Hong Kong’s textile industry leaders have come together to produce antivirus gloves they hope will provide frontline workers more protection during the Covid-19 pandemic.Raymond Chu Lop-fu, chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Textiles, tol...

Hong Kong’s 2022-23 budget has largely responded to public expectations. The most welcome measure is the distribution of HK$10,000 (US$1,280) in electronic consumption vouchers to 6.6 million residents.However, there are two areas of public concern...

Jagdeep Singh, a 31-year-old farmer from India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh applied to local authorities for a revolver licence four months ago.His village of Lakhimpur Kheri, home to 4 million people, is filled with lush green sugar cane...

Russia’s defence ministry announced a ceasefire on Saturday to allow residents of two Ukrainian cities that were surrounded by Moscow’s forces, including the strategic port city of Mariupol, to evacuate.“Today, March 5, from 10am Moscow time (0...

The new US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, has arrived in the country and will be in quarantine for three weeks, the US embassy said in a tweet on Saturday.The United States has been without an ambassador in Beijing since Terry Branstad stepped ...

China will carry out more than a week of military drills in the South China Sea in an area between its southern province of Hainan and Vietnam, the government announced, warning shipping to stay away.China claims a large part of the disputed waterway...

Hong Kong Baptist University is offering journalists in the city a chance to spend a year on campus attending courses of their choice while getting a monthly allowance that will match their salaries under a first-ever programme of its kind.The “Pro...

Birmingham, the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with half of London’s average home price, offers a budget-friendly alternative to the British capital for Hong Kong’s migrants under the British National (Overseas) visa programme.The aver...

A woman has been fined HK$5,000 (US$640) after she was caught on camera smearing her saliva on the door of an MTR train in Hong Kong.A police spokesman said the force was investigating the incident that occurred on Friday morning at Kowloon Tong stat...

Just weeks before the opening of the annual “two sessions”, Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics in a bubble with not reports of coronavirus transmissions from inside the loop to the outside, and vice versa.China hailed the model a success and said...

Hong Kong’s traffic offenders will find it harder to escape being booked when the police deploy two robots equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to monitor busy city streets.The police issued about 3.3 million fixed penalty tickets ...

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, with mounting casualties and little sign of an immediate ceasefire, many China watchers are scratching their heads about Beijing’s role in the lead-up to the assault.For China, which appears...

London and the outlying boroughs of the United Kingdom’s capital remain the top destination for Hong Kong’s migrants under the British National (Overseas) visa programme, taking the lion’s share of home sales attributed to the influx in the pas...

About 15 per cent of Hongkongers have caught Covid-19, according to health experts, as the city confirmed more than 37,000 new infections on Saturday.The latest caseload of 37,529 marks the first time since Tuesday that the city’s daily numbers hav...

As China’s “two sessions” begin, a growing number of delegates to the annual political meetings are calling for reforms to tackle the trafficking of women and children.Human trafficking – especially that of women and children – quickly beca...

Former vice-president Mike Pence urged Republicans to move on from the 2020 US election and declared that “there is no room in this party for apologists for Putin” as he further cemented his break from ex-president Donald Trump.Pence, in a speech...

Like countless other online Chinese keyboard warriors, Yu Zhe (an online pseudonym) applauded the Russian invasion of Ukraine late last month. Agreeing with him was another online user who said “if Russia does not wage war, they will be threatened ...

Singapore will impose unilateral sanctions against Russia, a move a former diplomat said was the first time in decades that the city state was censuring a foreign nation without backing from the United Nations Security Council.Sanctions include the i...

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Saturday vowed to focus on Hong Kong’s prosperity through better integration with the country, in a departure from past warnings of the city being undermined by foreign forces.Li made the comments on Saturday as he del...

A former US military linguist is arming volunteers with Russian phrases like “put your weapon down” before they head to Ukraine to fight. Another US veteran said he was in Ukraine linking volunteers to groups on the ground.They are among organise...

After a lifetime in Hong Kong, Sung Chi-wah and his wife packed up their belongings last June and moved to Swindon, a town of 222,000 people in southwest England – about an hour-long train ride from central London.The couple, both nearing retiremen...

A prison in Quanzhou, Fujian in southeast China is helping inmates avoid shame by coming up with an elaborate ruse so they can fool their relatives that they are working in big cities.The guards discovered that some inmates never told their loved one...

China’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), starts its annual meeting on Saturday. The NPC meeting is part of the “two sessions” – one of the biggest events on the country’s political calendar – along with the meetin...

North Korea fired a ballistic missile toward the sea to the east of the Korean peninsula on Saturday, militaries in the region said, an apparent test just days before the South’s presidential election.South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said it d...

Amid an unprecedented wave of Covid-19 infections, the Hong Kong government has imposed its toughest measures yet. The authorities were apparently caught out by the latest Omicron wave, which worsened rapidly and became the focus of local and interna...

Three companies controlled by tycoon Victor Li Tzar-kuoi have received a notice of interest from unnamed parties to buy one of the UK’s largest power distribution companies that they jointly own.The preliminary expression of interest has yet to be ...

There has been a sharp rise in the number of middle-aged Hong Kong residents applying to pursue higher education in Australia and hoping to relocate their families there, according to latest data from Canberra.Between November last year and January, ...

On a cold winter’s night in January 2013, Sylvia Yu Friedman drove an hour out of Kunming, China, to a small, dim-lit market in Yunnan province, on the border of Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.She and two other women were there with a mission: to film i...

In better times, Ukrainian drone enthusiasts flew their gadgets into the sky to photograph weddings, fertilise soybean fields or race other drones for fun. Now some are risking their lives by forming a volunteer drone force to help their country repe...

Group of Seven countries and the European Union reacted with alarm on Friday to Russia’s assault on a nuclear power plant in Ukraine, as the US administration demurred on whether it considered the shelling a war crime.“We urge Russia to stop its ...

The White House is not advocating for regime change in Russia, President Joe Biden’s spokeswoman said on Friday after a US senator advocated for Russians to assassinate President Vladimir Putin.“We are not advocating for killing the leader of a f...

Russia’s war in Ukraine has “horrified” the World Bank’s shareholders, including China, and will have lasting consequences for Russia’s international standing, the global lender’s president said on Friday.World Bank President David Malpas...

As soaring global demand for lithium shows no signs of abating amid a global shift to battery-powered vehicles to reduce carbon emissions, the acceleration of lithium mining and extraction in China is of keen interest to industry representatives at t...

As International Women’s Day approaches, women in Pakistan are gearing up to organise the annual Aurat March, or Women’s March. Online and offline, misogynist rhetoric has also been gaining ascendancy.Recently, Minister of Religious Affairs Noor-...

The US Supreme Court has reinstated the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.The justices, by a 6-3 vote on Friday, agreed with the Biden administration’s arguments that a federal appeal court was wrong to throw out the sente...

Chinese consumers are stepping up to support Ukrainian and Russian businesses, with some flocking to Russian-run e-commerce stores on JD.com, while others are queuing up to dine at a Ukrainian restaurant in Beijing.Since Russia invaded Ukraine last w...

Western media outlets, including the BBC, CNN and Bloomberg news, are temporarily suspending operations in Russia after the country’s lawmakers approved legislation criminalising reporting of the war in Ukraine that differs from the government line...

President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have grown closer in the last couple of months. This was particularly obvious when Putin was made Xi’s guest of honour at the opening gala of the Winter Olympics earlier this year. Not...

​Deaths from Covid-19 complications in Hong Kong have been crossing the 100 mark daily over the past four days such that the city now has the world’s highest fatality rate for the coronavirus, mostly among undervaccinated elderly residents.Author...

A senior Beijing health official has told Hong Kong’s government to step up leadership and cross-departmental coordination to lower death rates and win the “people’s war” against a worsening fifth wave of coronavirus infections.Dr Liang Wanni...

Thousands of South Koreans fled their homes Friday as a large wildfire ripped through an eastern coastal area and temporarily threatened a nuclear power station before being driven away by winds.As of Friday evening, around 1,000 firefighters were ba...

ByteDance has decided to assign three managers from its short video unit to its virtual reality subsidiary Pico Interactive, a start-up that the owner of TikTok acquired last year and signalling its commitment to the futuristic technology.Song Binghu...

For a second year running, the Lunar New Year came and went quietly for the members of the once-grand Six Companies in San Francisco’s Chinatown.In earlier years, hundreds of the community association’s members would flock to New Asia’s banquet...

Singapore plans to introduce a points-based visa system for some of its highest-paid foreign workers, including scores for how the applicant’s nationality contributes to the diversity of their firm, in addition to education, skills and pay.The prog...

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed on Friday that a Russian projectile hit Europe’s biggest nuclear plant amid clashes in Ukraine, raising the threat to Ukraine’s power supply or the risk of a nuclear accident, according to experts....

The leader of China’s top political advisory body called for the country to rally behind the ruling Communist Party as China faces “unprecedented” domestic and international challenges.Delivering his annual report at the opening of the Chinese ...

Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday the Western military alliance would not set up a no-fly zone over Ukraine nor send its troops there, but promised other help to Kyiv and urged President Vladimir Putin to immediately end Russia�...

The decision by two China-backed development banks to halt “all activities” with Russia shows Beijing is treading a careful line on its close trading partner amid worldwide condemnation of the attack on Ukraine, analysts believe.This comes after ...

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo called for Washington to recognise Taiwan as a sovereign nation during a speech in Taipei on Friday that angered Beijing.“It is my view that the US government should immediately take necessary and long overd...

A new electric vehicle (EV) from the Alibaba Group Holding-backed IM Motors will launch this month, joining a crowded but rapidly growing market dominated by Tesla and Chinese firms Xpeng and Nio.The first smart electric car from IM Motors will go on...