People’s Liberation Army activities in the Taiwan Strait are being closely watched by the United States and Japan and it needs to find a way to operate effectively while being surveilled, according to analysts. A report by Beijing-based defence thi...

The International Monetary Fund has raised its 2026 economic growth forecasts for both China and the United States by 0.3 percentage points, the latest sign that the pause in their trade war has eased pressure on both economies. In its latest World E...

An 11-year-old girl in China who often sends text messages to her dead grandfather has moved millions of internet users in the country. According to a report by media outlet The Cover, the girl’s mother known as Han, who lives in the southwestern S...

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi announced her plan to dissolve the House of Representatives on Friday for a snap general election, the opening day of this year’s ordinary parliamentary session. At a press conference on Monday, Takaichi said ...

Hong Kong has deported 113 rejected non-refoulement claimants after a week-long operation, according to the Immigration Department. The operation codenamed “Shield” involved deporting a group of 68 men and 45 women, some of whom had completed pri...

The Shenzhou-20 spacecraft returned to Earth with no astronauts inside – just metal, heat and a cracked window – touching down at the Dongfeng landing site in China’s northern Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Monday. The hull appeared to be ...

Hong Kong’s rule of law is “more robust and enduring than the outcome of any single case”, the city’s chief justice has declared after former media boss Jimmy Lai Chee-ying was found guilty in a landmark national security case that drew inter...

Malaysia’s king has issued a blunt warning to officials, saying his “hunt for the corrupt” will reach all levels as the country reels from a corruption scandal inside the armed forces that has implicated senior ranks. A former army chief and do...

For much of the past decade, the energy transition debate has largely revolved around one question: can clean technologies work at scale? That is increasingly being answered. Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles (EVs) have mov...

Guatemala’s president on Sunday declared a 30-day nationwide state of emergency to combat criminal gangs after authorities accused the groups of killing eight police officers and holding hostages at three prisons. The killings occurred in the Guate...

As silver prices surged past S$100 (US$78) an ounce in recent weeks, Singaporean Faris Ghani saw a long-running bet finally begin to pay off. The 35-year-old relocation consultant has been quietly accumulating the metal since he was 21, betting that ...

December was a record-breaking month and busier than ever for the Hainan, China’s first Type 075 amphibious assault ship and one of Beijing’s most important assets in the event of any potential military operation against Taiwan. The Yushen-class ...

A Hong Kong court has ordered the winding-up of a bakery chain and declared a co-founder of a now-closed congee restaurant group bankrupt, highlighting the plight of the local retail and catering sectors amid shifting consumer patterns. The High Cour...

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has nominated his nephew to join the central bank’s board of governors, two sources said, amid growing concern about its independence as the government seeks more support for ambitious economic targets. Investo...

Competition in the Hong Kong labour market intensified in the past year with applications per job advertisement surging by nearly 60 per cent, even as AI eliminated some positions, according a popular online employment marketplace. Jobsdb Hong Kong r...

The couple behind the Asia distributor of Japanese skincare brand Fancl has bought prime office and retail space in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district, highlighting selective bargain hunting by cash-rich local investors as commercial property prices re...

Hackers disrupted Iranian state television satellite transmissions to air footage supporting the country’s exiled crown prince and calling on security forces to not “point your weapons at the people”, footage online showed early Monday, the lat...

China’s birth count plummeted to a record low last year, falling by about 10 million from its 2016 peak and slashing the total by more than half in less than a decade, as the country’s population shrank for a fourth consecutive year. Only 7.92 mi...

“We will not leave the desert till we beat the foe, although in war our golden armour be outworn 100 times.” In this celebrated poem from China’s Tang dynasty, Wang Changling captured the unyielding spirit of soldiers in golden armour battling ...

Pakistani firefighters began searching the smouldering remains of a sprawling Karachi shopping centre on Monday for more than 60 people still missing after a massive fire. Police chief Javed Alam Odho confirmed 14 people have been killed, warning tha...

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s record on legal reforms has come under scrutiny after a journalist was detained under a colonial-era Sedition Act for asking a “sensitive question” linking the Gaza crisis to the treatment of ethnic Chin...

China’s top securities regulator has signalled it wants a slower, longer-lasting stock market rally rather than a short-lived speculative surge as it steps up measures to curb excessive trading after activity and margin financing hit fresh highs ea...

A video clip released by a woman in China in which her husband is seen smashing up their home because she bought a 1,500-yuan (US$215) dishwasher has gone viral on social media. The woman, who lives in Guangdong province, southern China, said in a vi...

Even as global trade weathered extreme volatility in 2025, China is pressing ahead with port expansions, building bigger and more strategically positioned hubs to secure its trade future. In the first 11 months of 2025, China’s foreign trade contai...

Chinese humanoid developer UBTech Robotics has struck a deal to supply European aviation giant Airbus with robots for its manufacturing facilities, the latest step in efforts to expand industrial applications of its robots outside China. Airbus purch...

A divorced Malaysian couple looking to rekindle their relationship were arrested for being alone in a hotel room after religious enforcement officers raided their hotel room in Johor in the early hours of Sunday morning. Johor’s Islamic Religious D...

We have put together stories from our coverage last weekend to help you stay informed about news across Asia and beyond. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. Japan urged to ‘correct historical errors’, r...

Home prices in mainland China continued to decline at a rapid pace in December, posing challenges for an economy that is struggling to find new growth drivers. New home prices fell 0.4 per cent month on month on average across 70 cities, according to...

Hong Kong should expand its annual marathon into a two-day race and add more diverse routes to attract more participants and boost the city’s mega-event economy, two lawmakers have said. They also said on Monday that organisers of the Standard Char...

Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) will delay the restart of its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday, public broadcaster NHK reported on Monday, after an alarm malfunction. It would have been the fir...

Physicist You Chenglong has left the United States to take up a full-time position in China after working for more than a decade in the strategically important fields of quantum sensing and precision measurement. Previously based at Louisiana State U...

As political and business leaders gather in the Swiss town of Davos for this year’s World Economic Forum, scheduled to begin on Monday, analysts expect China to continue positioning itself as a reliable trade partner and supporter of multilateralis...

In Japan, “foreigner policy” has entered mainstream consciousness, with a politically middle-of-the-road newspaper concluding that xenophobia dominated the country’s “national conversation” last year. In a December 29 review of the year, th...

Hong Kong aims to develop its “NewSpace” economy by positioning itself as a leading hub for finance, insurance, legal and arbitration services, and materials application in alignment with the nation’s development plan. The Chief Executive’s P...

China has confirmed that it achieved its annual growth target last year as the economy weathered an unprecedented trade war with the United States, but growth slowed to a three-year low in the final quarter, dragged down by a series of domestic headw...

Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr said on Monday that a “significant” discovery of natural gas had been made near the country’s sole producing offshore site. About 2.8 billion cubic metres (98 billion cubic feet) of natural gas was fou...

The verdant green leaves and dainty white flowers of the alligator weed are becoming a common sight in waterways across Japan. But while the plant, whose scientific name is Alternanthera philoxeroides, may look innocuous, it is an absolute menace acc...

The dust has settled on the election of the Legislative Council president, and committees and panels have settled into the new Legco. Most, it seems, are ready to hit the ground running. First on the agenda: dealing with the aftermath of the Tai Po f...

China and Chile are set to launch a three‑month expedition into the uncharted depths of the eastern Pacific Ocean – a “historic opportunity” to seek new forms of life and geological insights into the causes of earthquakes and tsunamis. Settin...

A Chinese woman was shocked to discover that her late husband had engaged in a seven-year affair and had transferred nearly 20 million yuan (US$3 million) to his mistress. The discovery prompted the cheated-on wife to file a lawsuit to reclaim the am...

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has unveiled a road map to introduce 20 measures under a five-year initiative aimed at modernising the city’s trade finance landscape and strengthening connectivity with mainland China and Asean trade corrido...

A typical day for Aizat Halim begins at 5am, as he sets out on a drive to his fruit farm in Janda Baik, about 50km (30 miles) from his home in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur – a distance that reflects the gap between his current and former lives...

A 12-year-old boy was fighting for his life in hospital after being mauled by a large shark in Sydney Harbour, police in Australia said on Monday. The boy had been jumping off rocks with friends late on Sunday afternoon at Shark Beach in Vaucluse, ar...

Hong Kong will expand drone patrols to all major police regions from Friday, including The Peak, Cheung Chau and Lamma Island, for crime prevention, crowd control and traffic monitoring. Superintendent Tango Ko Chung-ying of the force’s key points ...

Just under a third of Singapore residents in a recent survey by global communication firm Edelman believe that the next generation would be better off than the current one – a drop of 11 percentage points from last year’s findings. The Edelman Tr...

Chow Tai Fook Enterprises (CTFE), the parent of embattled New World Development (NWD), will keep pursuing deals that create “win-win outcomes”, chairman Henry Cheng Kar-shun said as he revealed the private investment holding company’s philosoph...

The ‌Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers in Alaska to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, the site of large protests against the government’s deportation drive, two US officials told ‍Reuters on Sunday. The US Army...

China’s pharmaceutical industry, whose revenue is projected to rise by 50 per cent between 2024 and 2030, has emerged as a new growth engine for the national economy as leading players ramp up investment in research and production. The country’s ...

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He has written extensively on security issues and international politics and is best known ...

Wildfires raging across central and southern Chile on Sunday left at least 18 people dead, scorched thousands of acres of forest and destroyed hundreds of homes, authorities said, as the South American country sweltered under a heatwave. Chilean Pres...