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Japan and the United States have confirmed they will advance cooperation on investing in strategic sectors and honour the other terms of a trade deal they reached last year, even though President Donald Trump’s tariff policies have changed significantly over time. “We reaffirmed that last year’s agreement remains unchanged,” Japan’s Trade and Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa told reporters in Wash...
Hong Kong’s leader has identified financial services, innovation and technology, and education as three key new growth drivers ahead of the unveiling of the city’s inaugural five-year development blueprint and annual policy address. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said on Saturday that Hong Kong’s first five-year plan would outline broad strategies, set clear development directions and align with...
Hong Kong’s leader has identified financial services, innovation and technology, and education as three key new growth drivers ahead of the unveiling of the city’s inaugural five-year development blueprint and annual policy address. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said on Saturday that Hong Kong’s first five-year plan would outline broad strategies, set clear development directions and align with...
At least one person was killed and 11 are missing after they were buried by a landslide in central China as the region continued to battle severe flooding caused by Typhoon Saudel. The landslide hit Gaoping, a town in a mountainous area of Jiangxi province, at around 4am on Saturday, according to state broadcaster CCTV. It said rescue teams were rushing to the disaster site. The accident followed ...
Weeks before President Javier Milei visits France, scrutiny has grown around an Argentina-run university residence in Paris supposed to promote peaceful coexistence but which activists say instead restricts lodger freedoms and hosts European far-right figures. Paris city officials have demanded the foreign ministry investigate Argentina House, one of dozens of homes run by foreign nations or Frenc...
Weeks before President Javier Milei visits France, scrutiny has grown around an Argentina-run university residence in Paris supposed to promote peaceful coexistence but which activists say instead restricts lodger freedoms and hosts European far-right figures. Paris city officials have demanded the foreign ministry investigate Argentina House, one of dozens of homes run by foreign nations or Frenc...
A rupture between Taiwan’s two opposition parties over a mayoral race threatens to spill into November’s elections and erode the fragile trust underpinning their potential 2028 alliance. The main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and smaller Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have both registered candidates for mayor of Zhubei, the biggest city in Hsinchu county, after weeks of negotiations failed to produce a...
Bangladesh’s deadliest measles outbreak in decades is nearing the grim milestone of 1,000 child deaths, as a devastating epidemic sweeps through the country and crowded hospital wards fill with struggling babies. Cries of sick children and the hiss of oxygen machines fill the air at Dhaka’s Shishu Hospital, where Rima Akter keeps a vigil beside her nine-month-old son. “Just an hour ago, a child di...
When the day heats up, small business owner Chung Kee Wa, 68, changes how he tends his oil palm plantation in Yong Peng, in Malaysia’s southern Johor state. Oil palms younger than three years offer little shade, so he tends them in the early mornings and evenings, spraying pesticide, applying fertiliser or weeding. “We try our best to avoid going to the plantation around noon,” Chung said. He carr...
Anita Lee Yan-kwan grew up around a traditional business that supplied fish balls to Hong Kong’s street food stalls and eateries. But for decades, Kau Kee Food Factory’s signature product was known only among industry operators until Lee, a second-generation owner, opened the company’s first retail store late last year. Kau Kee has operated as a silent giant in the food industry for 66 years, supp...
At least two people were killed and dozens injured on Friday after an explosion at a military barracks in the Bolivian municipality of Viacha, about 30km (20 miles) from La Paz, Defence Minister Ernesto Justiniano said. His ministry said in a statement that 14 people were missing. The blast occurred at around 2.30pm in an area used to store pyrotechnic material, authorities said. While the cause...
At least 10 people were killed and 62 injured on Friday after an explosion at a military barracks in the western Bolivian city of Viacha, local authorities said. The blast took place at around 2.30pm at a military facility used to store pyrotechnic material. While the cause has yet to be established, officials said the blast originated from the defence ministry’s fireworks stockpile. Viacha healt...
In a country consumed by conflict, a sport defined by brutality dominates: Myanmar’s lethwei martial art, where headbutts are encouraged and knockout blows are the aim of the game. “I can’t live without fighting,” said 19-year-old Su Luck, who enters the ring under the paradoxical pseudonym “Peace Prize”. “I have never once considered giving up this passion,” she said. Lethwei is traditional Burme...
India’s largest-ever business delegation, 200 executives strong, touched down in Japan late last month in search of money, machinery and manufacturing know-how. At its head was Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, whose four-day tour from August 24 to 27 not only laid the groundwork for next year’s 75th anniversary of diplomatic ties but also worked to solidify an economic partnership now expanding int...
A Chinese man dressed in a food delivery uniform has sparked widespread curiosity online after he was seen in Singapore buying curry puffs for a customer in China to fulfil a “cross-border food order.” On August 31, Chloe, a Chinese woman living in Singapore, shared a video depicting the man in a Meituan uniform waiting at Hong Lim Curry Puff, a snack shop located in PLQ Mall, about a 17-minute dr...
Inside a tiny self-service laundromat in Quarry Bay in the east of Hong Kong Island, next to a wall of washing machines, stands a waist-high cryptocurrency terminal with signs reading “Elon Musk recommends Dogecoin” and “Buy bitcoin in one minute”. In order to obtain Dogecoin through the ATM, customers feed Hong Kong dollar notes into a slot and scan a QR code. The equivalent amount in cryptocurre...
Helen Fung’s home felt empty. After her husband died last October, she found herself rattling around a house in Singapore with only a domestic helper she could not get along with for company. She turned down her children’s invitations to move to England, put off by London’s grey winters, and instead checked herself into an assisted living facility. On a recent Monday afternoon in St Bernadette Lif...
Tetris said on Friday that it did not give permission for the White House to use the game’s iconic imagery for a controversial online arcade that the Trump administration released on Thursday. “The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of Build the Wall and did not authorise or license the Tetris brand or intellectual property for the game,” Tetris said in a statement. “We are currently ...
One by one, Tesla Model Y Ls roll out of the company’s end-of-line inspection bays, gleaming in black, white and gold. They are a mix of left-hand and right-hand drive – one of many signs the electric vehicles (EVs) produced here are destined for ports around the world. The company touts a total assembly time of less than 40 seconds at its sprawling Gigafactory in Lingang, a coastal area on the fa...
The US government owns 9.9 per cent of Intel, converted out of US Chips Act grants, alongside a golden share in US Steel, US$400 million in the rare earth mining firm MP Materials and stakes in roughly 30 firms worth US$26.7 billion. In 2025, Nvidia and AMD gave up 15 per cent of their China chip sale revenues in exchange for export licences. The country that spent four decades advising its allies...
A judge declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial on Friday after jurors said they could not reach a unanimous verdict on whether she was criminally responsible for killing her three young children. The mistrial, on the seventh day of deliberations, leaves the case unresolved and allows prosecutors to take the 36-year-old former labour and delivery nurse to trial again. Neither Clancy...
The United Nations General Assembly voted on Friday to back a resolution spearheaded by several African countries to adopt a map that makes their continent bigger while shrinking North America and Europe. Aimed at “a more accurate representation” of continental landmasses, the resolution was supported by 164 countries while the US voted against it and six other states abstained. The new map – know...
President Donald Trump intensified pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, threatening to cut off trade with certain economies with which the US has a deficit if the central bank does not act. Trump issued his demands on Friday in a lengthy social media post after a stronger-than-expected August jobs report, which could bolster the case for Fed officials to raise rates at their ne...
Denmark and four other European Union countries agreed on Friday on a model for “return hubs” in non-EU nations and hope to begin sending migrants to the facilities as early as 2027, an official said. The announcement, made after a one-day meeting in Copenhagen, is the latest development in an effort by EU states to send people whose asylum requests have been rejected to third countries outside th...
As Beijing and Moscow double down on the Arctic shipping route, Europe is hitting the brakes. Despite being the main destination for goods along the route and accounting for most of the world’s shipping giants, Europe opposes the commercialisation of Arctic transits, wary of fragile polar ecosystems and navigational risks amid rising anxiety over Russia and China’s closer polar collaboration. “In ...
The US job market rebounded in August as employers added a surprising 162,000 jobs. The unemployment rate stayed at a low 4.1 per cent. The jobs report, issued by the Labour Department on Friday, could be good news for President Donald Trump two months before midterm elections in which the health of the economy is weighing on voters’ minds. Hiring far exceeded the 65,000 forecasters had expected, ...
The US job market rebounded in August as employers added a surprising 162,000 jobs. The unemployment rate stayed at a low 4.1 per cent. The jobs report, issued by the Labour Department on Friday, could be good news for President Donald Trump two months before midterm elections in which the health of the economy is weighing on voters’ minds. Hiring far exceeded the 65,000 forecasters had expected, ...
A public multi-storey car park in Hong Kong’s central business district will be partially closed for about six weeks from November as the city prepares to host a meeting of Interpol’s top governing body for the first time. Hong Kong police plan to take over the seventh and eighth floors of the Rumsey Street car park in Sheung Wan to set up a traffic coordination command centre. “The centre is plan...
A mix-up of embryo biopsy specimens may have been caused by “intentional unlawful conduct” at a private fertility clinic, which breached the code of practice for reproductive technology by lacking sufficient protective measures, a Hong Kong regulator has found. The Council on Human Reproductive Technology said on Friday that, following an investigation into the incident, it had ordered service pro...
Chinese researchers have found a way to extract uranium from seawater at several times the target rate set by the US Department of Energy, putting China at the forefront of a global quest to tap into a vast source of nuclear fuel. The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao did this using a material they developed called PhosCage – a sponge-like molecular structure filled with phospha...
