Chinese drug maker Sinovac’s CoronaVac shot reduces the risk of symptomatic Covid-19 infections by half, in line with previous data, according to the long-awaited results of a phase three clinical trial in Brazil.The trial by Brazil’s state-owned...

Wealthy people in Japan are turning to private jets in greater numbers as they seek to eschew crowded airports amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.The push means that ANA Holdings Inc’s private jet charter business is expecting sales of 1 billion...

For a woman surnamed Wu, a mundane trip to a shopping centre resulted in her helping a man who had been tricked into forced labour ten years ago reunite with his long-lost family. Wu, who was from the same village in Guizhou in southern China, found...

For Ramadan this year, Magdy Hafez has been longing to reclaim a cherished ritual: performing the nighttime group prayers called taraweeh at the mosque once again.Last year, the coronavirus upended the 68-year-old Egyptian’s routine of going to the...

Eyeing a future in which it may send poets into space to extol the beauty of the stars, Japan’s national space agency is looking to expand its horizons by dropping the science major requirement for potential astronauts as it launches its first recr...

A Hong Kong police officer was suspended from duty after he was found to be among the 65 people arrested at an underground casino in the city over the weekend.The 28-year-old constable was accused of operating the gambling den with another two men, a...

Sixty years after he became the first person in space, there are few figures more universally admired in Russia today than Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.His smiling face adorns murals across the country. He stands, arms at his sides as if zooming int...

The chief of a remote Pacific village which worshipped Prince Philip with religious fervour said Monday it was too early to know whether the British royal’s descendants will receive similar deification.Yakel village on the Vanuatu island of Tanna f...

Hongkongers who have received their Covid-19 jabs will be able to form “vaccination bubbles” and gather together in larger numbers than is currently allowed at venues such as restaurants, the city leader has announced as part of a bid to incentiv...

When Aram Limsakul’s son and daughter came down with dengue fever two years ago, he gave the children, then aged five and four, a vaporiser to inhale the smoke from his own home-grown marijuana. Within a few days, “their fever reduced, they stopp...

One of China’s poorest provinces has become a vanguard for green energy, with a pilot project delivering significant savings to residents through the use of solar power.The trial, in a suburb of Guiyang, the provincial capital of Guizhou in the sou...

It was a historic week for India’s technology industry. In the space of four days, the country minted at least six new start-ups with a valuation of US$1 billion or more – what techies call unicorns because they’re supposed to be such rarities....

The Biden administration is stepping up scrutiny of China’s plans for a digital yuan, with some officials concerned the move could kick off a long-term bid to topple the US dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency, according to people fami...

Cambodians who lost family during the Khmer Rouge genocide Sunday slammed an Irish artist’s decision to digitally add smiles to old black-and-white pictures of victims killed by the regime.The ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot installed a rei...

Faced with a barrage of vitriol over its position on Xinjiang, the Better Cotton Initiative – an organisation that prides itself on “creating transparency” – has gone to ground.Calls to BCI’s Geneva headquarters have gone unanswered over th...

A fully vaccinated foreign worker in Singapore on Sunday tested positive for Covid-19, the only local case in the 20 total infections recorded on the same day.The ministry of health said the patient was a 23-year-old Indian national who worked in the...

Three elections coming up in Hong Kong will play out in a dramatically reshaped political landscape following Beijing’s sweeping overhaul of the city’s electoral system, and there have already been calls for voters to protest by casting blank bal...

With air travel crippled by the Covid-19 pandemic, AirAsia led by its founder Tony Fernandes – often touted as the “Richard Branson of Asia” – has been vigorously stepping up the budget carrier’s year-long diversification plan. As the p...

New Zealand on March 25 approved laws to give couples three days of paid leave from work following a miscarriage or stillbirth, joining a growing list of nations that have approved such legislation.China and India have had such laws since the 1950s a...

Hideki Matsuyama overcame a potentially ruinous moment to become the first Japanese man to win a major championship with a one-shot Masters victory over Will Zalatoris at Augusta National in Georgia, United States on Sunday.Matsuyama, who started the...

Prince Harry returned to the United Kingdom on Sunday ahead of the funeral for his grandfather Prince Philip.Philip, 99, died on Friday.Meghan Markle, Harry’s wife who is pregnant with the couple’s second child, was not medically cleared to trave...

Seven Catholic clergy, including two French citizens, were kidnapped on Sunday in Haiti, said the spokesman of the Bishop’s Conference for the island nation, which has been rocked by unrest.Five priests and two nuns were abducted in the morning in ...

China’s failure to provide access to global health experts made the Covid-19 pandemic worse than it had to be, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Sunday, and it was important to “get to the bottom” of the origin of the novel coronavi...

The US$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is poised to attract more Chinese imports, and analysts expect it to widen the United States’ contentious trade deficit with the world’s second-biggest economy.The stimulus will add about US$30 billion to ...

Tottenham Hotspur forward Son Heung-min on Sunday became the latest Premier League player to be targeted with racist abuse on social media following a match.The South Korea international was involved in an incident which saw a goal from Edinson Cavan...

Several hundred demonstrators marched in Brazil on Sunday to protest a ruling by the Supreme Court allowing authorities to bar in-person religious services under Covid-19 restrictions.The “Christian Family Freedom March” came after the High Court...

Chinese filmmaker Chloe Zhao’s US recession drama Nomadland, about a community of van dwellers, was the big winner at Britain’s Bafta awards on Sunday. Zhao became only the second woman to win the Bafta for best director, and star Frances McDorma...

Britain’s former prime minister David Cameron said he accepted that communications with government needed to be done through formal channels after the row about his lobbying activities for financier Lex Greensill deepened on Sunday.Cameron, who was...

Egyptian prosecutors said on Sunday they found that gross negligence by railway employees was behind a deadly train crash that caused public outcry across the country. Drugs were allegedly also involved.The March 26 crash of two passenger trains in t...

Russia and China are frustrating the international response to the Myanmar crisis, a top European Union diplomat said on Sunday, as the death toll from a military crackdown climbed past 700.Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military removed civil...

Iran’s atomic energy organisation said the Natanz nuclear facility was hit by a terrorist act, hours after it said an “accident” had caused a power failure there.The episode came a day after the Islamic republic said it had started up advanced ...

Bavarian leader Markus Soeder joined the race to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel after Germany’s election in September, setting up a fight with the head of her Christian Democratic Union for the nomination in her governing conservative bloc.Soeder...

Jordan’s Prince Hamzeh on Sunday made his first public appearance since he was placed under house arrest last week, reciting Quranic verses together with King Abdullah II at the graves of their forefathers. The gesture appeared to be an attempted s...

London has made it easier for Hongkongers to access the new pathway to citizenship under the controversial British National (Overseas) visa scheme, allowing husbands and wives and their children to apply separately.The concessions also allow children...

The Philippine armed forces will hold joint exercises with hundreds of US soldiers over the next two weeks, its military chief said on Sunday, amid growing tensions with Beijing in the South China Sea.The annual war games between the military allies ...

The Chinese ambassador to the US Cui Tiankui has celebrated the 50th anniversary of the unlikely sports exchange known as “ping-pong diplomacy” by urging the two countries to revive the spirit of the occasion.In 1971, at the world table tennis wo...

Queen Elizabeth has been left bereft at the death of her husband, Prince Philip, one of the couple’s sons said on Sunday, as prayers were said at memorial services across Britain.Prince Andrew said his 94-year-old mother was “incredibly stoic” ...

The United States military has engaged in a form of “cognitive warfare” following the latest encounter between its warships and the Chinese navy.Both countries have deployed aircraft carrier strike groups to the East and South China seas, led by ...

Young Myanmar protesters are fighting the junta’s internet shutdown and information suppression by secretly distributing underground newsletters, as the reported death toll rose to at least 701 on Sunday.For 56 days straight there have been interne...

Hundreds of shoppers have flocked to support a pro-democracy Hong Kong retail chain for a third straight day, after authorities seized HK$400,000 (US$51,400) worth of mislabelled goods from the business.On Sunday afternoon, more than 100 people queue...

The social media platform Clubhouse has said reports of a personal data breach involving it’s 1.3 million users, which prompted Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog to issue a security warning, were “misleading and false”.Online publication CyberNews...

Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Sunday ordered swift rescue and relief efforts after at least eight people died in a strong earthquake on the country’s main island of Java. Saturday’s quake caused falling rocks to kill a woman on a motorcycle...

China’s coronavirus vaccine production is expected to hit 3 billion doses by the end of the year, according to the country’s health agency.National Health Commission official Zheng Zhongwei made the prediction – which is in line with previous e...

Schools in Hong Kong have been urged to hold more regular activities to promote understanding of the city’s new security law, and the education minister has pledged to take a multipronged approach to raising children’s sense of national identity....

Former Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying has said he is yet to decide whether to run in the next leadership race, while also urging the public to earn Beijing’s trust if it wants the electoral system to be more democratic.Leung did not rule...

Chinese diplomats are being asked to strengthen their combative posture even though Wolf Warrior diplomacy appears to have backfired in the West and even at home, but while China is justifying its powerful counteraction against “foreign smears”. ...

Hong Kong’s Covid-19 contact-tracing app has recorded nearly 3.8 million downloads – representing more than half of the city’s population – and about 19,000 people have been tested for the coronavirus over the past two months after receiving ...

Warplanes from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan and the United States gathered southwest of Taiwan at the same time this week as a US warship transited nearby, adding more tension to the region.The encounter started on Wednesday morning when a US Air For...

Israel will work with Washington to ensure any “new agreement” on Iran’s nuclear programme will safeguard regional security, Defence Minister Benny Gantz told his US counterpart Lloyd Austin on Sunday.The comments came as Austin made the first ...

India’s big industrialist families usually make the news for their billion-dollar deals and high-profile acquisitions, but every now and then they grab the headlines for an entirely different reason: the battles over their billions.Last month saw t...