The Philippines will receive its first batch of Covid-19 vaccines this weekend from China’s Sinovac Biotech, allowing it to start its inoculation programme next week and lifting hopes for an economic revival after lengthy lockdowns that have fuelle...

Chinese President Xi Jinping told his French counterpart on Thursday that he wanted to find ways to work with France on issues concerning central and eastern Europe, amid scepticism about Beijing’s influence in the region.In a phone call with Emman...

Myanmar police detained a Japanese freelance journalist at a protest in the commercial capital of Yangon, a colleague said on Friday, in the first detention of a foreign reporter since the military coup on February 1.Yuki Kitazumi, who runs a media p...

Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou has taken HSBC to court in Hong Kong to seek access to documents relating to her extradition case, days after the request was rejected by a London court. The application at the High Court o...

China has approved its first single-shot Covid-19 vaccine for general use and also given the green light to a second product developed by Sinopharm.The single-shot adenovirus-vectored vaccine, known as Convidecia, was developed by CanSino Biologics a...

A British citizen was sentenced to two weeks in jail and fined S$1,000 (US$753) on Friday for breaking a coronavirus quarantine order in Singapore.Nigel Skea is the first Briton to be jailed for flouting coronavirus rules in the city state. A handful...

A 58-year-old man who drank heavily and forgot to bring his keys escaped serious injury in a fall after he tried to climb into his third-floor flat in northern Hong Kong on Friday.The man attempted his climb at the public housing block of Wah Yat Hou...

The global Covid-19 pandemic has led to another round of ultra-loose monetary policy from central banks in developed economies, flooding the markets with cheap money. Although the global economy needs a lot of support to recover from the Covid-19 pan...

Hong Kong police have lost contact with the family of the late protester known as “raincoat man” – whose yellow jacket became an icon among his comrades after he died in a fall in the early days of the extradition bill movement – some two mon...

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging stricter precautions for gym-goers after tracing coronavirus outbreaks to fitness centres in Hawaii and Chicago that left dozens of patrons with Covid-19.The findings, detailed in two papers...

Sharing digitally altered “deepfake” pornographic images should be made a crime, a British government-backed review said on Friday after finding victims were being denied justice because the law has not kept up with new, hi-tech forms of abuse.Pu...

Singapore’s government is helping investors based in the city state make sense of the political crisis in Myanmar by providing them with updates on the unfolding situation, trade minister Chan Chun Sing said on Friday, adding that it was “difficu...

Hong Kong’s target of phasing out new purchases of fossil fuel-powered private cars by 2035 is already “the most progressive in Asia”, and will be subject to review every five years to see if it can be achieved even sooner, the city’s environ...

A Covid-19 cluster at a Chinese restaurant in a high-end Hong Kong shopping mall has ballooned to about 30 infections, health officials have revealed.The worrying situation involving Mr Ming’s Chinese Dining, located at the K11 Musea shopping mall ...

Hong Kong police have asked 52 former opposition lawmakers and activists arrested last month on subversion charges under the national security law to report to the force on Sunday, a month earlier than expected, with some expecting prosecution.The gr...

India announced new rules on Thursday to regulate content on social media, making Facebook, WhatsApp and others more accountable to legal requests for swift removal of posts and sharing details on the originators of messages.The code – part of an e...

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has spoken to his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar for the first time in five months and called for more dialogue to ease tensions in their countries’ months-long border stand-off.The 75-minute telephone...

Hong Kong customs officers have seized HK$126 million (US$16.2 million) of cocaine hidden in a shipment of South American grapes bound for mainland China from Peru, the second major cocaine bust this week.The 80kg haul was discovered on Tuesday after...

A group of Russian diplomats and family members used a hand-pushed rail trolley to leave North Korea this week, after Pyongyang’s strict anti-coronavirus measures resulted in most forms of passenger transport across the border being blocked.North K...

China should go against market expectations and set a target for economic expansion in 2021 to ensure quality growth, a researcher at an influential government think tank told state media.“Without a certain pace of expansion, the quality of the eco...

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been sent to a prison outside Moscow to serve his sentence, his lawyer said on Thursday, a move that comes despite a demand by Europe’s top human rights court for his release.Navalny lawyer Vadim Kobzev ...

Japan is in disputes with all its immediate neighbours over territory, with those competing claims largely dating back to its imperial past of a century ago. Tokyo insists that it has no ambitions to obtain new territory and is merely claiming sover...

South Korea launched its Covid-19 inoculation campaign on Friday, with shots to be administered in some 200 nursing homes, in an effort that officials call the first step in returning the country to more normal life.The first doses of AstraZeneca’s...

Hong Kong’s biggest international school group has said it will help pupils understand the concept of national security but will not be introducing new practices such as flag-raising ceremonies following the issuing of sweeping guidelines on the to...

US President Joe Biden on Thursday directed military air strikes in eastern Syria against facilities belonging to what the Pentagon said were Iran-backed militia, in a calibrated response to rocket attacks against United States targets in Iraq.The st...

When a survey of 1,200 people by Indonesian pollster Indikator Politik this month showed that Indonesia’s military, known by the acronym TNI, was the most trusted institution in Southeast Asia’s largest economy – even relegating President Joko ...

[Sponsored article] A survey of 402 Hong Kong teachers, carried out by the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, showed that emotional issues are an increasingly common concern among students. The 2017 study also revealed that an overwhelming maj...

Another 200,000 places in Hong Kong’s mass Covid-19 vaccination programme will be available for online booking on Monday, the same day private clinics are to begin receiving the mainland-produced Sinovac jabs, officials said after inspecting an ino...

The world’s largest high-speed rail network could nearly double in size over the next 15 years as part of China’s ambitious new plan to expand public transport – signalling that the government will continue to splash out on large infrastructure...

In August last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic raged through much of Asia, I wrote a cover story for the Post’s This Week in Asia magazine about esoteric developments surrounding the South China Sea dispute that were mainly being parsed by legal won...

There is still no light at the end of the tunnel for Hong Kong’s major property developers after a painful year in which their hotel and retail businesses took a particular drubbing, according to analysts and industry figures.Three of the city’s ...

More than 60,000 yuan (US$9,300) in coins has been scooped out of one of China’s most renowned natural springs over the past three years.The coins are tossed into the water by the millions of tourists who visit the Baotu Spring Park in the city of ...

US President Joe Biden on Thursday told Saudi King Salman he would work for bilateral ties “as strong and transparent as possible”, the White House said, ahead of the expected release of a sensitive US intelligence report on the 2018 murder of Sa...

Chinese internet giants Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings – the triumvirate known as BAT – rank among the lowest in terms of ensuring user privacy and freedom of expression on their platforms, according to a new survey comparing s...

Former US Olympic gymnastics coach John Geddert, who had ties to disgraced team doctor Larry Nassar and was charged earlier on Thursday with human trafficking and sexual assault, has since died by suicide, authorities said.According to court document...

Most small and medium-sized companies operating in China’s south plan to stay in the country despite concerns that frictions between Beijing and Washington are likely to grow this year, according to a new survey from the American Chamber of Commerc...

In the hunt for the source of the Covid-19 disease, the World Health Organization confirmed China identified supply chains for animals sold in Wuhan, where the first known outbreak occurred, a move based on the view the virus may have first infected ...

Donald Trump supporters who launched a deadly assault on the US Capitol last month have indicated they want to “blow up” the building and kill members of Congress, the acting chief of the Capitol Police said on Thursday.Threats suggest extremists...

Opponents of policies used by universities to increase their numbers of black and Hispanic students asked the US Supreme Court on Thursday to prohibit Harvard University’s consideration of race in undergraduate admissions in a case that could end s...

ByteDance has agreed to a US$92 million class-action settlement to settle data privacy claims from some US TikTok users, according to documents filed Thursday in US District Court in Illinois.ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the short video a...

Covid-19 has killed more than 2.5 million people worldwide since the pandemic began in December 2019, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University on Thursday. More than 112 million cases have been reported in total.With over 800,000 deaths, Euro...

Pop superstar Lady Gaga is offering a US$500,000 reward for the return of her French Bulldogs, Koji and Gustav, stolen in a violent altercation in Los Angeles that left a man fighting for his life, police and a source close to the singer said on Thur...

The Netherlands’ parliament on Thursday passed a non-binding motion saying that the treatment of the Uygur Muslim minority in China amounts to genocide, the first European country to make such a statement.“A genocide on the Uygur minority is occu...

A New York prosecutor has obtained copies of Donald Trump’s tax records after the Supreme Court this week rejected the former president’s last-ditch effort to prevent them from being handed over.The Manhattan district attorney’s office enforced...

President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead US trade policy told senators on Thursday that the principles behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – the multilateral Pacific trade deal pursued by the Obama administration then rejected by former presi...

The number of homes expected to be produced under Hong Kong’s land-sale programme has plunged to an 11-year low, prompting the government to address the shortfall by advancing the tender of a newly reclaimed site even though the railway station ser...