The Hollywood Reporter News

  Beijing:  The locked-down Chinese city of Xi'an on Monday tightened Covid-19 controls to the "strictest" level, banning residents from driving cars around town in an effort to control the country's worst outbreak in 21 months. China has stuck to a "zero-Covid" strategy of tight border restrictions, lengthy quarantines and targeted lockdowns as Beijing prepares to welcome thousands of overseas visitors for February's Winter Olympics. Xi'an -- where 13 million residents are facing their fifth day of home confinement -- is at the centre of a flare-up that has pushed nationwide daily infections to their highest numbers since March last year. Restrictions tightened further on Monday as Xi'an announced it would impose the "strictest social control measures", according to a city government social media account. The northern city -- home to the world-famous Terracotta Warriors -- recorded 150 new cases on Monday, bringing the total locally tr...

  Moscow:  An investigative journalist for the BBC's Russian-language service in Moscow said in a video released on Monday that he had felt compelled to leave Russia for self-imposed exile in Britain due to what he called unprecedented surveillance. Russian authorities designated Andrei Zakharov a "foreign agent" in October, a decision the British broadcaster said at the time it strongly rejected and would try to overturn. The designation was the latest twist in a crackdown on media outlets that the authorities in Moscow see as hostile and foreign-backed. Separately, BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford left Russia in August after Moscow refused to extend her permission to work in what it said was a tit-for-tat row with Britain over the treatment of foreign media. The foreign agent designation has Cold War-era connotations and requires those so labelled to prominently indicate in all their content that they are "foreign agents", something which can hurt advertising re...