The Philippines will soon welcome back foreign tourists, the government said on Friday, as it prepares a partial reopening to vaccinated travellers 20 months after closing its borders to contain the coronavirus.Tourism operators across the archipelag...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has warned Japan against getting too close to the United States and urged it to prioritise relations with its neighbours, in his first formal conversation with his new counterpart.Wang told Yoshimasa Hayashi over the ...

Hong Kong’s anti-corruption watchdog agency arrested a retired legislator, his son and a businesswoman and charged them with fraud for transactions related to a publicly listed company almost a decade ago.Chim Pui-chung, the two-term former Legisla...

Authorities in Indian-controlled Kashmir have ordered an investigation into a police raid that killed four people – and later exhumed two bodies and returned them to families who say Indian troops shot them in cold blood.Police earlier said the two...

Almost half of children have successfully secured a place at their preferred primary school in Hong Kong for the next academic year, the highest in more than a decade, amid a shrinking student population.Some 22,892 children, or 47.6 per cent, secure...

India will repeal three agricultural reform laws that farmers have been protesting against for more than a year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Friday, in a stunning U-turn that to some analysts is a significant defeat in his political career.I...

A Hong Kong construction worker has been spared jail after he admitted punishing his intellectually disabled daughter with six slaps on the face and back for urinating on the ground.The 31-year-old father of three was instead sentenced to 1½ years o...

Joseph Armas, a senior executive at a leading elevator firm, will take the helm of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong next year as its new chairman amid ongoing tense relations between the United States and China.The chamber selected Armas...

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) is willing to pull the plug on its business in China – worth hundreds of millions of US dollars – if Chinese star player Peng Shuai’s whereabouts are not fully accounted for and her sexual assault allegati...

Amid the United States’ rivalry with China, Washington and its Western allies must remain wary of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his use of dubious “non-state actors” to sharpen his global projection of power, former US Secretary of State...

Beijing has been urged to implement more supportive policies amid risks and uncertainties surrounding the pandemic, consumption and financial vulnerabilities, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Friday.“China’s recovery is well advanced...

Hong Kong received 1 million new doses of the German-made BioNTech vaccine on Friday morning, with the city’s government revealing the purchase for the first time.The arrival of the fresh batch of the coronavirus drug coincided with an infectious d...

A 59-year-old housewife has been found dead in a Hong Kong flat, where she is believed to have suffocated under piles of clothing that fell on her.Emergency personnel were called to her flat in the Flora Garden housing estate on Cloud View Road in No...

Trade talks between China and the United States have been fast-tracked after a virtual meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, but finding common ground for future negotiations is still far from assured, according to analysts.While both ...

Imprisoned and on hunger strike, Georgia’s former president Mikheil Saakashvili called on the United States for help as the former Soviet republic turns away from the pro-Western path he set it on 18 years ago.Saakashvili sent the scrawled, handwri...

The widow of late Taiwanese author Bo Yang has decided to stop publishing The Ugly Chinaman, a controversial book critical of Chinese culture and national characters.Chang Hsiang-hua, a writer, poet and teacher, has decided to permanently suspend pub...

A crucial state election in Malaysia on Saturday could shape up into a catalyst for disgraced former prime minister Najib Razak to reinvent himself politically and his pro-Malay party to cement their power ahead of a general election due in 2023.The ...

US President Joe Biden and the leaders of Canada and Mexico played up their close ties in the first North American regional summit since 2016, but tensions on trade and immigration lurked in the background.This was the first so-called “Three Amigos...

As Joe Biden pops the cork on his alcohol-free birthday bubbly this weekend he will not need to be reminded that he was born as close to the end of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency as he was to the start of his own.The veteran Democrat, who turns 79 on...

If you look up at a clear sky on Friday, you might be lucky enough to witness a rare celestial event: the longest partial lunar eclipse of the century, where the moon will turn mostly blood red as it slips into earth’s shadow.What can I expect?Duri...

US prosecutors on Thursday announced sex-trafficking charges alleging that girls and young women were coerced to have sex with the founder of a Philippines-based church who is a friend and adviser to President Rodrigo Duterte.A 74-page indictment cha...

China and India have agreed to come up with more measures to contain tensions on their disputed border after the failure of the most recent military talks on disengagement.During a virtual meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordin...

Shoppers in Canada’s flood-hit province of British Columbia have emptied grocery shelves following catastrophic flooding, although the shortages are as much down to panic buying as disrupted supply chains, industry associations said.Even as floodwa...

One of the 154 would-be candidates for Hong Kong’s legislature has been disqualified by a government-led panel, under a new vetting mechanism designed to screen hopefuls for national security risks as part of Beijing’s overhaul of the city’s el...

Taken aback at the recent rate of increase in the price of fuel, food and a range of other everyday household items in Japan, Kantaro Suzuki has decided to defeat inflation by walking.The freelance writer from Tokyo says he has put on weight from not...

Lisa Hou, a mother of two, recalls eating wild vegetables her elderly mother picked in Kowloon Park for dinner last year so they could save the family’s meagre resources for the children.“We would buy the children vegetables from the market when ...

China’s biggest property developers – even those not in the grip of a debt crisis – are pulling out all the stops to cut costs as the industry faces a gloomy outlook.China Vanke, the country’s third-biggest home seller by sales, told its staf...

It was just after sunset one day last month when veterinary surgeons Karthi and Paolo Martelli arrived at a village in Hong Kong’s New Territories with Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) staff to tranquillise wild boars in th...

The COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference was the most successful climate summit since the 2015 Paris Climate Conference and reached a maximum consensus among nations, according to a senior adviser to the Chinese COP26 delegation.“Especial...

Australia has become a “sabre wielder” rather than a defender of peace because of its plans to build at least eight nuclear-powered submarines with US and British technology, China’s top envoy in the country told The Guardian.Australia in Septe...

Tech giants in China are feeling pressured to assert their presence in global discussions about the metaverse to avoid losing out to Western peers despite caution from authorities, analysts said.On Wednesday, video streaming and gaming platform Bilib...

A top US climate official on Thursday played down the weakening of commitments to reduce coal usage at the recent COP26 conference, stressing that the fossil fuel’s inclusion in the summit’s resulting document was a victory in itself.Jonathan Per...

Germany is applying pressure on citizens to get Covid-19 shots, announcing plans to restrict many leisure activities for the unvaccinated in almost the entire country.Chancellor Angela Merkel presented a catalogue of measures on Thursday that will al...

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers – most of them sounding alarms over China’s competitive threat – called on Thursday for passage of a bill to provide billions of dollars in funding for domestic production of semiconductor chips.The Problem So...

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt on Thursday halted the high-profile execution of death-row inmate Julius Jones, hours before he was expected to die for a 22-year-old murder in which doubts about his guilt have been raised.The governor’s eleventh-hour...

The recent virtual summit between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping has not dispelled concerns among Indo-Pacific countries that tensions between the US and China will continue to rise.The three-hour discussion ended on a more optimistic note than many observ...

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Washington’s involvement in infrastructure in Africa was not about China, but intended to improve the standard of infrastructure without countries becoming burdened by debt.On a visit to Af...

US President Joe Biden revealed that he is considering a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing, as pressure from Congress intensifies over China’s suspected human rights abuses against the Uygurs and other ethnic minority gr...

An American who had been blocked for years from leaving China has returned to the United States, the US government told Reuters, his release coming just hours before the two countries’ leaders met this week.Daniel Hsu’s return also coincided with...

A push by the US to encircle China economically will likely “collapse in on itself” or ultimately backfire, Chinese experts say, as Washington steps up efforts to build a trade “coalition of democracies” with Europe and Japan to put Beijing u...

Foodpanda, one of the leading food delivery platforms in Hong Kong, reached a deal on pay packages with its couriers late on Thursday, bringing to an end a labour dispute that sparked a two-day strike last weekend.Company operations director Pedro Di...

Belarus authorities on Thursday cleared the main camps where migrants had huddled at the border with Poland, in a change of tack that could help calm a crisis that has spiralled in recent weeks into a major East-West confrontation.In another potentia...

The driver of a Hong Kong double-decker bus that overturned just before midnight on Thursday, killing one person and injuring 11 others, has been arrested.The 58-year-old KMB driver was arrested for dangerous driving causing death and grievous bodily...

The trial of two dozen humanitarian activists who helped migrants reach Greece three years ago was adjourned on Thursday shortly after opening and moved to an appeals court.The activists, who are accused of espionage, forgery and assisting a criminal...

Members of Afghanistan’s women’s youth development soccer team arrived in Britain on Thursday after being flown from Pakistan with the help of a New York rabbi, a UK soccer club and American television personality Kim Kardashian West.A plane char...

China’s biggest obstacle to achieving self-sufficiency in semiconductors is a chronic shortage of talent in the industry, not the lack of funding, according to the founding father of the country’s chip manufacturing sector.Richard Chang Rugin, fo...

The star of a hit new Indian film tackling the oppression of marginalised communities was under armed police guard on Thursday after threats of violence.“Jai Bhim” is a legal drama based on the true story of an activist lawyer fighting for a trib...

A children’s clothing retail chain known for its anti-government stance has announced it will shut down its Hong Kong stores by the end of next year over what the owner called “harassment by the evil force”.Opposition-friendly businessman Herbe...

Travellers from Hong Kong will be allowed to enter mainland China without having to undergo Covid-19 quarantine starting from the first week of December, earlier than expected, although the initial quota will be limited to only a few hundred per day....