A young Hong Kong businessman accused of importing second-hand counterfeit clothing from across Asia to sell in the city as vintage apparel has been arrested after customs found fake items worth HK$5.3 million.The 23-year-old man, the sole proprieto...

Japanese prosecutors have charged two Americans, Michael Taylor and his son Peter, in connection with the escape of former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn to Lebanon.Tokyo District Prosecutors have been questioning the Taylors since they were extradited...

Many Asian countries are accelerating the roll-out of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine after confidence in its safety was hit, following reports that the shot was linked to rare blood clots in Europe earlier this month.After briefly halting its use, ...

Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat on Monday said the first face-to-face talks between the United States and China under the Biden administration were a “step in the right direction”, though he warned that the global order was tra...

The Chinese woman who trended on social media as “China’s most beautiful interpreter”, always dreamed of being a diplomat and was noted for her looks — even in high school, say former teachers and classmatesZhang Jing dazzled the world with h...

Israelis will on Tuesday vote in their fourth parliamentary election in just two years. Once again, the race boils down to a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Netanyahu, who has served as prime minister for the past 12 years, hopes vote...

About 24 hours after military chiefs from India and Pakistan surprised the world last month with a rare joint commitment to respect a 2003 ceasefire agreement, the top diplomat of the United Arab Emirates popped over to New Delhi for a quick one-day ...

Health care workers received the first shots in Taiwan’s Covid-19 vaccination drive on Monday, beginning a campaign that will not use supplies from mainland China, amid uneven distribution of vaccines globally.Taiwan has 117,000 doses of the AstraZ...

Hong Kong’s leader slammed the spreading of false information about Sinovac’s Covid-19 vaccine shortly after receiving her second dose on Monday, accusing a small group of activist medical professionals of running a smear campaign against the Chi...

A second Canadian citizen held for more than two years on spying charges, in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a senior executive of the telecoms giant Huawei, went on trial in Beijing on Monday.The trial on Monday of analyst and former d...

Grace Lee is afraid to leave her home at night in New York City’s financial district.Like many of the city’s 1.9 million Asian-Americans, Lee, 41, fears she’ll become a victim of a growing spree of anti-Asian violence. “I stand in the middle ...

Sri Lanka’s ambassador to China has dismissed suggestions the South Asian country is planning to extend a 99-year lease it granted to Beijing to run Hambantota port.Palitha Kohona said in an interview that his country would “never be an unsinkabl...

Torrential rains lashed Australia’s southeast again on Monday, worsening once-in-a-century flooding that has forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes and closed hundreds of schools.The days-long deluge has inundated coastal areas of New S...

Mainland Chinese authorities have started releasing from jail eight of the 12 Hong Kong fugitives arrested at sea while trying to flee to Taiwan last year.Activist Andy Li, who was previously arrested under the national security law, was the first of...

The Philippines and India, which share concerns about China’s territorial assertiveness, are drawing closer together on the back of two very different means of defence: missiles and Covid-19 vaccines.On March 2, Manila signed an agreement with New ...

Resilience, overcoming obstacles and pushing through hardships amid the Covid-19 pandemic will be the focus of this year’s Student of the Year awards, which are celebrating their 40th anniversary.Hundreds of secondary school pupils are expected to ...

A city in eastern China has formally banned a notorious wedding tradition where guests are allowed to tease the new couple and their bridesmaids, after a series of incidents when the joke went too far.The authorities in Zouping, a city in Shandong pr...

Hong Kong’s pro-establishment elite who huddled in meetings with Beijing officials last week on the city’s biggest political shake-up came away with two hard truths: a new power centre was in the making and a vetting committee would be its tough ...

The storied Imperial Hotel in Japan’s capital is to be demolished and rebuilt at an estimated cost of nearly US$2 billion, part of a larger redevelopment of several blocks of the city’s Yurakucho district, although not many are expected to lament...

A demonstration in southwest England against increased police powers turned violent on Sunday, leaving several officers hurt, authorities said.“Horrendous scenes in Bristol,” said John Apter, head of the police federation of England and Wales.“...

US President Joe Biden on Sunday said he planned to visit the border with Mexico “at some point” and his administration was working to ensure that potential migrants applied for asylum in their home countries.Biden, who took office on January 20,...

Philippine troops have killed a leader of the Abu Sayyaf kidnap-for-ransom group and rescued four Indonesian hostages held since last year.Majan Sahidjuan, alias Apo Mike, was severely wounded in a gun battle with the marines on Saturday night in Lan...

Japan ended the Covid-19 state of emergency midnight on Sunday in the Tokyo metropolitan region, the last remaining area of the country that had been under the measure since early January.The emergency in Tokyo and neighbouring Kanagawa, Chiba and Sa...

Online room rental company Airbnb and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon have been put on a “name-and-shame” list as part of a campaign by human rights groups calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.The campaign – which ...

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, on his first visit to Afghanistan as Pentagon chief, said Sunday that the Biden administration wants to see “a responsible end” to America’s longest war, but the level of violence must decrease for “fruitful...

Britain on Sunday warned the European Union against halting exports of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccines if the bloc does not receive promised deliveries, saying such a move would be “counterproductive”.Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said “the w...

Former US president Donald Trump plans to return to social media soon, using “his own platform” after being banned from Twitter and other outlets, a former adviser said on Sunday.“I do think that we’re going to see president Trump returning t...

Archaeologists have discovered the 6,000-year-old skeleton of a child in the “Cave of Horrors” in Israel's Judaean Desert, alongside ancient Dead Sea scrolls and the world's ‘oldest basket’.The “Cave of Horrors” takes its name from the 40...

Russian jets hit rebel training camps in northwestern Syria near the Turkish border on Sunday, hours after Syrian artillery killed seven civilians and injured 14 doctors in an attack on a hospital in the area, witnesses and rebel sources said.The sou...

United States Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth on Sunday expressed doubts about FBI Director Chris Wray’s initial assessment that the fatal shooting of six Asian women in Atlanta-area spas may not constitute a hate crime, saying it “looks racia...

Buckingham Palace is to consider appointing a diversity chief as “more needs to be done” to address the issue, a royal source has said.The proposals, which have the “full support” of the royal family, aim to seek independent views to help ass...

Pope Francis launched a fresh attack on the mafia on Sunday, Italy’s day of remembrance for victims of the mob, describing them as “organisations of sin” who have exploited the coronavirus pandemic.“Mafias are present in various parts of the ...

Equal opportunity campaigners and members of the ethnic minority community say more could be done to bridge racial divides and language barriers in Hong Kong during the coronavirus pandemic.A two-hour online seminar attended by local charities and co...

Veteran judge Kemal Bokhary, who sits in Hong Kong’s top court, has weighed in on the debate on whether foreign jurists should leave the city’s judicial system over national security law concerns by saying he has no plans to quit.“You may have ...

Hong Kong teachers are planning to drop sensitive topics, avoid discussing social problems in China and stop holding events to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown amid simmering fears surrounding the Beijing-imposed national security law.Teacher...

The public barbs exchanged between senior Chinese and US officials over Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan may suggest that Beijing is not pushing hard for further top-level meetings, according to Chinese analysts and sources.The fact that the two sides ...

Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina has said he does not plan to vaccinate himself against Covid-19, preferring a herbal “remedy”, and is in no hurry to launch mass inoculations for his citizens. “Personally I have not yet been vaccinated ...

Four grenades and a mortar from the second world war were unearthed near a popular Hong Kong hiking trail on Sunday afternoon.The explosives were found by a 28-year-old military enthusiast with a metal detector at about 12.50pm on a slope close to th...

The popularity of a Chinese interpreter has soared because of her cool handling of State Councillor Yang Jiechi’s 15-minute opening remarks at the start of talks between senior US and Chinese officials in Alaska on Thursday.Zhang Jing stole the sho...

North Korean diplomats vacated their embassy in Malaysia and were expelled on Sunday, after the two nations cut diplomatic relations in a dispute over the extradition of a North Korean criminal suspect to the United States. The North Korean flag and ...

The sale of bicycles has increased in Hong Kong as more residents have taken to outdoor activities, but seasoned cyclists say much can be done to make the city friendlier to the two-wheelers.Left with not much to do amid strict pandemic-related restr...

Japan and South Korea displayed different approaches to handling their relationships with China when they hosted the United States’ top diplomat and defence chief last week, with Tokyo adopting a harder stance to Beijing and Seoul working to avoid ...

Internet and social media access was cut in the Republic of Congo on Sunday as polls opened in a presidential election which veteran leader Denis Sassou Nguesso is expected to win.The internet went down just after midnight, several hours before the o...

Hong Kong’s minibus operators want the government to end its “favouritism” towards bus and rail services and start paying them more attention, saying they are in desperate straits. Among other things, they want the authorities to recognise the...

The head of Hong Kong’s de facto central bank has dismissed suggestions that the recent weakening of the Hong Kong dollar was caused by Beijing’s overhaul of the city’s electoral system, as he expressed confidence the political shake-up would n...

China is building a new information superhighway connecting China, Europe and Africa in a project dubbed the “digital silk road”.One of the key pieces of infrastructure is the 15,000km (9,3000mile) Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe (Peace)...

As far as fresh starts go, this one could have been better: Just as Britain was seeking to move ties with India to a higher plane, it riled India with a debate in the British Parliament earlier this month where MPs lashed out at New Delhi’s handlin...

Hong Kong’s largest public transport interchange, boasting the city’s first air-conditioned bus depots, is set to open on April 2 in one of the city’s biggest redevelopment areas.Spanning 161,000 sq ft, the new public transport interchange at K...

Tourists writhe their bodies to pumping techno beats on dance floors along Mexico’s Caribbean coast – a magnet for people from around the world who want to party during a pandemic.The Latin American country is among those worst hit by Covid-19 wi...

Like countless parents throughout China, those of 34-year-old Yuan Yin want to do everything they can to support him and his future wife as they prepare to get married.But the weakened property market in Sheyang county, Jiangsu province, is making it...