The director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, on Saturday said the current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates against the coronavirus. Health authorities are now considering mixing different vaccines, he noted during a conference on China’s vaccine and immunization strategies. After international media picked up his comments, Gao told the Associated Press he was speaking about the effectiveness of “vaccines in the world, not particularly for China.”

In 2018, Li Yuese spent 10 months locked inside a windowless room in a facility run by the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. Officials at the “transformation” center beat and tortured him, Li told Radio Free Asia. “I could not sleep,” he said. “After you’ve been in there a week, death starts to look better than staying there.”

Myanmar’s ambassador to London could not enter the embassy on Wednesday after a military attaché seized control of the building. Ambassador Kyaw Zwar Minn said the delegates claimed they received instructions from the ruling junta in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Meanwhile, demonstrators gathered outside the embassy to oppose the Feb. 1 military coup.

Heavy rain continued to drench eastern Indonesian islands on Wednesday as rescuers struggled to reach remote areas. Landslides and flooding triggered by Tropical Cyclone Seroja killed at least 119 people in Indonesia and 27 others in neighboring East Timor. On the Indonesian Lembata island, the storm sent solidified lava from a November volcanic eruption crashing down on more than a dozen villages.

At least 48 people, including the train's conductor, died when a passenger train collided with a truck outside a tunnel along Taiwan’s east coast Friday morning. Authorities said at least 120 passengers were injured in Taiwan’s worst train accident in at least four decades.

Four people, including a child, died when a shooter opened fire on an office building in Orange, Calif., Wednesday evening. One other person sustained injuries before police shot the suspect. Orange Police Department Lt. Jen Amat said officers transported the shooter to a local hospital in critical condition.

The military junta in Myanmar, also known as Burma, killed six people and injured 12 others during Tuesday’s airstrikes. Some 12,000 people are internally displaced after weeks of violence, and as many as 3,000 fled into neighboring Thailand over the weekend before being sent back by Thai officers. The Karen National Union, which represents the Karen minority, said military ground troops are advancing into the territory from all fronts and vowed to respond.