A Chinese advisory panel has given the green light to the Covid-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech, meaning it will become the first vaccine developed overseas to be used on the mainland once it receives approval from the drug regulator.If the National...

The postponed Tokyo Olympics are about to start, albeit with no hugging or high-fives. More than 11,000 athletes will compete in 339 sporting events across more than 40 venues. They will be bonded by the Olympic spirit of friendship, solidarity, fair...

Rescuers were pumping out water on Thursday to try to find 14 construction workers trapped by a flood in a tunnel being built in southern China.The rescuers have not been able to contact the workers missing since the flood at 3.30am, the Zhuhai city ...

Covid-19 deaths and cases are on the rise again globally in a dispiriting setback that is triggering another round of restrictions and dampening hopes for an almost normal summer of fun.The World Health Organization reported on Wednesday that deaths ...

The number of Hong Kong civil servants required to get coronavirus jabs or undergo regular testing could soon increase as the government looks to boost its lagging vaccination rates, the city’s leader has revealed – with teachers potentially next...

Almost 2 million more doses of Covid-19 vaccine will arrive in Taiwan on Thursday, consisting of direct purchases and a third donation from Japan, the government said, as the island ramps up inoculations and gets domestic cases well under control.Tai...

China is sending a special team to Pakistan to work with local authorities in the ongoing rescue operation and investigation into Wednesday’s deadly shuttle bus blast that killed at least 13 people, after Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for a probe...

The street protests that erupted over the weekend in Cuba were the biggest at least since those a quarter century ago, when then-President Fidel Castro personally went into the streets to calm crowds of thousands furious over dire shortages that grip...

The main cause of mysterious shaking in the SEG Plaza two months ago was a vortex-induced resonance caused by the two long masts on top of the building, say Shenzhen’s official investigators.They said that while the building was safe overall, neces...

The future of a fifth Hong Kong university student union was under threat on Thursday, after the institution it is associated with said it would stop collecting fees on its behalf.Lingnan University previously collected HK$133 (US$17.12) per student ...

Squeezed between a busy hotel district and the New Delhi Railway station, Paharganj slums in India’s capital barely reflects a city that was a Covid-19 hotspot just weeks ago. Trash vendors wander through the settlements, children play barefoot in ...

Hong Kong’s leader on Thursday pledged to focus on solving the city’s housing woes in the final year of her term, saying she would strengthen top-level supervision of government policy to prevent “fragmentation of responsibilities” among depa...

The South African government sought to deploy around 25,000 troops to curb days of deadly unrest, amid fears of food and fuel shortages as disruption to farming, manufacturing and oil refining began to bite.At least 72 people have died and more than ...

Singapore is racing to figure out how to counter a growing Covid-19 cluster around karaoke lounges, where the sort of close contact and discretion essential to their normal operations complicates efforts to ring-fence these cases and prevent spread.I...

TikTok, and its Chinese sister app Douyin, has become the fifth non-game app to surpass 3 billion global installs across app stores, a tier that used to be the exclusive domain of Facebook, despite growing competition and increasing global tensions, ...

The Chinese authorities have started building a wall along the country’s porous southwestern borders that have long been an easy conduit for drug smugglers and human traffickers.It may not stand comparison with the Great Wall or Donald Trump’s pr...

South Korea’s space programme is set for a major boost with new satellites to keep it at the forefront of the 6G communications competition and more eyes in the sky for national security purposes, the science minister said.Lim Hye-sook said this me...

A Brooklyn author and Iranian dissident who was the apparent target of an Iranian kidnapping plot said she initially expressed disbelief when the FBI told her of the plan eight months ago.“I jokingly responded that I am used to receiving death thre...

The British public now needs to be as alert to covert infiltration by hostile countries as it is to terror threats, the head of the MI5 intelligence agency said.Ken McCallum warned that it is wrong to believe that other nations represent only a threa...

Hong Kong customs has shut down a local money-laundering syndicate that used cryptocurrency to process illegal funds totalling HK$1.2 billion (US$155 million), arresting the suspected ringleader and other members in the first operation of its kind in...

Asian air travel may take another three years to recover fully from the devastation wrought by the pandemic, lagging behind rebounds in other regions and offering a stern headwind for refiners making jet fuel.It will take until 2024 for international...

After 10 straight days of hiccups, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was admitted to a hospital Wednesday with an intestinal obstruction, but doctors said they would not operate immediately.Bolsonaro, 66, was admitted to the Armed Forces Hospital in...

Pasu Ng Kwai-lun is not afraid of breaking taboos.“I encourage people to talk about death openly,” said the 40-year-old, who runs a social enterprise providing after-death care and funeral planning services.In a recent talk given at his Sham Shui...

Hong Kong’s leader will meet residents to hear their views on her government for the first time in two years before delivering what she describes will be a “visionary” policy address, the last of her current term.But with only about 200 people ...

Hong Kong’s plan to lift entry bans for fully vaccinated residents and work visa holders from extremely high-risk areas will do little to help thousands of domestic helpers whose home countries’ inoculation records are unrecognised, employment ag...

China’s economy grew by 7.9 per cent in the second quarter of 2021 compared with a year earlier to post a 12.7 per cent growth in the first half of the year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on Thursday.This was just below expectat...

The US Senate passed legislation on Wednesday to ban the import of products from China’s Xinjiang region, the latest effort in Washington to punish Beijing for what officials say is an ongoing genocide against Uygurs and other Muslim groups.The Uyg...

Competition in the digital banking sector in Indonesia is heating up as well-resourced technology companies muscle into the scene, capturing a chunk of the market share from large but typically rigid traditional banks.Among the digital banks that are...

Ko Wing-lam has been battling low self-esteem since she was young.The 20-year-old Form Six student had a poor relationship with her mother, who placed tough demands on her and berated her “all the time” whenever she did something wrong. Her fathe...

Air quality in Hong Kong has improved substantially, which is why it has not been a daily public complaint for some years.The mid-1990s saw a dramatic deterioration in air quality because of insufficient local control, and also as pollution increased...

Owners of drones will have to register them, undergo training and pass tests, and buy insurance from next year as the Hong Kong government will gazette a long-delayed bill to regulate the remote-controlled flying devices on Friday.The regulatory regi...

Britney Spears on Wednesday won the right to choose her own lawyer to help her end the 13-year-long conservatorship that controls her personal and business affairs, The New York Times reported.The Los Angeles judge overseeing the conservatorship appr...

A New York City museum dedicated to telling Chinese-American history marked its reopening to the public on Wednesday, with an exhibit on Asian Americans and racism that it curated partially through submissions gathered during the pandemic and a surge...

Hong Kong will allow in residents and workers coming from extremely high-risk areas provided they hold a recognised Covid-19 jabs record starting from next week, while unvaccinated students stranded in Britain can also come back home, the Post has le...

There may be a bipartisan consensus on tougher US policy toward China, but Republican lawmakers tend to focus on China’s negative behaviour and attributes, employing terms like “propaganda”, “spy” and “lie” on social media, according to...

Chinese scientists have developed a prototype “refrigerator” capable of reaching the ultra-low temperatures needed for quantum computing.According to state-run media, the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing believes...

Increasing hostility and challenges by developed countries will not deter China from boosting hi-tech investment under its grand infrastructure-connectivity plan known as the Belt and Road Initiative, according to analysts.Their comments came after E...

China’s military has overcome numerous technological challenges to chip away at the United States’ supremacy in recent years, but continues to be stymied by lagging domestic innovation and corruption in its defence industry, according to a US gov...

Long before American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos made history with their Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, another poignant image of silent protest was etched into the conscience of Koreans – and largely forgotten everywhere else....

Wielding sticks, guns and metal rods, minibus owners on Wednesday patrolled a ransacked shopping centre in Johannesburg to stop the looting of shops destroyed by mobs, adding further violence to the unrest in South Africa.Concerned about loss of inco...

The ancient capital of Luang Prabang, nestled amid the mountains of northern Laos, is one of Unesco’s most impressive and well-preserved World Heritage Sites. But it has not been spared from the dam ambitions of the Lao government, which has approv...

Flooding in western Germany has left six people dead and about 30 missing.The catastrophe was unfolding in the rural Eifel region of Rhineland-Palatinate state, where police said four people had been found dead in the district of Ahrweiler.The entire...

A Florida judge on Wednesday approved the sale of the oceanfront property where a collapsed Florida block of flats building once stood, with proceeds intended to benefit victims of the deadly disaster.At a hearing, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Ha...

Two Los Angeles community groups are encouraging residents to get vaccinated against Covid-19 – by offering free marijuana.As the Delta variant becomes the dominant strain of the coronavirus in California, grass roots organisations are innovating w...

Thousands of interpreters who aided US and Nato forces in Afghanistan will be evacuated beginning in late July, Washington announced.But their destinations were still unknown and there are lingering questions about how to ensure their safety until th...

A senior Russian security official warned Britain on Wednesday not to sail its warships near Russian-annexed Crimea again unless it wanted its sailors to get hurt.The warning, issued by Mikhail Popov, deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, ...

The announcement on July 12 that Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, had signed advance purchase agreements with Sinopharm and Sinovac was a significant marker of progress for China’s vaccine industry.Prior to that, each Chinese company also made th...

More than 160 “unmarked and undocumented” graves have been discovered on the site of a former boarding school for Indigenous children on an island near Vancouver in Canada.The graves were found near the former Kuper Island Residential School in t...

Hong Kong authorities have agreed to lower the threshold for defining the crime of doxxing, removing a requirement that prosecutors prove victims suffered psychological harm.With the lowering of the threshold, revealed on Wednesday, the mere act of d...

Wise Road Capital, the Chinese private equity fund that triggered a US national security review after it bid for a prized South Korean chip firm, said it follows market principles and does not take orders from Beijing when it comes to foreign investm...