Beijing

China on Friday announced new plans to restrict the online gaming industry, sending shares in tech giants including Tencent tumbling and wiping tens of billions of dollars off their value.

New draft restrictions published online by the regulator are aimed at limiting in-game purchases and compulsive playing behaviour.

Top U.S. military officer General Charles "CQ" Brown spoke with China's General Liu Zhenli on Thursday, a spokesman said, after a more than year-long halt to high-level defense talks between the two countries.

China has warned the Philippines that it "must act with caution", Beijing's foreign ministry said, following a string of incidents in the disputed South China Sea as Manila increasingly stands up to Chinese assertiveness in the region.

Jailed pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai will go on trial in Hong Kong on Monday for national security crimes, facing life in prison in a case that has sparked international condemnation.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that the EU and China must address "imbalances and differences" between them.

"China is the EU's most important trading partner," von der Leyen said at the start of the Beijing summit, "but there are clear imbalances and differences that we need to overcome."

European leaders met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday for talks dominated by divisions between the bloc and its largest economic partner over everything from trade to the war in Ukraine.

China said Wednesday European Union export policies towards Beijing do not "make sense", on the eve of a high-level summit in the Chinese capital.

The European Union's scrutiny of foreign investment suffers from blind spots because some EU members do not carry out screening and those that do have widely different approaches, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said on Wednesday.

European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen warned Tuesday, ahead of an annual EU-China summit, that Europe won't tolerate its soaring trade imbalance with China forever.

While the president of the European Commission stressed that EU states would prefer negotiations to a trade war she left an implied threat of protectionist measures on the table.

Russia on Dec. 1 appointed notoriously pro-Kremlin maestro Valery Gergiev, a personal friend of President Vladimir Putin for decades, to lead Moscow's world famous Bolshoi Theater.

Gergiev takes over Russia's main stage at a time when Moscow is increasingly casting culture as a battleground in its clash with the West while troops fight in Ukraine.