THE wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo met her jailed husband yesterday, activists said, apparently to inform him he had won the prestigious award amid a media blackout in China.

China said today that it was investigating a company whose insecticide-tainted frozen dumplings made 10 people ill in Japan.

China reported its seventh and eighth bird ‘flu outbreaks in three weeks today, while Vietnam – which has suffered most of Asia’s human deaths from the virus – ordered police and the military to help fight the disease.

China has reported two new outbreaks of bird flu among chickens in its north-eastern province of Liaoning, bringing the total number of reported outbreaks in the past month to six.

Seven priests of China’s underground Roman Catholic Church have been detained for attending an unauthorised retreat following the election of the new Pope, a US-based monitoring group said today.