Shanghai public health authorities have told all hospitals and clinics across the city to reopen emergency wards after reports that people were being denied access to treatment during the citywide lockdown. The order followed after several incidents ...

As anger in Sri Lanka mounts over massive food and fuel shortages, the government is hoping to negotiate a financial lifeline from the International Monetary Fund to end the country’s spiralling economic crisis. Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa wil...

Hong Kong will look into ways to exempt chief executive election hopefuls from strict social-distancing rules ahead of the coming poll, the city’s leader has said, confirming that the five-yearly political event will proceed on May 8. But Chief Exe...

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said his government handed an official protest to the US embassy on Friday over what it called Washington’s interference in the country’s affairs. “We now have given a démarche to [the] American embassy,” K...

Australia formally signed a trade deal with India on Saturday as the two nations signalled an intention to forge closer trade ties. The Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement was signed in a virtual ceremony by Trade Minister Dan Te...

The warring sides in Yemen’s seven-year conflict have for the first time in years agreed a nationwide truce, which would also allow fuel imports into Houthi-held areas and some flights operating from Sanaa airport, the UN envoy said on Friday. The ...

One of Hong Kong’s most iconic migratory birds could be removed from a list of endangered animals in two years, following decades-long conservation efforts, an environmentalist group has said. The global population of the black-faced spoonbill has ...

The objections of family members have stymied efforts in a Covid-19 vaccination outreach service for Hong Kong’s elderly, with up to 20 per cent of senior residents eventually cancelling bookings at the last minute. The trend, revealed by a major N...

As the sun dips below the Indian Ocean waves, Ukrainian tourist Viktoria Makarenko and her daughter light incense every evening at a temple in a Sri Lankan beach resort to pray for a return home. Russia’s February invasion of the 35-year-old’s ho...

All 132 people on board China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 were killed when the Boeing 737-800 plunged from a cruising altitude into a hillside in southern China on March 21, sending shock waves across the country. The accident spelled an end to mo...

US and Taiwanese officials have held talks on expanding Taiwan’s international participation, including “opportunities” for the island to attend a major World Health Organization meeting next month. Taiwan is excluded from most global organisat...

Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged the EU not to “tie the whole world” to the crisis in Ukraine and warned it could take decades to repair the economic damage. In a virtual summit with European Union leaders on Friday, Xi told European Commis...

More than 3,000 people have escaped the besieged region of Mariupol in a convoy of buses and private cars, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday as the Red Cross prepared a fresh evacuation effort for the devastated southern port. The ...

Hong Kong’s sole incinerator for clinical waste can no longer cope with the surge in refuse, which has increased nearly six-fold since the coronavirus pandemic began two years ago. The city produced 48.7 tonnes of clinical waste each day between Ma...

A shopping frenzy that ensued at a newly opened luxury brand store earlier this week in Zhengzhou, the capital of the central Henan province, highlights the “huge consumption power” potential in China’s so-called lower-tier cities after two yea...

Hong Kong’s leader has urged all residents to test themselves for Covid-19 using rapid kits three days in a row next week to get a better picture of the city’s pandemic situation. Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor on Saturday said people...

A multilayered ownership controversy over Malaysia’s Covid-19 tracking application marred what would have been a week to remember for Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s government as the country allows quarantine-free travel to all vaccinated t...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned his people early on Saturday that retreating Russian forces were creating “a complete disaster” outside the capital as they leave mines across “the whole territory,” even around homes and corpses....

A Chinese woman pregnant with quadruplets gave birth to two boys a week ago, but the other two fetuses remain in her womb. Her first baby was born on March 22 at Qilu Hospital of Shandong University in Jinan, Shandong province, eastern China, after a...

India and China’s common ground over Russia’s war in Ukraine may be an opportunity to repair their damaged relations, but observers say renormalisation of ties will be difficult. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to India last week raise...

Sri Lanka’s president declared a state of emergency on Friday giving sweeping powers to security forces a day after hundreds tried to storm his house in anger over an unprecedented economic crisis. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa invoked the tough law...

In the hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin declared his “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, several Southeast Asian nations released carefully couched statements that balanced their concerns about the invasion wi...

Hong Kong’s upcoming election for its next chief executive is turning out to be the quietest since the city’s handover to mainland China in 1997. If Hongkongers’ election-related searches online are any indication, interest has fallen flow in c...

Will Smith has tendered his resignation from the body that awards the Oscars after his attack on Chris Rock during the weekend ceremony, a statement said on Friday. “I am resigning from membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,...

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has been tasked with downloading cockpit voice recorder data recovered from the China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed in southern China last month. “NTSB investigators are assisting the Civil ...

A US judge on Friday upheld Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking conviction, despite a juror’s acknowledgement that he had falsely stated before the trial he had not been sexually abused. Maxwell, 60, had been convicted in December of helping the ...

Chinese state media has sought to defend Beijing’s zero-Covid strategy – which has become a part of Xi Jinping’s political legacy – using the president’s “persistence is victory” phrase to encourage people to stay the course. Authoritie...

As thousands of foreign domestic helpers from the Philippines were allowed into Hong Kong from Friday when the city lifted its flight ban, employment agents said they hoped to clear a backlog of stranded workers in the coming two months. Philippine c...

Rainbow flags could be taken from fans at the World Cup in Qatar to protect them from being attacked for promoting gay rights, a senior leader overseeing security for the tournament said. Major General Abdulaziz Abdullah Al Ansari insisted that LGBT ...

A Red Cross convoy travelling to the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol turned around because it had become impossible to proceed with its mission to begin evacuating civilians on Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said. “...

In their first summit in almost two years, EU and Chinese leaders agreed on Friday to cooperate in trying to resolve Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even if, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it, they held “clearly opposing ...

Pope Francis issued a historic apology to Canadian Indigenous peoples on Friday for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in residential schools that sought to erase their cultures and where many children suffered abuse and were buried in unmarked grave...

Malaysia’s prime minister and Indonesia’s president looked on as officials signed an agreement Friday on the placement and protection of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia during a meeting in Jakarta. The memorandum of understanding, signed b...

Two South Korean air force planes collided in mid-air during training and crashed near their base on Friday, killing all four people aboard the aircraft, officials said. Both planes were KT-1 trainer aircraft – South Korea’s first indigenously de...

China has said it will strengthen domestic production and expand its “circle of friends” to secure energy supply, following Washington’s decision to release oil from a strategic reserve due to volatile crude prices triggered by Russia’s invas...

Local officials should raise concerns over the withdrawal of UK judges from Hong Kong’s top court to Britain’s legal and political sectors, several constitutional experts have said, as they also called for positive promotion of the city’s rule ...

A valuable non-fungible token (NFT) owned by Jay Chou has been stolen, the Taiwanese singer said on his Instagram account on Friday, in another cybercrime incident linked to the rising popularity of the digital tokens. Chou said in an Instagram post ...

A report by the World Wildlife Fund shows illegal purchases of wildlife online are growing in Myanmar in a threat both to public health and to endangered species. The report issued Friday found that enforcement of bans on such transactions has weaken...

Shanghai’s heightened virus control and prevention measures have resulted in unmet medical demands for hundreds of patients who have been left untreated because of a shortage of resources. A de facto citywide lockdown amid a resurgence in Covid-19 ...

Canto-pop legend Leslie Cheung’s classic concert in 2000 has been remastered using artificial intelligence to mark 19 years since the death of the Hong Kong star. Tencent Media Lab, a multimedia research and development unit under Tencent Holdings,...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Friday to shore up support from the Asian nation amid ongoing Western efforts to pressure world leaders to economically isolate Moscow. The meeting was ...

The Japanese government announced additional sanctions against North Korea on Friday, following the regime’s long-range missile test last month. Tokyo said the assets of four Russia-based organisations and nine individuals – six North Koreans and...

The first time one was reportedly spotted turned out to be a false alarm. This time it appears to be for real. Researchers in several countries have identified hybrid variants of the Delta and Omicron strains of the coronavirus. They have also found ...

The United States’ top envoy to Hong Kong has maintained that his country’s latest report painting a bleak picture of deteriorating liberties in the city does not amount to a confrontational approach, insisting the findings were outlining “the ...

Increasingly overwhelmed by supply-chain disruptions and soaring raw material costs, Chinese exporters and foreign investors in China are feeling the pinch from Covid-19 restrictions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, China’s worst coro...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has rejected calls for Russia to be expelled from the Group of 20, saying the bloc should not be split. “No one has the power to divide the G20,” Wang said in a meeting with visiting Indonesian counterpart Retno M...

Anger is boiling over in Sri Lanka at the country’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1948, much of it directed at the island nation’s all-powerful Rajapaksa family. Late Thursday hundreds of people tried to storm the home of Gotabaya R...

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Russia is consolidating and preparing “powerful strikes” in the country’s east and south, including besieged Mariupol, where a new attempt will be made Friday to evacuate civilians from the devast...

The perceived light sentences for a couple who sold their daughters in eastern China have again spotlighted the problem of child trafficking in the country and reminded people that some families would go to great lengths to protect their sons, especi...

An agency under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), one of the country’s major technology industry regulators, has plans to create its own digital collectibles, as more local players start to explore the use of non-fun...