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New Zealand has passed hotly contested legislation to block lawsuits that seek to hold companies liable for climate change harm. The right-wing coalition government’s legal amendment cleared a final hurdle in parliament on Tuesday night by a margin of 67 votes to 53. The law aimed to prevent civil litigation overriding its climate policy and undermining business confidence, the government said. It...
The world knows that US President Donald Trump is angry with Iran. But he is not happy with the small country lying across the Strait of Hormuz from the Islamic Republic, either: Oman. Oman has played a relatively low profile role since the Iran war began, including as a mediator. But its geography has thrust the sultanate into the uncomfortable position of negotiating with Tehran over management ...
A Chinese national, described by the US Justice Department as a “prolific” money launderer, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Tuesday and ordered to pay US$25 million for his role in a Chinese money laundering outfit with ties to Mexican drug gangs. The agency said Jianfei Lu, aged 31, was involved in laundering more than US$92 million in illicit funds in a two-year period, collecting the mon...
The South China Sea’s contested islands could be transformed into autonomous, robotic fortresses, according to a defence proposal by the Chinese coastguard. The plan, which was detailed in a Chinese-language journal supervised by the state-run China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, envisions a maritime landscape defended by a coordinated swarm of machines instead of soldiers. The proposal comes ...
Shares of Unitree Robotics surged 629 per cent above their initial public offering price to open at 1,100 yuan in their Shanghai trading debut on Wednesday, giving China’s best-known humanoid robot maker a market capitalisation of about 445 billion yuan (US$66 billion). The opening pop from its IPO price of 150.80 yuan was followed by a pullback, with the stock dropping below 900 yuan per share in...
Japan’s most greying municipality has turned to its Peruvian sister city in search of a way to reverse its population decline and address the labour shortage that together threaten its survival. The mountain village of Nanmoku in Gunma prefecture, where 65.2 per cent of residents were aged 65 or older in the 2020 census, signed a sister-city agreement with Belen in northern Peru in November, hopin...
Japan’s most greying municipality has turned to its Peruvian sister city in search of a way to reverse its population decline and address the labour shortage that together threaten its survival. The mountain village of Nanmoku in Gunma prefecture, where 65.2 per cent of residents were aged 65 or older in the 2020 census, signed a sister-city agreement with Belen in northern Peru in November, hopin...
Flight attendants and pilots are at the highest risk of dying from radiation-related cancers – even more than people who work with radioactive materials, according to a new study. Cosmic radiation comes from space. Only a small amount reaches the Earth’s surface, but exposure is greater for people flying at high altitudes. There has been limited evidence from small studies suggesting that the expo...
Hong Kong is formulating its first five-year plan for economic and social development. Such plans are likely to become a regular feature of governance, and will shape how the city allocates land, builds housing and infrastructure, develops industries, trains talent and improves public services. They can also give government departments a common frame for action, rather than leaving them to operate...
A Chinese tourist site recently concluded a month-long position that paid 60,000 yuan (US$8,900) to live on a mountaintop, observe the cloudscape, and share daily videos of the sea of clouds. On July 8, the Laojun Mountain Scenic Area in central China’s Henan province posted a recruitment ad for a “cloudscape observer” to work from July 16 to August 15. The Laojun Mountain Scenic Area is one of Ch...
Scheduled joint US and South Korean military drills are expected to be cut by about half, according to South Korean media on Wednesday, following President Donald Trump’s order to substantially reduce US participation in the annual exercises. The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, which began on Monday, had been due to run into next week. The allies were set to complete the first, defensive phase of ...
As Hong Kong customs expands its investigation into Opatra London following complaints of high-pressure sales tactics involving purchases of up to HK$100,000 (US$12,800), former employees and customers of similar beauty chains say the aggressive sales playbook feels all too familiar. Although the UK-based luxury beauty chain – originally incorporated as Oro Gold – has distanced itself from local d...
A new film telling the story of the Iraq war through Chinese eyes marks the latest in a series of soft power initiatives designed to get Beijing’s message across to the wider world. Although Once Upon a Time in the Middle East does not explicitly state the name of the country in question, it is set in the 2000s and features an invasion by American troops. The film’s central character, a Chinese ch...
In a global first, China’s leading commercial rocket company LandSpace has recovered a stainless-steel booster after an orbital launch, marking a major step in the country’s efforts to develop lower-cost, reusable rockets. It is also the first country to succeed in orbital launch recovery down distinct technological pathways, pulling off a dual-track strategy that even the United States – which pi...
In a global first, China’s leading commercial rocket company LandSpace has recovered a stainless-steel booster after an orbital launch, marking a major step in the country’s efforts to develop lower-cost, reusable rockets. It is also the first country to succeed in orbital launch recovery down distinct technological pathways, pulling off a dual-track strategy that even the United States – which pi...
In a global first, China’s leading commercial rocket company LandSpace has recovered a stainless-steel booster after an orbital launch, marking a major step in the country’s efforts to develop lower-cost, reusable rockets. The successful mission makes Zhuque-3 China’s first commercial rocket to both reach orbit and have its first stage recovered. SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster, which is also made of...
A close aide to Donald Trump is at the centre of an ugly clash between the White House and Senator Jon Ossoff, after the Democratic lawmaker drew the administration’s ire for highlighting the close nature of her relationship with the president. Natalie Harp, a 35-year-old executive assistant to the president, is little known to the public but a constant presence at Trump’s side, both in the White ...
US President Donald Trump’s abrupt move to scale back annual military drills with South Korea has handed President Lee Jae Myung a fresh impetus for greater defence self-reliance even as he seeks to maintain the long-standing alliance. Lee on Tuesday called for accelerated efforts to regain wartime operational control (OPCON) of South Korean forces from the United States and build nuclear-powered ...
Hong Kong’s fast-transfer payments denominated in yuan surged to a six-month high in July, signalling accelerating adoption of real-time cross-border retail payment channels even as mainland Chinese authorities maintain tight controls on capital outflows. Transaction values through Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System (FPS) for yuan reached 350.3 billion yuan (US$60 billion) in July, marking a 34 per...
The United Arab Emirates has said it is suspending all trade and financial dealings with Iran after reporting an Iranian missile attack directed at its ships. The announcement comes after a period of relative calm in the UAE, with no Iranian missiles aimed at the country since May after it bore the brunt of attacks in the early weeks of the Middle East war. Abu Dhabi has, however, accused Tehran o...
The United Arab Emirates said that two ballistic missiles were fired towards the country from Iran, the Islamic Republic’s first known attack on the Gulf nation since May as the wider Middle East war continues unabated. Both missiles fell into the sea, with one of them dropping within the UAE’s territorial waters and the other outside, the country’s defence ministry said Tuesday. Assessments indic...
As China deepens the commercialisation of its vast troves of data, the United States needs to develop its own national data strategy that treats data as an economic asset to better position itself to prevail in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics, a key US congressional advisory body has said. In a report published on Tuesday, the US-China Economic and Security Revie...
A North Point redevelopment site is being put on the market for HK$1.2 billion (US$153 million) after its owner, which spent years assembling the ageing property, warned that redeveloping it could result in losses of as much as 30 per cent. The sale offers a rare glimpse into the difficulties facing private developers in Hong Kong’s urban-renewal drive, where lengthy acquisition periods, financing...
Several top US Democratic lawmakers chided US President Donald Trump on Tuesday for easing sanctions recently on Chinese and Hong Kong officials who, they said, were “complicit in Beijing’s dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy”. “We write to express serious concern,” the four-page letter said. “It raises serious questions about the durability of US policy towards Hong Kong that we believe warrant a...
Several top US Democratic lawmakers chided US President Donald Trump on Tuesday for easing sanctions recently on Chinese and Hong Kong officials who, they said, were “complicit in Beijing’s dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy”. “We write to express serious concern,” the four-page letter said. “It raises serious questions about the durability of US policy towards Hong Kong that we believe warrant a...
Midwestern Americans watching television this summer may have been surprised to see China and bacon appearing together in political advertisements. “The corrupt Save Our Bacon scam in the farm bill – it’s a giveaway to Chinese corporations,” one advertisement declared over images of the Chinese flag and Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Whose side is your senator on? America or China?” Viewers might ...
A US Navy destroyer with about 300 sailors aboard suffered a major breakdown in the Pacific Ocean last month that left it without power for four days, the Navy confirmed in a statement. The USS Benfold “reported an engineering casualty involving its generators, causing a loss of power” on July 24, Navy spokesman Commander Matthew Comer said in the statement. The breakdown meant the crew went witho...
Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University are among 30 American institutions ordered to audit their foreign research relationships, according to US officials, as higher education representatives accused the Pentagon of implying wrongdoing without publicly presenting evidence. The identities emerged after the Department of Defence announced the audit...
Mexico is weighing plans to impose further trade restrictions on selected products from China and other countries while raising existing import taxes on others, according to four people familiar with the matter. The so-called anti-dumping measures would deepen Mexico’s alignment with Washington as President Claudia Sheinbaum pursues a multi-year extension of the North American trade pact known as ...
The United States imposed sanctions on Tuesday on the International Criminal Court’s president and a senior trial lawyer at the court, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. The move is the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign against The Hague-based court, which was established in 2002 by the international community to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humani...
