A Russian rocket lifted off carrying a Japanese billionaire to the International Space Station, marking the country’s return to space tourism after a decade-long pause that saw the rise of competition from privately held US companies.Online fashion...

South African researchers have provided the first tentative answers to the question of how well vaccines currently in use may protect against Omicron, the new and highly mutated coronavirus variant.Their findings, made public on Tuesday ahead of peer...

A helicopter carrying India’s military chief General Bipin Rawat crashed on Wednesday in the south of the country, the air force said, killing at least four people.Rawat is India’s first chief of defence staff, a position that the government esta...

A rash of seismic activity across an arc of southern Japan in recent weeks – including the most powerful earthquake to strike Tokyo in a decade – has triggered renewed concern that a major natural disaster may be imminent, potentially the much-fe...

Bangladesh sentenced 20 university students to death on Wednesday for the brutal 2019 murder of a young man who criticised the government on social media.The battered body of Abrar Fahad, 21, was found in his university dormitory hours after he wrote...

When she lost a leg to cancer at the age of 10, Shao Yue never imagined she could learn to dance.Now, she is a national wheelchair-dancing champion who hopes her story can help change perceptions of people with disabilities in China.“People think w...

Hong Kong’s public housing target for the next decade remains unchanged, with long-term supply expected to meet demand despite shortages over the next five years, according to the city’s latest long-term housing strategy report.Secretary for Tran...

Police have arrested five Hongkongers over a weekend brawl captured on video in the Lan Kwai Fong nightlife hub that was sparked by a row between a partygoer’s girlfriend and his ex-partner.Four women and a man were on Tuesday detained on suspicion...

A rhino horn trader has been sentenced to 14 years in jail, the longest ever prison term a Vietnamese court has handed down for the crime, a local conservation group said on Wednesday.Vietnam is both a consumption hub and popular transit point for th...

An unemployed man has been found guilty of wounding after biting off a former Hong Kong district councillor’s ear and attacking three others during the social unrest of 2019.A High Court jury of three men and four women on Wednesday convicted Joe C...

Tokyo will move to recognise same-sex partnerships, its governor said, becoming the largest city in Japan to do so, as activists push for national recognition.Japan is the only nation of the Group of Seven countries that does not recognise same-sex u...

The idea of a democracy summit seemed promising enough when it was announced in February, with Washington emerging from years of Donald Trump’s mercurial governance and President Joe Biden’s administration keen to craft a unified front against an...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was under fire Wednesday after a video emerged of his senior aides joking about holding a Christmas party at Downing Street last year when social gatherings were banned under Covid rules.The government has been ac...

To Bill Gates, 2021 did not bring as much improvement to the pandemic as he had hoped.With more Covid-19 deaths this year than in 2020, the Delta variant and challenges with vaccine uptake, progress has been underwhelming, the billionaire indicated i...

The International Olympic Committee faced more questions about Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai on Tuesday, five weeks after concerns about her safety first emerged.In its first news conference since the Women’s Tennis Association suspended all of it...

South Korea’s new daily Covid-19 cases rose above 7,000 for the first time, Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said on Wednesday, putting hospital capacity under strain as deaths and severe cases rise.Infections in South Korea have skyrocketed this month ...

A company based in Australia has created a 3D-printed pod that offers people a “painless” assisted death and the pod may be available soon to residents in Switzerland.The pod was created by a non-profit organisation called Exit International, whi...

Hong Kong’s strict quarantine policy is “more politics than science”, according to former InvestHK director general Mike Rowse, who has thrown his hat into the ring for this month’s Legislative Council election.Rowse also said he “felt sorr...

Malaysia’s second highest court has upheld a 12-year jail sentence previously handed to former prime minister Najib Razak in the first of several criminal cases linking him to the 1MDB financial scandal.The three-judge Court of Appeal ruled that th...

US senators struck a deal on Tuesday to create a one-time law allowing Democrats to lift the nation’s borrowing authority and avert a catastrophic credit default without requiring votes from the opposition Republicans.The House of Representatives a...

A major Hong Kong restaurant chain has joined hands with university students to make beer out of surplus bread in a bid to help local start-ups and raise funds for charity.The partnership was formed after a news article about a bread-to-beer start-up...

Causeway Bay looks increasingly more appealing as an office address, amid the rental crash in what was until recently the world’s most expensive retail shopping district.The monthly net office rent in the district between Hong Kong’s Wan Chai and...

Hong Kong is set to hold its Legislative Council election on December 19, the first citywide poll since Beijing revamped the electoral system to ensure only “patriots” hold political power. In the third of a four-part election series, Tony Cheung...

Australia will not send officials to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday, joining a US diplomatic boycott of the event.Canberra’s decision comes amid “disagreement” with China over a number o...

A distressed sale last week at Hong Kong’s former Kai Tak airport site has clouded the outlook of the city’s property market, as an expected glut of residential land weighs on prices.Five plots of land at Kai Tak, valued together at up to HK$71.3...

When South African officials held a briefing introducing a new and worrying coronavirus variant late last month, the reaction was swift: countries around the world threw up travel bans, decimating flight schedules and isolating nations across souther...

Nearly 70 nurses and doctors working in the intensive care unit at a Spanish hospital have tested positive for Covid-19 after attending a Christmas party, health authorities said on Monday.Sixty-eight health workers at the University Regional Hospita...

Every person who is moderately interested in dinosaurs knows the theory that they were wiped out some 66 million years ago when an asteroid or comet struck Earth, causing the most famous mass extinction event in history.What many people do not realis...

US President Joe Biden warned President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday of “strong” Western economic blowback against any Russian attack on Ukraine, while the Kremlin leader demanded guarantees that the Nato alliance keep clear of Russia.The two leader...

Beijing’s ambassador has warned that Canada risks driving away Chinese investors and companies if it bans Huawei Technologies from its 5G internet infrastructure, saying he hoped Canada had learned a lesson from the outcome of the “Meng Wanzhou i...

US lawmakers included a range of efforts to push back against China and Russia in a massive annual defence bill released on Tuesday, including US$300 million for Ukraine’s military and a statement of support for the defence of Taiwan.The fiscal 202...

French police on Tuesday arrested a man suspected of involvement in the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but Saudi officials claimed that they were holding the wrong man.Investigators were seeking to confirm that the man carrying a pa...

Donald Trump’s former chief of staff has ended his cooperation with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 assault on the US Capitol by supporters of the former president, his lawyer said on Tuesday.Mark Meadows, who failed to appe...

The UN’s top court ordered rivals Armenia and Azerbaijan Tuesday to prevent racial hatred and avoid aggravating their feud following last year’s war between the Caucasus arch-foes.Azerbaijan was also told to protect Armenian prisoners from the 20...

Hong Kong’s security minister has branded fugitive ex-lawmaker Nathan Law Kwun-chung a “coward” and “traitor” after he urged voters to ignore the coming Legislative Council election.In a strongly worded statement on Tuesday night, Secretary...

China’s middle class has grown explosively in the past 20 years.In 2000, roughly 3 per cent of the country’s population was classified as middle class. By 2018, more than half of China’s population – 707 million people – had entered the cou...

A court in Germany on Tuesday convicted a 67-year-old electrician of aggravated, dangerous and simple assault for removing the testicles of several men at their request, causing one person to die.A Munich regional court sentenced the man to eight yea...

A man who killed his wife and three young children before taking his own life had faked a Covid-19 vaccination certificate and feared his children would be taken away from him when the forgery was discovered, a German prosecutor said on Tuesday.Polic...

France’s exclusion from the Aukus security alliance has given the European powerhouse an impetus to step up its engagement with other countries in the Indo-Pacific region while it mends frayed ties with Australia, one of its senior diplomats has sa...

Instagram on Tuesday launched a feature that urges teenagers to take breaks from the photo-sharing platform and announced other tools aimed at protecting young users from harmful content on the Facebook-owned service.The previously announced “Take ...

China’s economic planners are expected to switch their focus from financial discipline to gradual easing while boosting investment and consumption to fend off headwinds to growth, experts said ahead of the annual central economic work conference th...

Hong Kong’s battered catering industry has urged the government to lift all social-distancing restrictions on restaurants if it rolls out a controversial Covid-19 vaccine passport plan.Ray Chui Man-wai, chairman of catering industry body the Instit...

Britain’s operation to roll out Covid-19 booster shots to all adults is struggling to pick up speed even as the Omicron variant spreads rapidly across the country.Fewer UK adults received a third shot of vaccine on Saturday than they did seven days...

Beijing’s top diplomat in Hong Kong has urged business and community leaders in the United States to “take a rational, fair and objective view of China’s development”, stressing that getting the relationship between the two countries right is...

It’s not often you see turtles flying. But that’s what happened after 40 endangered sea turtles were injured when the water off Massachusetts cooled down so quickly they were unable to swim away. They tiny animals were flown to the Mississippi Aq...

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on Tuesday said he was “excited” ahead of his mission to the International Space Station, which marks Russia’s return to space tourism.Maezawa, a space enthusiast who made his wealth in online fashion, will s...

China will stick with its “dynamic” zero-tolerance Covid-19 policy over the winter and spring amid uncertainty over the effectiveness of vaccines against the new Omicron variant, according to a senior health official.George Gao Fu, director of th...

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has rejected calls for the full release of an internal government report on the fatal 2012 Lamma ferry crash, citing privacy concerns in a move that drew scorn from the families of victims.The chief executi...

Malaysia’s second-highest court will decide on Wednesday morning whether to uphold a 1MDB-linked conviction against Najib Razak, after judges on Tuesday dismissed the former prime minister’s application to introduce fresh evidence.Najib, 68, was ...