Globalsecurity.org

In the special year of 2020 shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, China has fulfilled its responsibilities as a major country in the world while safeguarding its national interests and dignity.

A massive gas reservoir with expected reserves of over 100 billion cubic meters was found in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to PetroChina's local branch.

On Friday, the US Commerce Department announced that it will put China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and 60 other Chinese companies on a trade blacklist in order "to protect US national security".

China is firmly opposed to the United States adding 59 Chinese entities to its "entity list" of export controls, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce said Saturday.

A Belarusian human rights group says security forces have detained more than people during protests calling on strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka to step down.

In Turkey, more than 900 minors, including 264 between the ages of 12 and 14, have appeared before the court in a span of six years for "insulting" President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a report says.

Beijing previously slammed the US for sending one of its destroyers through the strait, which serves as a buffer between mainland China and Taiwan, an island that Beijing considers to be an inalienable part of its territory.

Taiwan has deployed navy and air force after a Chinese aircraft carrier group led by the country's newest carrier, the Shandong, sailed through the Taiwan Strait just one day after the US sent a warship to the sensitive waterway.

China's first indigenous aircraft carrier, the Shandong, transited through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, prompting Taiwan to dispatch military assets to monitor the voyage, according to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense (MND).

"The US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin sailed through the Taiwan Strait on the night of December 18. The naval and aerial forces under the Chinese PLA Eastern Theater Command have tracked and monitored the US destroyer throughout the whole process," said Air Force Senior Colonel Zhang Chunhui, spokesperson for the PLA Eastern Theater Command, in a written statement published on Saturday.

The German government has brought home three women and 12 children from refugee camps that hold families of Islamic State (IS) fighters in northeastern Syria.

China's Chang'e-5 probe retrieved about 1,731 grams of samples from the moon, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

On December 18, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Moderna COVID-19 (mRNA-1273) vaccine (ModernaTX, Inc; Cambridge, Massachusetts), a lipid nanoparticle-encapsulated, nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine encoding the stabilized prefusion spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (1).

Several countries in Europe and the Middle East are banning air travel from Britain because of rising concerns over a mutant strain of the coronavirus that has been spreading rapidly in England this month.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said early Sunday there are 76.3 million global COVID-19 cases.

Moderna, Inc. and its partners have started distributing their COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, the second approved for emergency use in the country.

The Global Times reporters on Sunday visited the COVID-19 vaccine Beijing manufacturing plant of leading Chinese vaccine producer Sinovac to see how vaccines go through a complex packaging process - from vaccine bulk grouting to packaging - before they are shipped to vaccination sites around the world.

China's top respiratory diseases expert Zhong Nanshan said environment-to-human transmission has become a new pattern in the spread of COVID-19, and called on scientists to look for answers to this growing problem.

China's leading vaccine maker Sinovac is working around the clock to prepare for mass production, with the first production line to secure 300 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine annually, the Global Times learned after an exclusive visit to the company's plant in Beijing.

Beijing authorities at a press conference on Sunday vowed to take a series of updated measures to curb imported COVID-19 cases, including advising returnees to take direct flights, requesting them to strictly follow 14+7 days of medical observation upon entering China, and strengthening management of a local medium-risk community where a recent confirmed case stayed.