President Xi Jinping has announced that China has accomplished its poverty alleviation target of the new era as scheduled.
He made the remarks at a meeting of the top Party leadership.
Over the past 8 years, China has lifted all rural poor population under the current standard out of poverty and nearly 100 million poor people have shaken off poverty.
So far, the country has removed all poor counties from the poverty list, and eradicated absolute poverty and regional poverty.
Participants at the meeting called for greater efforts to improve the monitoring and assistance mechanism to prevent people from falling back into poverty.
The ascender of China's Chang'e-5 Lunar probe has left the moon after collecting soil and rock samples.
The next challenge for the Chang'e-5 is to carry out a rendezvous and docking mission in an orbit around the moon.
The ascender will dock with the orbital-returner combination waiting in the lunar orbit and transfer the samples to earth.
A Chinese research team has achieved quantum computational advantage, a significant computing breakthrough.
A quantum computational advantage, also known as "quantum supremacy," indicates an overwhelming quantum computational speedup.
In the study, a quantum computer prototype "Jiuzhang" was established and helped detect up to 76 photons.
The team says Jiuzhang's quantum computing system can implement large-scale "Gaussian boson sampling" 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest existing supercomputer.
It also processes 10 billion times faster than the 53-qubit quantum computer developed by Google.
Researchers suggest the capacity of the new system has application potential in areas such as graph theory, machine learning and quantum chemistry.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah has resigned.
It's reported the 31-year-old plans to start a consulting firm focusing on the corporate, political and defense realms.
Farah previously served as press secretary for U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and spokesperson for the Pentagon.
White House communications director is a senior member of the presidential staff, responsible for crafting and promoting the message and agenda of the administration.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden says he has selected Brian Deese to serve as the next director of the National Economic Council.
The 42-year-old is a former Obama administration official and currently head of sustainable investing at BlackRock.
Deese previously served as a deputy director of the National Economic Council.
He played a leading role both in rescuing the U.S. auto industry and in negotiating the landmark Paris Agreement on climate during the Obama administration.
OPEC and a group of allied countries including Russia have agreed to increase oil production by 500,000 barrels per day from January and will meet monthly after that to decide whether to further adjust output.
The OPEC members and a group of allies had made deep cuts in production to support prices as the COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced demand for fuel.
The U.S. benchmark for oil traded at less than 46 US dollars per barrel Thursday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 46 cents on the day.
That is down from around 63 dollars at the start of 2020.