thousands of Christians formed a human shield around its entrance after plans for its demolition were announced. Church members accused Communist leaders in Zhejiang province of ordering an anti-church crackdown and claimed there were plans to completely or partially demolish at least 10 places of worship. …

Just as the global economy has all but recovered from debt-fueled crises in the United States and Europe, economists have a new worry: China. They see a lending bubble there that threatens global growth unless Beijing defuses it. That’s the view that emerges from an Associated Press survey this month of 30 economists. Still, the economists remain optimistic that Beijing’s high-stakes drive to reform its economy—the world’s second-largest—will bolster Chinese banks, ease the lending bubble and benefit U.S. exporters in the long run. […] The source of concern is a surge in lending by Chinese banks. The lending was initially...

Gov. Jerry Brown took the stage at a downtown San Francisco luncheon Saturday to tout his legislative record, plug some upcoming projects and note the changing demographics of California.

China's navy commissioned 17 new warships last year, the most of any nation. In a little more than a decade, it's expected to have three aircraft carriers, giving it more clout than ever in a region of contested seas and festering territorial disputes. Those numbers testify to huge increases in defense spending that have endowed China with the largest military budget behind the United States and fueled an increasingly large and sophisticated defense industry. While Beijing still lags far behind the U.S. in both funding and technology, its spending boom is attracting new scrutiny at a time of severe cuts...

The president of General Motors said Sunday that the company and local partners are boosting production capacity for GM-brand vehicles in China to 5 million. Speaking at the Beijing auto show, Dan Ammann said the company also expects sales of its Cadillac luxury cars to double to 100,000 next year. General Motors Co. and its Chinese partners are in the midst of what the company has said is a $12 billion investment program through 2017. …

Faced with growing public anger about a poisonous environment, China’s government released a yearslong study that shows nearly one-fifth of the country’s farmland is contaminated with toxic metals, a stunning indictment of unfettered industrialization under the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule. The report, previously deemed so sensitive it was classified as a state secret, names the heavy metals cadmium, nickel and arsenic as the top contaminants. It adds to widespread doubts about the safety of China’s farm produce and confirms suspicions about the dire state of its soil following more than two decades of explosive industrial growth, the overuse of farm...

Russia is rolling out two major projects—a gas pipeline and a Crimea deep water port—with China, as EU countries and the US weigh options on economic sanctions. Russia’s ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, told EUobserver on Wednesday (16 April) that work on the “Power of Siberia” pipeline and the Chinese construction of a 25-meter-deep port in Crimea are proceeding as normal despite the Ukraine crisis. Describing the pipeline as a “mega-project”, he said it will pump 60 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas a year from the Kovykta and Tchayandinskoe gas fields to Russia’s far east, with a branch...

Nothing is going right for Hangzhou at this moment. Walmart will be closing its Zhaohui store in that city on April 23 as a part of its overall plan to dump marginal locations—about 9% of the total—in China. Thanks to the world’s largest retailer, another large block of space in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, will go on the market at a time when there is generally too much supply. The problem is especially pronounced in the city’s premium office market. Hangzhou’s Grade A office buildings at the end of 2013 had, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, an average...

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel delivered a two-pronged warning to Asia Pacific nations Sunday, announcing that the U.S. will send two additional ballistic missile destroyers to Japan to counter the North Korean threat, and saying China must better respect its neighbors. In unusually forceful remarks about China, Hagel drew a direct line between Russia’s takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region and the ongoing territorial disputes between China, Japan and others over remote islands in the East China Sea. “I think we’re seeing some clear evidence of a lack of respect and intimidation and coercion in Europe today with what the Russians...

Against the backdrop of Russia’s takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean region, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Saturday a key message he will deliver to leaders in Tokyo this weekend is that the U.S. is strongly committed to protecting Japan’s security. Hagel said it is understandable for nations to be concerned as they watch the events unfold in Ukraine, where Russian troops are still massed along the border. The issue reverberates in Asia where China, Japan and other nations are locked in bitter territorial disputes, including over disputed islands in the East China Sea. …

Thousands of Chinese Christians have mounted an extraordinary, round-the-clock defence of a church in a city known as the 'Jerusalem of the East' after Communist Party officials threatened to bulldoze their place of worship. In an episode that underlines the fierce and long-standing friction between China's officially atheist Communist Party and its rapidly growing Christian congregation, Bible-carrying believers this week flocked to the Sanjiang church in Wenzhou hoping to protect it from the bulldozers. Their 24-hour guard began earlier this week when a demolition notice was plastered onto the newly-constructed church which worshippers say cost around 30 million yuan (£2.91...

The continued threat of economic boycotts targeting Israel hasn’t deterred China from forging ahead with a new freight rail link through Israel. The planned link could provide an alternative to the Suez Canal. The project would connect the 300-plus kilometers between Eilat on the Red Sea and Ashdod Port on the Mediterranean. And it could be the chance for China to gain a foothold in the region. …

FULL TITLE: Beijing hotel workers already 'fed up' with Obama entourage in 3400-square-foot, $8,350-per-night suite inconveniencing 'pretty much everyone' – and the first lady's mother is 'barking at the staff' Michelle Obama and three of her family members are staying in a $8,350-per-night Beijing presidential suite, but despite a 24-hour butler and other perks that come with the lodging, her entourage has inconvenienced 'pretty much everyone' and made the hotel staff 'fed up,' a well-placed hotel staffer has told MailOnline. The sumptuous pad at the Westin Beijing Chaoyang hotel – its website calls the room 'an oasis of comfort –...

While much of the world was busy watching Russia swallow Crimea, few realized that an also dangerous territorial tit-for-tat had begun to unfold earlier this month more than 5,000 miles away in the South China Sea. At Second Thomas Shoal, a handful of Philippine marines have long been stationed and re-provisioned on the rusting deck of the BRP Sierra Madre, a Philippine naval ship half-sunk into the reef in 1999. Ever since, the vessel and the marines have served to embody Manila's claim of sovereignty over the shoal. More recently, China has tried to raise the salience of its own...

A monk set himself on fire Sunday in an ethnic Tibetan area of northwest China, the country’s official news agency reported. […] Qinghai neighbors Tibet. More than 100 people have self-immolated in Tibetan areas since 2009 to protest Chinese restrictions on Buddhism and denigration of the Tibetans’ spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who lives in India. …

The Obama administration is stepping up its attempts to court China’s support for isolating Russia over its military intervention in Ukraine. With official comments from China appearing studiously neutral since the Ukraine crisis began, President Barack Obama spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping late Sunday in a bid to get Beijing off the fence. The call was their first known conversation since Russian forces took control of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow Crimea region. It came amid signals that Russian President Vladimir Putin was hardening his position on Crimea, which is due to vote on joining Russia in a referendum this weekend that...