You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Hello, I'm Oliver Conway.

This edition is published in the early hours of Friday, the 21st of June.

The American Ambassador to Beijing tells us the US is working hard to

avoid conflict with China. Egypt says it's trying to establish how many of its

citizens die during this year's Harge pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, where temperatures topped 50 degrees.

And the Canadian film star Donald Sutherland has died at the age of 88.

Also in this podcast, the employees that were allowed to work from home were much happier

and you saw that in hard data and at their quit rates fell by a third and for the

company they saw a massive increase in profitability.

Does working from home make you more or less productive?

They are the two most powerful nations on earth both in economic and military terms. Despite being rivals though, the US and China have a shared interest in avoiding disagreements

getting out of hand. That hasn't been easy of late but according to the US

Ambassador to Beijing, things have improved a bit.

Nicholas Burns told the BBC he was doing all he could to avoid a potential conflict with

China.

He spoke to our Beijing correspondent Laura Bicca.

So what was his view of how US-China relations are going?

I think the key words were relatively better and when I pushed him on this he

really went with the relatively and that is because there were several months if not up to a year with very

little communication and the problem with that is that these are two militaries that operate in very close proximity to one another both in the Taiwan

straight and in the South China Sea. These are dangerous flash points. So when it comes to military

...