China has renewed calls for international sanctions on North Korea to be lifted and accused the United States of stoking regional tensions with talks to hold military exercises with the South.In an address to an online Asean foreign ministers forum o...

A huge wildfire tearing through northern California became the third-largest in the state’s history on Friday, and looked set to continue growing.A long-term drought that scientists say is driven by climate change has left the Western United States...

This is the fourth part in a series of stories looking at China’s economic outlook in the second half of 2021 as it continues its recovery from a coronavirus-hit 2020.Since May, Jane Zeng has had countless sleepless nights after her husband told he...

Former NBA star Jeremy Lin has tested positive for Covid-19 on his third day of quarantine in Shanghai on Saturday, after flying in from the United States.It is not known whether the 32-year-old has the highly transmissible Delta variant.Lin said he ...

Experience teaches us that well-organised despots, unless stopped in their tracks by citizen resistance, robust watchdog institutions, unforeseen outcomes and plain bad luck, can quickly remould sickly democratic institutions into a different politic...

Hong Kong’s education minister has remained tight-lipped on whether the city’s largest teachers’ union has breached the national security law with its past political activities, saying only that enforcement agencies will “take appropriate act...

Hong Kong recorded seven new imported Covid-19 cases on Saturday, all fully vaccinated, including a variant carrier who had visited a book fair last month and sparked mandatory testing for exhibition goers.All the new cases involved arrivals from the...

Restaurants, retail giants and shops selling electrical products are enjoying brisk sales thanks to Hong Kong’s HK$36 billion e-voucher scheme to boost consumer spending, but smaller players such as wet market vendors are unhappy with being left ou...

Australia reported a record daily number of new coronavirus cases this year on Saturday with the highly infectious Delta variant continuing to spread through the country’s most populous states of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.With about ...

Some of the world’s most advanced warships, such as aircraft carriers, and submarines – and possibly China’s carrier killer missiles – will be just some of the firepower deployed in the western Pacific Ocean this month as the United States, C...

Even people who have recovered from Covid-19 are urged to get vaccinated, especially as the extra-contagious Delta variant surges – and a new study shows survivors who ignored that advice were more than twice as likely to get reinfected.Friday’s ...

Chinese export growth slowed as expected in July, as the favourable comparison base effect from a year earlier started fading, according to data released on Saturday.Robust export growth had been a key factor boosting the Chinese economy since late l...

Dozens of influential Malaysian civil society groups have expressed dismay and alarm after a 17-year-old student who took a male teacher to task for allegedly joking about rape in class was served with a defamation suit and called up by police for �...

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed deep concern about China’s growing nuclear arsenal during a meeting with foreign ministers of Asian countries and partner nations, the State Department said on Friday.Addressing a virtual meeting of th...

Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka described the moment as “undoubtedly the greatest athletic achievement and honour” of her life. Flaming torch in hand, she climbed the steps of a miniature Mount Fuji, lit the Olympic cauldron and, with that, the ...

It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time not so long ago in Hong Kong when the biggest political story in town was unsanctioned home improvement.In early 2012, a bureaucrat who aspired to be the city’s chief executive was caught hiding a ...

In December last year, nurse Mark Chan* left his job in Hong Kong and moved his family of four close to Derby, in the East Midlands region of Britain, following the imposition of the national security law.The decision was made out of fears of the ero...

Dozens of families already in quarantine after flying into Hong Kong have urged authorities to allow their young children to serve part of their isolation period at home, mirroring new rules set to kick in only for arrivals from Monday.In a letter se...

Two people in China who contracted Covid-19 are now fighting online rumours that they were cheating on their partners after their movements were posted online as part of the government’s routine contact tracing procedures.One of the men, Ma Junchen...

The father of Britney Spears on Friday rejected efforts to remove him as the controller of his daughter’s estate and said there have been recent discussions over whether to place the singer again in a mental health facility for evaluation.Jamie Spe...

An Olympic medallist, a Hong Kong political appointee and a handful of billionaires are among the unexpected faces set to determine the make-up of the new “patriotic sector” of the Election Committee, the body tasked with choosing the city’s ne...

A woman who accused New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of groping her breast at the governor’s state residence has filed a criminal complaint against him, the Albany County Sheriff’s office said on Friday.The complaint, filed on Thursday with the she...

What kind of document should an investor in Chinese tech stocks in Hong Kong or New York read: an in-depth analysis of a company’s business and financials written by an investment professional or an inside page story from a Beijing-based journalist...

Singapore’s central bank has told “several” digital payments service providers that they will be granted licences to operate in the city state, in a move analysts say cements its status as Asia’s leading crypto-financial hub.Jason Davis, an a...

For the first time in nearly two decades, a German warship is heading to the South China Sea.The frigate Bayern left its port in northwestern Germany on Monday on a voyage that is expected to last about six months.According to Germany, the deployment...

Want to find your inner Matt Damon and spend a year pretending you are isolated on Mars? Nasa has a job for you.To prepare for eventually sending astronauts to Mars, Nasa began taking applications Friday for four people to live for a year in Mars Dun...

A group of 14 Republican politicians in the US House of Representatives on Friday asked the US Commerce Department to add former Huawei unit Honor Device Co to the government’s economic blacklist.The politicians led by Republican Michael McCaul, th...

US prosecutors said on Friday they had charged two Myanmar citizens in a plot to attack the country’s UN ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, an outspoken supporter of the democracy movement who has refused junta orders to resign.In an alleged conspiracy foile...

The 14th five-year plan is the quinquennial national plan that establishes the strategic direction for China’s economic and social development. One short phrase in the plan has sparked copious discussions in Hong Kong’s cultural industry, and tha...

The administration of US President Joe Biden appeared to shrug off a new pressure campaign from business groups urging Washington to remove Trump-era tariffs on Beijing.More than 30 organizations representing a wide range of industries had signed a l...

United States authorities were improperly trying to put evidence before the judge in Meng Wanzhou’s extradition hearing, a lawyer for the Huawei Technologies executive told the long-running proceedings in Vancouver on Friday.Meng, who is Huawei’s...

The US Army in Europe and Africa said on Friday it will retain six sites that were previously expected to be returned to Germany and Belgium amid growing demand for facilities on the continent. A seventh site, in Germany, will be transferred to the A...

A Palestinian man was killed by live Israeli fire on Friday in a town in the occupied West Bank that has seen months of heavy clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces, Palestinian officials said.Imad Duikat, 38, was shot in the chest...

Thousands of people fled wild fires burning out of control in Greece and Turkey on Friday, including a major blaze just north of the Greek capital of Athens that left one person dead, as a protracted heatwave turned forests into tinderboxes and flame...

The Taliban ambushed and killed the director of Afghanistan’s government media centre on Friday in the capital, Kabul, the latest killing of a government official just days after an assassination attempt on the country’s acting defence minister.T...

Inaugurating the first completed China-funded infrastructure project by day and meeting high-level US officials by night, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s diplomatic balancing act continued nine months before the 2022 election.The two crucial...

China’s strong economic recovery is expected to fade in the months ahead, putting downward pressure on the yuan exchange rate and consequently creating headwinds for other Asian currencies, analysts said.China is a net importer of goods from many S...

A local procuratorate in Beijing has initiated a public interest lawsuit against Tencent Holdings, alleging that the youth mode of its massively popular WeChat social media platform fails to comply with China’s minor protection laws, marking the fi...

Japanese police said on Saturday they arrested a man who stabbed 10 passengers on a commuter train in Tokyo hours earlier, in what public broadcaster NHK reported to be a random burst of violence unrelated to the ongoing Olympic Games.The 36-year-old...

As many parts of the world battled the Delta variant of the coronavirus, China was cautiously confident that it could beat the virus again using the “zero tolerance” strategy.It is an approach that relies on mass vaccination, mass testing, stay-a...

Three more developers have applied under a government scheme aimed at unlocking land for housing to convert two New Territories plots totalling 25 hectares into more than 16,000 flats, amounting to nearly 40 per cent of Hong Kong’s annual supply ta...

As the Taliban escalates attacks to capture cities in Afghanistan, analysts say its confidence has been boosted by last week’s meeting with China, even though Beijing did not give a clear indication that it backed the Islamist group’s military ex...

Hong Kong’s business, professional and political leaders have vowed to pack the newly empowered 1,500-member Election Committee with an array of talent to push officials into solving some of the city’s most entrenched problems.At Friday’s launc...

ByteDance is making a speedy retreat from the education sector, formerly a strategic area the Beijing-based owner of TikTok had invested heavily in over the past two years, after Beijing’s new policy banned the pursuit of profit from off-campus tut...

Indian and Chinese soldiers have pulled back from another area along their disputed border as part of moves to lower tensions amid a 15-month stand-off that has sometimes led to deadly clashes, India’s army said on Friday.An Indian army statement s...

China’s new ambassador to the United States has called for cooperation in fighting Covid-19 despite the growing tensions between the two countries.Qin Gang, currently completing his second week of quarantine in Washington, tweeted on Friday that th...

One of Hong Kong’s most popular shopping festivals kicked off on Friday to large crowds with cash to spend, as the annual event was held indoors in summer for the first time in its history.The three-day Hong Kong Brands and Products Shopping Festiv...

China has sealed off part of the South China Sea for a military drill on a scale that analysts say could involve tests of carrier-killer ballistic missiles.The drill is expected to take place between Friday and Tuesday, and comes as the US and its al...

China’s economy is growing steadily, but the domestic recovery still remains unstable and unbalanced, a top official from the country’s economic planner said on Friday.The world’s second-largest economy has, for the most part, recovered from di...

A lawyer who was jailed for 4½ months for tussling with a plain-clothes police officer in Hong Kong has been released on bail pending an appeal in his case.Samuel Phillip Bickett won the application at the High Court on Friday, after serving more th...