One year after a mysterious pathogen first revealed itself in Wuhan, China, the Covid-19 pandemic enters 2021 with no signs of slowing down. Global daily deaths reached record highs this week, while US infections approached 20 million, twice as many ...

Hong Kong’s opposition activists staged an act of defiance on New Year’s Day, organising a mobile protest from atop a van, calling for the freeing of “political prisoners” in both the city and mainland China.The procession, designed to bypass...

A giant statue of a second-century general erected as a tourist attraction in central China four years ago is to be relocated at a cost of 155 million yuan (US$23.8 million), after an inquiry found it to be a waste of money, according to local media ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc in Hong Kong and the world at large, crippling travel, forcing businesses to shut down and keeping people cooped up at home. Since the first case was confirmed in Hong Kong on January 23, the city has battled a...

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has stressed the importance of cross-strait stability as she seeks to hold talks with Beijing to end confrontation and resume exchanges with the Chinese mainland in the face of a new presidency in the United States.In...

The congressional joint session to count electoral votes is generally a routine, ceremonious affair. But US President Donald Trump’s repeated, baseless efforts to challenge Democrat Joe Biden’s victory will bring more attention than usual to next...

With coronavirus infections persisting in Japan, Frenchman Eric Fior, who owns a language school in Yokohama, decided several months ago to scrap all plans for a year-end overseas holiday. “It became quite clear even in the spring that this thing ...

Hong Kong confirmed 42 new Covid-19 infections on New Year’s Day, the lowest daily caseload since the start of the fourth wave almost six weeks ago, but health officials and experts warned more cases could emerge after the long holiday.Friday’s c...

India will test its Covid-19 vaccine delivery system with a nationwide trial on Saturday as the South Asian nation prepares to roll-out an inoculation programme to stem the world’s second-worst outbreak.The federal health ministry has reviewed prep...

Her role as a scheming consort in the 2004 imperial palace TVB drama War and Beauty – one she reprised in its 2013 sequel Beauty at War – made Sheren Tang Shui-man the queen of Chinese-language television drama.Critics lauded the Hong Kong actres...

The leading US infectious disease specialist, Dr Anthony Fauci foresees America achieving enough collective Covid-19 immunity through vaccinations to regain “some semblance of normality” by autumn 2021, despite early setbacks in the vaccine roll-...

This time last year, residents of Hong Kong were still trying to fathom the unprecedented violence that had been convulsing the city for months. What more could the city endure? Some sort of calm must surely be next.But the social unrest soon gave wa...

China’s economic growth could reach as high as 9 per cent next year, and its rapid rebound from the coronavirus pandemic may help the economy overtake the US to become the world’s largest later this decade, analysts said.But Beijing is likely to ...

US Vice-President Mike Pence asked a federal judge in Texas to deny a Republican congressman’s emergency request for a court order that would essentially allow the vice-president to reverse Donald Trump’s election loss during a joint session of C...

Malaysia and Singapore on Friday said they would terminate a plan for a multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project after protracted talks failed to break a deadlock over Kuala Lumpur’s demands for changes to a blueprint first approved in 2016.As a...

There were no fireworks to greet it – and no media session due to the coronavirus – but as Hong Kong residents were celebrating the arrival of 2021 in muted fashion, the city welcomed its first baby of the new year at the stroke of midnight at Qu...

Alphabet’s drone delivery unit Wing criticised Trump administration rules issued this week mandating broadcast-based remote identification of drones, saying they should be revised to allow for internet-based tracking.On Monday, the Federal Aviation...

When C.C. Sun first heard in 2019 about so-called blind box toys, collectible figures in mystery packaging, the 32-year-old engineer from Tianjin mocked her colleague for playing with children’s stuff.Fast forward to last June. When Sun saw Harry P...

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sent a letter simply wishing his nation well in the new year.He said he will “work hard to bring earlier the new era in which the ideals and desires of our people will come true”, the official KCNA news agency ...

When Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced last month that Indonesians would get Covid-19 vaccines for free, he called on his cabinet ministers to “prioritise and reallocate other budgets … so there is no reason for the public not to get vac...

The past year saw a number of high-profile arrests in Hong Kong. Those who got a knock on the door from police included prominent opposition figures involved in the anti-government protests of 2019, as well as last year’s June 4 vigil.Following the...

The New York Stock Exchange said it will delist three Chinese companies to comply with a US executive order that imposed restrictions on companies that were identified as affiliated with the Chinese military.China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unic...

The spectre of the coronavirus cast a pall over most of 2020, and while a new dawn awaits every dark night, Hong Kong’s geomancy and cartomancy practitioners interviewed by the Post have predicted another uneasy year for the city in 2021.The pandem...

Alex Rawi Ruto is a 16-year-old high school student in Depok city, just outside the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, who started investing in mutual funds this year after squirrelling away part of his 100,000 rupiah (US$7) monthly allowance.He has sinc...

As the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve 12 months ago, groups of young people who had been gathering outside Times Square in Hong Kong – many of them couples – chanted “See you in Victoria Park on January 1”, making an open invitatio...

Britain on Friday began a new year and life outside Europe, after leaving the bloc’s single market trading rules to go it alone for the first time in nearly half a century.Brexit, which has dominated politics on both sides of the Channel since 2016...

China flew its biggest warplane, the Y-20 transporter, to Fiery Cross Reef in the disputed South China Sea on December 25, satellite images show.The huge aircraft was seen on the airstrip on the militarised reef in the Spratly Islands but was not obs...

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility on Thursday for an attack that killed 37 soldiers in Syria the day before jihadists ambushed a bus in eastern Syria.War monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday IS had attacked s...

The Christmas lights are still twinkling outside Little Mountain Place, a care home that is largely occupied by Chinese Canadian elders, in the suburban Vancouver neighbourhood that is its namesake.But inside, a tragedy of startling speed and ferocit...

The Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) has been the basis of economic collaboration between mainland China and Taiwan since it came into effect on September 12, 2010. However, as the 10-year anniversary of the agreement loomed this ye...

In the summer of 2019, into her seventh year as a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), Hua Chunying was just about to finish four months of study at the Central Party School – the main training ground for senior Communist Pa...

Pakistani police arrested 24 people in overnight raids after a Hindu temple was set on fire and demolished by a mob led by supporters of a radical Islamist party, officials said on Thursday.Meanwhile, dozens of Hindus rallied in the southern port cit...

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday Britain will be “an open, generous, outward-looking, internationalist and free-trading” country once it quits all European Union rules at 11pm GMT (6pm Eastern Time).“This is an amazing moment for t...

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assailed the Chinese government on Thursday and called authorities in Hong Kong “lackeys” for the treatment of a group of fugitives known as the “Hong Kong 12”.Ten individuals, who authorities arrested at sea...

President-elect Joe Biden is planning to include a lighting ceremony commemorating the Americans lost to Covid-19 as part of the events for his inauguration.The vigil will be held the day before his inauguration at 5.30pm at the Lincoln Memorial Refl...

Iran on Thursday executed a man who had been convicted of murder 12 years ago when he was 16, a human rights group said, drawing condemnation from the United Nations human rights office which said it was prohibited under international law.There was n...

President Donald Trump delivered a year-end video message on Thursday after returning early from holiday, highlighting his administration’s work to rapidly develop a vaccine against Covid-19 and rebuild the economy.As the end of his presidency near...

This is the 12th installment in our series on the Covid-19 pandemic, one year after the coronavirus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. We look at how the city’s residents enjoy getting back to normal as they avoid thinking back to darker t...

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Thursday accused outgoing US President Donald Trump of aiming to fabricate a “pretext for war” as tensions mount between the two countries.His remarks come ahead of the first anniversary of the US...

Police and federal authorities are investigating after a Wisconsin health system said an employee admitted to deliberately spoiling 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine.Aurora Medical Center first reported that the doses has been spoiled on Saturday, say...

China has detected its first imported case of the new coronavirus variant that is spreading rapidly around Britain, according to a publication run by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Countries around the world have cut off ...

Alarmed that a political crisis in Nepal could endanger China’s strategic interests and Belt and Road projects, a Chinese Communist Party emissary has held days of talks to try to stop the Himalayan country’s ruling communist party from tearing i...

Seventeen people have been jailed – including two for life – for running China’s biggest ivory smuggling ring, moving millions of dollars of tusks from West Africa into the mainland’s vast domestic market.Demand for ivory carvings and jewelle...

Chinese President Xi Jinping singled out the country’s economic growth in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic in his annual New Year’s television speech on Thursday night. But there was no mention of the challenges to China’s global ambi...

A British former politician who supported calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” has been accused of hypocrisy after he protested against people referring to a new mutation of the virus as having originated in Britain.“Can we please stop referrin...

This New Year is being celebrated like no other in most of the world, with many bidding farewell to 2020, a year they’d prefer to forget.From the South Pacific to New York City, pandemic restrictions on open air gatherings saw people turning to mad...

While some affluent Chinese would like to emigrate to escape a perceived harsher environment for private entrepreneurs at home, they are increasingly reluctant to do so – at least in the next few years – because of concern about the coronavirus p...

Only about 2.6 million Americans had received a Covid-19 vaccine going into the last day of December, putting the US far short of the government’s target to vaccinate 20 million people this month.About 14 million doses of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s...

The Philippines will struggle with the coronavirus pandemic for two more years if it does not alter its current strategy to combat the disease and replace the leaders implementing it, according to one of the country’s top medical experts.Dr Anthony...

China is in talks with India to hold another round of military discussions in a bid to ease a seven-month stand-off along a disputed section of their Himalayan border.Tan Kefei, spokesman for the Ministry of National Defence, said on Thursday that Ch...