North Korean defectors in Tokyo symbolically summoned Kim Jong-un to court on Thursday over a repatriation programme they describe as “state kidnapping”.The unusual case is a bid to hold Pyongyang responsible for a scheme that saw more than 90,00...

“Quite sad, very sweet, very gentle,” was how a woman described the murder suspect she unwittingly bought a beer for at a bar on Hong Kong’s easy-going Lamma Island before realising who he was and calling the police.Matthew Choi, the 31-year-ol...

A Hong Kong foreign domestic helper who tested positive for the coronavirus five days after completing quarantine has been confirmed as infected, triggering compulsory screening orders on places she visited.The 30-year-old woman, who arrived in the c...

A Chinese court sentenced to death a man who set fire to his ex-wife and well-known vlogger Lhamo while she was live-streaming, killing her.According to China’s state broadcaster CCTV, Tang Lu was convicted of murdering the beloved Tibetan internet...

A Hong Kong government proposal to encourage residents to convert their pensions into annuities would be “absurd” if made mandatory, the city’s labour minister said on Thursday.Secretary for Labour and Welfare Law Chi-kwong said on a radio show...

Apple has joined a growing list of tech companies pledging donations for flood relief efforts in China’s northern province of Shanxi, where heavy rains earlier this month left 15 people killed and 19,000 buildings destroyed.“As the Shanxi region ...

At least 31 people have died in a blaze at a 13-storey residential building in the city of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan that broke out early on Thursday.Sixty-six people have been taken to hospital, with 14 of those showing no signs of life, Kaohsiun...

A video of bare-chested North Korean soldiers performing extreme stunts in the country’s latest show of force has gone viral, creating a buzz online in South Korea and beyond.The North’s leader Kim Jong-un and his sister Kim Yo-jong, seated among...

Australia is not shut to Chinese investors but national security concerns and the protection of critical infrastructure are now key factors determining deal approvals, the head of its Foreign Investment and Review Board (FIRB) said on Thursday.Chines...

Ahead of Diwali, two of Bollywood’s leading men are pitching another option during India’s annual gold shopping spree: cryptocurrencies.India’s top two cryptocurrency platforms have each tapped stars – one, Amitabh Bachchan, may be the most f...

Hong Kong’s massive sea pollution problem has been exposed once more, with the two tropical cyclones that battered the city in the past week dumping piles of rubbish on its beaches and coastline.Styrofoam, discarded water bottles, and abandoned fis...

The World Health Organization said the number of global coronavirus cases fell in the last week, continuing a downward trend that began in late August.In its latest weekly assessment of the pandemic published on Wednesday, the UN health agency said t...

G7 finance officials on Wednesday endorsed 13 public policy principles for retail central bank digital currencies, saying they should be grounded in transparency, the rule of law and sound economic governance, the US Treasury Department said.“Innov...

Taiwan will not start a war with Beijing but will defend itself “full on”, Defence Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said on Thursday, amid a spike in tensions across the Taiwan Strait that has raised concern internationally.Taiwan, a major semiconductor p...

An initial study on a new cross-border railway linking Hong Kong and Shenzhen’s Qianhai economic zone is expected to conclude next year, the local transport minister has revealed.Secretary for Transport and Housing Frank Chan Fan said on Thursday t...

Chile’s opposition moved to impeach the country’s president, Sebastian Pinera, for the controversial sale of a mining company through a firm owned by his children, which appeared in the Pandora Papers leaks.Pinera used “his office for personal ...

Japan dissolved its parliament on Thursday, setting the stage for an election at the end of the month that will pit new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida against unpopular opposition in a battle over who can better fix the pandemic-battered economy.Kishid...

China’s attempts to address its power shortage have received a boost through efforts to increase imports of coal and electricity from Russia, according to state media and government agencies.The country’s overall coal purchases in September rose ...

Last year’s once-in-a-century drought followed by torrential rain this year have left Taiwan’s tea farmers scrambling to adapt to the extreme weather changes.“Climate is the thing we can least control in managing our tea plantation,” said Chi...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Ryan Heath and Karl Mathiesen on politico.com on October 13, 2021.Scotland’s largest city – famous for deep fried Mars bars, club nights and sectarian s...

Melbourne will exit months of Covid-19 lockdown next week helped by a faster-than-expected vaccine uptake, Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews said on Thursday, ahead of schedule even though daily infections hit a record the same day.In the worst d...

US President Joe Biden’s administration hinted it could resort to force if diplomacy fails on Iran’s nuclear programme, rallying more closely than ever behind warnings by Israel.Amid a standstill in negotiations with Iran, US Secretary of State A...

The proud new owner of a third-hand liver says he’s “feeling good and hoping for a full recovery” following a landmark surgical procedure by doctors in the Indian capital.Doctors at the Max Hospital in Saket, New Delhi, saved the life of Anil K...

Every night at 3am, Rina is jolted awake by blaring speakers so loud she has developed an anxiety disorder: she can’t sleep, she’s too nauseous to eat – but she is also too scared to complain because doing so could see her jailed or attacked.Th...

Apple Inc on Wednesday ramped up its criticism of EU draft rules that would force it to allow users to install software from outside its App Store, saying that would boost the risk of cybercriminals and malware.But the Coalition for App Fairness, whi...

The Rolling Stones may have dubbed their tour “No Filter”, but the iconic rock band has filtered out one of their most popular songs from their set list.The band retired their 1971 hit song Brown Sugar from their current tour, for now, over “co...

Factory-gate inflation in China rose to the highest level on record in September, data released on Thursday showed.The producer price index (PPI), which reflects the prices factories charge wholesalers for their products, rose by 10.7 per cent in Sep...

At least 1,763 heritage sites were destroyed or damaged by torrential rain earlier this month in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi during a storm that left 15 people dead.A total of 19,000 buildings were destroyed during the downpour in the pro...

In February 2017 Zhou Fang, then president of Laibin People’s Hospital in southern Guangxi, was kidnapped by a local health commission official and two accomplices who claimed to be from the party disciplinary watchdog.They believed Zhou was taking...

Senior officials from Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong emerged from their heavily guarded headquarters in Western district earlier this month and popped up in multiple unexpected locations across the city.The office publicised about 20 such tr...

British heir to the throne Prince Charles has revealed that his beloved Aston Martin DB6 drophead has been converted to run on surplus wine and cheese, prompting much ridicule on social media.The royal told the BBC his blue 1970 sports car uses E85 ...

People who got Johnson & Johnson Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine as a first shot had a stronger immune response when boosted with vaccines from Pfizer Inc/BioNTech SE or Moderna Inc, a study run by the National Institutes of Health showed on Wednesday.The s...

China is set to unveil on Thursday a younger team of three astronauts for its Shenzhou 13 space mission, which is expected to take off in its northwest Gobi desert shortly after midnight on Saturday.The mission, which is planned to last for six month...

Netflix survival drama Squid Game, about desperate adults competing in deadly children’s games for a chance to escape severe debt, hits a little too close to home for Lee Chang-keun.With more than 111 million views, the show has captivated global a...

PLA missile scientists say the accuracy of hypersonic weapons could be improved by more than 10 times if control is taken out of human hands and given to a machine.Their paper, published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Systems Engineering and ...

When Sovia Gill saw the news this month that Australia would reopen its international borders from November, she was so overwhelmed with relief that she burst into tears. But when the international student from India’s Punjab state read the fine pr...

A 37-year-old Danish citizen is suspected of killing five people with a bow-and-arrow and other weapons in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg in a rare incident of mass killing in Norway, police said on Thursday.Two people, including an off-duty police ...

US President Joe Biden on Wednesday urged the private sector to help ease supply chain blockages that are threatening to disrupt the American holiday season and said the White House plans a nationwide overhaul of the clogged system.Biden said the Por...

Beijing will not likely allow property giant China Evergrande Group to collapse as the government devises a way to get tough on the company without inducing sectorwide turmoil, market analysts said at a conference on Wednesday.Evergrande, saddled wit...

Romanian doctors sent an open letter on Wednesday titled “a cry of despair” as the country’s overwhelmed and deteriorated health care system copes with a record-setting surge of coronavirus infections and deaths.The College of Physicians of Buc...

The great Brexit brawl headed into its next stand-off on Wednesday when European Union concessions to improve trade in Northern Ireland were likely to be deemed insufficient by the United Kingdom.The EU’s top Brexit official, Maros Sefcovic, propos...

Invasion by exotic cordgrass has hampered the conservation of native wetlands in China’s major protected coastal areas, an international team led by Fudan University’s coastal ecology lab found after analysing three decades of data.They found tha...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a thinly veiled threat against the journalist Dmitry Muratov, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week for his investigative journalism as editor-in-chief of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.Putin broke h...

The United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in the Chinese city of Kunming has adopted a pledge to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and agree a framework to protect threatened habitats.The Kunming Declaration is not legally binding but its an...

The United States navy is strengthening its defences in the Asia-Pacific amid ongoing tensions with China by deploying its newest giant landing dock to Okinawa.The USS Miguel Keith, an expeditionary staging base designed to transport large quantities...

Intel Corporation has established a video business unit with China as its global headquarters, as the US tech giant eyes the country’s broad deployment of cameras and booming volume for video data.The IoT video business unit, established this year ...

Individual Hong Kong investors may be allowed to take a financial stake in the city’s ambitious new plan to transform its sleepy border area with mainland China into a Silicon Valley-style tech hub, the financial secretary has said.Paul Chan Mo-po ...

Hollywood’s Captain Kirk, 90-year-old William Shatner, blasted into space Wednesday in a convergence of science fiction and science reality, reaching the final frontier aboard a ship built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company.The Star Trek actor an...

Britain does not know when it might get a full trade deal with the United States but is hoping to join a trans-Pacific trade partnership next year, British trade minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan said on Wednesday.Trevelyan only took up her post last mon...

China – already a world leader in renewable energy production – aims to “vigorously” expand its solar and wind power projects to achieve climate targets.Delivering a keynote speech at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) Leaders...