Five people died and another person was injured after a fire broke out in a residential house in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, early Friday morning.

The fire began at around 2:50 a.m. in the house located in an industrial cluster area. The fire has been put out. An investigation is under way to probe the cause of the fire.

China will continue to meet promises made at the Paris Climate Change Conference and take effective measures to tackle climate change, no matter what kind of choices the U.S. new administration makes on the issue, a top Chinese climatologist said.

He Jiankun, an expert from the Specialist Committee on National Climate Change, made the remarks during a seminar on “China-U.S. Action and Cooperation in the New Age of Global Climate Governance” held in Beijing on May 24 by the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy, Tsinghua-Berkeley Joint Research Center on Energy and Climate Change, and World Resources Institute.

The seminar provided an opportunity for experts from home and abroad to discuss the new age and trends of global climate governance, and also share progress made in China-U.S. cooperation on controlling global climate change.

He Jiankun, also director of the Institute of Low Carbon Economy at Tsinghua University, devoted much of his speech to China’s policy on climate change.

He said that, in order to keep China’s promises in signing the Paris Agreement, a series of plans and strategies on energy development had been formulated. According to the 13th Five-Year Plan, the aim is to put in place measures that can ensure, by the end of 2030, that carbon emissions per unit of GDP will decrease by 60 percent to 65 percent from the 2005 level, and non-fossil energy will account for 20 percent of primary energy consumption.

“China will, as always, seek to ensure progress to be made regarding the Paris Agreement whether the Trump administration withdraws from the agreement or not. Under the international climate governance mechanism, China will strengthen its cooperation with other countries and speed up energy production and consumption reform, greatly reducing carbon emissions,” He said.

Collaboration on climate change between China and the U.S. has always been a focus of the bilateral relationship. As the leading carbon emitters in the world, the two countries have to fulfill their responsibilities and make their own contributions to reducing the intensity of such emissions.

Manish Bapna, executive vice president and managing director of the WRI, spoke about America’s recent climate action development, and stressed the importance of China-U.S. cooperation on climate change.

“China and the United States should continue to join hands on climate change, cooperation at the state and local level, or within the private sector should be strengthened. Only in this way can the momentum of reducing greenhouse gases in these two countries be maintained,” he said.

In his speech, he introduced data showing carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S had fallen while economic growth had been maintained. When talking about the new changes in America’s climate actions, he said that policies adopted by the previous Obama administration was capable of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but the new administration led by President Trump has already started to roll back climate and clean energy progress.

He also mentioned that, after signing the Paris Agreement, actions on creating job, investing in infrastructure and trading should be carried out together with climate change governance.

The attending experts then took part in a round-table discussion. Sam Adams, chief representative of U.S. office, WRI, shared his experiences on dealing with the carbon emission-reducing activities in Portland, Maine of the U.S. Manish Bapna and He Jiankun also discussed climate change governance from the perspective of education, technology, job and infrastructure building.

Chinese navy missile frigates identified and expelled a U.S. destroyer entering the South China Sea on May 25, the Ministry of National Defense (MOD) confirmed the same day.

MOD spokesman Colonel Ren Guoqiang told a routine press briefing that the USS Dewey entered waters adjacent to the Meiji Reef, prompting the PLA Navy missile frigates CNS Liuzhou and CNS Luzhou to identify and warn it to leave the area.

Col. Ren’s remark was in response to the request to confirm media reports claiming that the USS Dewey was “within the 12-nautical mile zone of the Meiji Reef” on a so-called “freedom of navigation” mission.

He reaffirmed that China has “indisputable sovereignty” over the Nansha Islands and waters surrounding them. “The Chinese military lodged solemn representations with the United States against such acts of flaunting its forces and boosting regional militarization.”

The MOD spokesman stressed that the United States is a destabilizing factor especially when the situation in the South China Sea was being ameliorated as a result of the joint efforts by China and ASEAN countries.

He said a healthy and stable military-to-military relationship was in the common interests of China and the United States whereas “erroneous acts by the U.S. military will only prompt the Chinese military to strengthen its capacity in order to safeguard the country’s sovereignty and security.”

Earlier this month, the MOD accused the United States of conducting close-in reconnaissance in the airspace over the Yellow Sea. MOD spokesman Senior Colonel Wu Qian said such spying activities of U.S. military aircraft and vessels were the “fundamental causes” of problems in security issues between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Ren rebuffed Japanese media’s allegation that China was deploying HQ-9 air defense missiles in the southern province of Hainan and was about to mark off a no-fly zone in the South China Sea.

He said that deploying weapons in Hainan was China’s own business within the scope of its sovereignty.

“As for the so-called ‘no-fly zone,’ it is a complete fabrication by the Japanese media. I am astonished by how far the fabrication has gone.”

Just days ahead of International Children’s Day, the Showyes Project, together with Voices of the Youth (Chinese: http://qnzs.youth.cn/), launched a fundraising night in Beijing on May 24. The activity is one of a series of charity projects dating back to 2015.

Voices of the Youth, a social networking platform under the All-China Youth Federation, launched the targeted poverty alleviation scheme together with China Social Welfare Foundation’s Showyes Project that year in response to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s call for “high precision” poverty relief during a Communist Party of China symposium on poverty relief and economic and social development in the 2016-2020 period.

In China’s underdeveloped areas, left-behind children whose parents are migrant workers in big cities, orphans and children from very poor families frequently face the risk of being withdrawn from school and even going hungry. Education and skill training are effective ways to help them shake off poverty.

Aiming at helping needy children with vocational training and reeducation, and further supporting them with careers guidance, the project is seen as hopefully helping plug a skills shortage in poor areas.

The object of this fundraising night is to raise enough money to support as many as 1,000 Chinese children continue their education.

During the fundraising activity, Perfect (China) Co., Ltd, together with other caring companies and individuals donated a total amount of more than 6 million yuan, which will benefit poor students from Jiangxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, Hubei, Yunnan, Hebei, Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces to realize their dream of going to school.

According to Jin Dong, an administrative staff member of Voices of the Youth, the activity is one of many important measures in realizing The Middle- and Long-term Youth Development Plan (2016-2025) released recently by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council.

The recent widespread ransomware cyberattack is a landmark incident showing that computer viruses can attack anyone anywhere rather than just targeting certain groups, senior Chinese cybersecurity officials said.

They also said China must be able to handle similar and even worse attacks in the future.

“WannaCry has no specific target. All Windows users are potentially the targets of the highly infectious virus. It has caused enormous panic among people around the world because it poses a direct threat,” said Liu Xinran, deputy director of the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Coordination Center.

He made the remarks during the center’s 2017 annual conference in Qingdao, Shandong Province, held Monday to Wednesday.

WannaCry, exploiting a security loophole in Windows, blocks users from accessing their own files. It encrypts data and system files, which the user can then access only by paying $300 in online bitcoin currency within seven days.

The attacks peaked between May 13 and 14 in China. Some gas stations run by China National Petroleum Corp in several cities could not process card and mobile payments because of the ransomware.

“It’s really difficult to calculate the exact damage the virus has caused in China because it disrupts the normal functions of many organizations, which can hardly be quantified,” said Yan Hanbing, director of the operation department at CNCERT, as the response team is known.

Chen Zhaoxiong, vice-minister of industry and information technology, said that as internet-based services have been deeply integrated into people’s daily activities, such attacks now have more effect on people’s lives than just interrupting cyberspace.

Threats of such attacks already represent severe security threats to key sectors including finance, transportation and energy in China, he added.

“WannaCry is just a warning sign. We need a better defense and warning system for severe attacks that are beyond our imagination in the future,” said Yang Peng, a senior engineer at the center.

“China will be in great danger if similar viruses are used by other governments to start a cyberwar,” he said.

Large corporations cannot afford to have cybersecurity loopholes caused by poor management because it matters to national security, Yang said.

Some corporations in key sectors were completely unaware that hackers implanted a virus in their system three years ago and their data had already been stolen, he added.