A restaurant fire in northeastern China killed 22 people on Tuesday, the official news agency Xinhua said, in the latest in a series of similar deadly incidents around the country, Reuters reported.

Xinhua did not identify the cause of the fire but said President Xi Jinping called it “a deeply sobering lesson” and urged local officials to quickly treat the injured, determine what triggered the blaze and hold those responsible to account.

The fire broke out at 12:25 p.m. (0425 GMT) in a restaurant in a residential area of Liaoning Province’s Liaoyang City, state broadcaster CCTV said. Three people were injured.

Footage circulating on social media including X and Chinese platform Douyin, and verified by Reuters, showed bright orange flames engulfing a storefront on street level alongside scores of parked vehicles. Smoke was seen billowing out as paramedics tended to people on stretchers, read the report.

Hao Peng, secretary of Liaoning’s provincial ruling party committee, said 22 fire trucks and 85 firefighters were deployed to the scene. Hao said the on-site rescue work had been completed and people had been evacuated.

It was the latest in a spate of similar incidents across the country in recent years. In April, 20 people were killed in a fire that broke out in an apartment for the elderly at a nursing home in the northern province of Hebei.

Gas leaks caused at least two high-profile explosions in residential areas last year, with a blast at a restaurant in Hebei province killing two people and injuring 26 in March, and an explosion in a highrise building in southern Shenzhen province in September killing one person.

Corpses covered in dust and debris were scattered in the wreckage of a detention centre for African migrants in Yemen, after what Houthi-controlled television described on Monday as a U.S. airstrike that killed 68 people.

The attack was one of the deadliest so far in six weeks of intensified U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis, an Iran-aligned group that controls northern Yemen and has struck shipping in the Red Sea in what it says is solidarity with the Palestinians.

A U.S. defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. military was aware of the claims of civilian casualties.

“We take those claims very seriously. We are currently conducting our battle-damage assessment and inquiry into those claims,” the U.S. official said.

The U.S. military has said it will not give detailed information about targets of its airstrikes for reasons of operational security.

Houthi-run Al Masirah television showed images of the aftermath of the strike in Saada, on a route used by African migrants to cross impoverished, conflict-riven Yemen to reach Saudi Arabia.

The footage showed bodies covered in dust amid blood-stained rubble. Rescue workers carried a man who was moving slightly on a stretcher. A survivor could be heard calling “My mother” in Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia.

Other survivors interviewed by Yemeni television in hospital described being awakened by the dawn blast. “I was thrown into the air and fell to the ground,” one said.

The American administration had committed a “brutal crime” by bombing the Saada detention centre which held more than 100 undocumented African migrants, Houthi spokesperson Mohammed Abdulsalam said on X.

The group vowed to continue its attacks on Red Sea shipping in a statement from its military spokesman Yahya Saree.

Reuters was able to verify the location and timing of the aftermath video through visible landmarks, such as a warehouse-like building with a shredded corrugated roof. Satellite images of the same location the previous day had shown the roof intact.

The location matched that of a migrant centre that had also been hit in a previous Saudi-led airstrike in 2022.

“It is unthinkable that while people are detained and have nowhere to escape, they can also be caught in the line of fire,” Christine Cipolla, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’ delegation in Yemen, said.

The deadliest U.S. strike on Yemen so far came this month with an attack on a fuel terminal on the Red Sea that killed at least 74 people.

The U.S. military has said it has struck more than 800 targets since the current operation in Yemen, known as Operation Rough Rider, started on March 15. The strikes, the U.S. military said, have killed “hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders.”

On Monday, the U.S. Navy said that an F-18 aircraft and its tow tractor fell off the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier, which has been aiding strikes in Yemen from the Red Sea.

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that initial reports were that the Truman made a hard turn because of a Houthi attack in the vicinity, but it was unclear if that had caused the F-18 to fall overboard. The Houthis have regularly attacked U.S. warships in the area, but none have been successful.

The Houthis said in an earlier statement on Monday that they targeted the aircraft carrier and its associated warships in response to what the group described as the U.S. massacres against civilians.

Rights advocates have raised concerns about civilian killings. Three Democratic senators wrote to Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth on Thursday demanding an accounting for loss of civilian lives.

“Strikes pose a growing risk to the civilian population in Yemen,” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Monday. “We continue to call on all parties to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians.”

A civil war in Yemen has raged for a decade between the Houthis and a government that controls the south, backed by Arab states, although fighting had eased for the past two years following a truce between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia.

Hundreds of thousands of people seeking to escape poverty travel each year through the Horn of Africa and across the Red Sea to journey by foot through Yemen to the Saudi border, aid agency officials say.

More than 500 people drowned crossing the Red Sea last year as they tried to reach Yemen, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.

The Yemeni-Saudi border, which stretches west to east across a humid coastal plain, rugged scrub-covered mountains and high desert dunes, was an active frontline in the war for years and remained dangerous even after the truce paused major fighting.

Human Rights Watch reported in 2023 that Saudi border guards had used explosive weapons and gunfire to kill hundreds of Ethiopian migrants, including women and children, trying to cross the border. A Saudi official rejected that report.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has tried for years to reduce the number of undocumented migrants entering and working there, often in low-paid jobs. U.N. studies have shown it is home to an estimated 750,000 Ethiopians.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday declared a three-day ceasefire in May in the war with Ukraine to mark the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies in World War Two, Reuters reported.

Putin’s move appeared aimed at signalling that Russia is still interested in peace – something that Ukraine and its European allies dispute – as President Donald Trump’s administration in Washington grows impatient with stuttering efforts toward peace.

The Kremlin said the 72-hour ceasefire would run on May 8, May 9 – when Putin will host international leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping for lavish celebrations to commemorate victory over Nazi Germany – and May 10.

Kyiv questioned why Putin would not agree to its call for an immediate ceasefire lasting at least 30 days to pave the way for diplomacy.

“For some reason, everyone is supposed to wait for May 8 and only then have a ceasefire to ensure calm for Putin during the parade,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. “We value people’s lives and not parades.”

Russia has said it wants a full settlement, not a pause.

Putin’s announcement came after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Sunday. The White House said Trump wanted a permanent ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, read the report.

“While President Trump welcomes Vladimir Putin’s willingness to pause the conflict, the president has been very clear he wants a permanent ceasefire and to bring this conflict to a peaceful resolution,” said National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes.

“All military actions are suspended for this period. Russia believes that the Ukrainian side should follow this example,” the Kremlin said in a statement on the May 8-10 ceasefire.

“In the event of violations by the Ukrainian side, Russia’s armed forces will give an adequate and effective response.”

It was the second unilateral truce announcement that Putin has made in quick succession, following a 30-hour Easter ceasefire that each side accused the other of violating countless times.

It came after Trump criticised Putin for a deadly Russian attack on Kyiv last week and voiced concern at the weekend that Putin was “just tapping me along”. Washington has repeatedly threatened to abandon its peace efforts unless there is real progress.

Rubio in a call with Lavrov on Sunday “underscored to his Russian counterpart the next steps in Russia-Ukraine peace talks and the need to end the war now,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement on Monday, without offering more details.

Russia’s foreign ministry said Lavrov “highlighted the importance of reinforcing the emerging conditions necessary to launch negotiations aimed at establishing a reliable framework for long-term, sustainable peace.”

The Kremlin said Moscow wants direct talks with Ukraine “without preconditions.”

Lavrov, in a written interview with Brazil’s O Globo newspaper on Monday, said that as well as ruling out Ukraine’s membership of NATO, a settlement should include “demilitarizing and de-Nazifying Ukraine” and international recognition of four regions of Ukraine that Russia has partially occupied since 2022 and claimed as its own, Reuters reported.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that the signal for direct talks should come from Ukraine, as it currently had a “legal ban” on negotiating with Putin.

He was referring to a 2022 decree in which Zelenskiy ruled out such negotiations, after Russia had claimed four Ukrainian regions as its own in an action condemned as illegal by most countries at the United Nations.

Ukraine accuses Russia of playing for time in order to try to seize more of its territory, and has urged greater international pressure to get Moscow to stop fighting.

Russia accuses Ukraine of being unwilling to make any concessions and of seeking a ceasefire only on its own terms.

Trump on Sunday urged Russia to stop its attacks in Ukraine and suggested Zelenskiy was ready to give up Crimea, which Russia seized from it in 2014.

Zelenskiy said earlier this month that doing so would violate Ukraine’s constitution. Kyiv has not commented on Trump’s comments on Sunday regarding Crimea.