The coronavirus pandemic hammered Hong Kong’s trade and logistics sector in 2020, driving exports down 1.5 per cent year on year, but industry groups are optimistic a rebound is in store as the city leverages growing domestic consumption in mainlan...

The global coronavirus pandemic boosted the brand value of China’s largest technology companies last year, even as it decimated livelihoods and economies the world over, according to a report by the British consultant Brand Finance.The brand value ...

China should permanently stop setting annual economic growth targets, as its overall level of borrowing and debt is rising at the fastest rate since 2009, following the global financial crisis, according to a senior adviser to the country’s central...

From India to Indonesia, fake news, fear and conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19 vaccinations are gathering momentum as governments embark on mass inoculation drives against the virus which has killed over 2.1 million and infected nearly 100 mil...

Twitter has banished My Pillow Chief Executive Officer Mike Lindell, the bedding company honcho who courted controversy after persistently tweeting Donald Trump was the real winner of the US presidential race.The company decided to ban Lindell perman...

Hong Kong will place two more neighbourhoods under stepped-up Covid-19 mandatory testing requirements and existing social-distancing measures will be extended by another week, health officials revealed, as the city confirmed 64 new infections and two...

Thousands of farmers in tractor convoys burst through police barricades on Tuesday to take their protest against agriculture reform to the heart of India’s capital, just as the nation marked Republic Day with a giant military parade.Police had earl...

A former Chinese vice-premier urged the newly inaugurated United States President Joe Biden to “meet China halfway” to rebuild trust and restart dialogue to ease the “unprecedented predicament” of strained relations between the major powers.Z...

He has anointed Pokemon and Hello Kitty as special envoys to promote the city of Osaka for the 2025 World Expo, and has a notoriously sweet tooth, with macarons a particular favourite – but Japan’s Taro Kono also has a combative streak, with some...

A Hong Kong court has thrown out an appeal bid from fugitive former lawmaker Ted Hui Chi-fung, who had sought to clear his name for snatching a phone from a public officer three years ago.Mr Justice Wilson Chan Ka-shun on Tuesday dismissed Hui’s ap...

American and Chinese investment in each other’s corporate securities reached US$3.3 trillion in 2020, despite political headwinds on both sides, according to Rhodium Group.Given the size of the two countries’ economies, “there would be room for...

An elderly gorilla was recovering from a serious case of Covid-19 after he was treated with cutting-edge synthetic antibodies, the San Diego Zoo said.Veterinary surgeons were identifying which animals to inject with the zoo’s limited supply of vacc...

Leon Black said on Monday he would relinquish his chief executive post at Apollo Global Management following an independent review of his ties to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.The review, conducted by law firm Dechert,...

It is a time of great change in the United States as the presidency of Joe Biden finally gets into gear. With an urgent need to defeat the Covid-19 crisis and repair the US’ beleaguered economy, Biden’s administration will leave no stone unturned...

As India last week announced it would send its neighbours 10 to 20 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines for free, a headline splashed on the Republic, a nationalist and right-wing television channel: “Some Spread Disease, Some Offer Cure”.It was a ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed claims by opposition leader Alexei Navalny that he owns a luxury property on the Black Sea worth US$1.35 billion, as the opposition urged fresh nationwide demonstrations.Courts around Russia started handing ...

Indonesia is set to officially surpass 1 million coronavirus cases on Tuesday, a grim milestone for the Southeast Asian nation that has struggled since last March to get the pandemic under control.The world’s fourth-most-populous country had record...

Hong Kong’s leader on Tuesday revealed she had sought Beijing’s help in securing Covid-19 jabs from state-owned Sinopharm after experiencing “hiccups” in the procurement of the three vaccines already purchased by the city.Carrie Lam Cheng Yue...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Burgess Everett, Marianne Levine and Meridith McGraw on politico.com on January 25, 2021.A top political aide to former president Donald Trump spent the wee...

For CK Colindres and her two children, 12 and 2, weekends were always spent strolling in shopping centres and dining out in the Philippines’ capital, Manila. That all changed when the pandemic struck.They have been cooped up at home since the gover...

Concern among vendors at Hong Kong’s main wholesale fruit market in Yau Ma Tei has deepened after news emerged that the government could lock down the area just ahead of Lunar New Year, as coronavirus infections there have increased in the past wee...

India’s ministry of electronics and information technology has issued fresh notices to make permanent a ban imposed on video app TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps in June, Indian media reported late on Monday.When it first imposed the ban, the India...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Andrew Desiderio and Marianne Levine on politico.com on January 25, 2021.For the first time in its 232-year history, the US Senate is putting a former presi...

Chinese soldiers on artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea have been sent upgraded tropical weather uniforms, state media said on Monday while reporting on new measures to keep personnel comfortable while stationed at the controversial ou...

Less than a month after the UK finally left the European Union’s single market, warnings of trade disruptions by those who wanted to remain a member of the trade bloc are becoming reality for some businesses.The new red tape of Brexit, dismissed by...

From this weekend, Britain will start accepting applications from people with British National (Overseas) status for a new visa that would earn them a pathway to citizenship. In the first of a three-part series on the BN(O) visa, we meet some early b...

The US Senate on Monday approved President Joe Biden’s nomination of Janet Yellen to be the nation’s 78th Treasury secretary, making her the first woman to hold the job in the department’s 232-year history.Yellen, a former chair of the Federal ...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Nick Niedzwiadek on politico.com on January 25, 2021.US President Joe Biden said on Monday he was eyeing a more ambitious target for daily coronavirus vacci...

A professor at one of China’s top fine-art academies wanted to get people interested in contemporary art with his latest exhibition, and they did.Chinese internet users were filled with outrage, accusing Feng Feng of plagiarising Miffy, the world-f...

36-year old Lin Yanqiong left her home in a small village in China’s central Hubei province to become a migrant worker at the age of 15, moving across the country to take a variety of jobs, including a nurse, waitress and masseuse.Her relatively un...

US President Joe Biden was expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday aimed at countering discrimination against Asian-Americans as the community made an all-out push to end the Trump administration’s controversial “China Initiative”.The in...

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, a long-time China sceptic, thanked Beijing on Monday for rapidly approving export of enough active ingredients to produce about 8.5 million doses of Sinovac Biotech’s Covid-19 vaccine being made in Sao Paulo, as...

The Biden administration has quickly removed a group of Trump administration appointees from the top of the US government’s global broadcasting arm, amid bipartisan criticism that the Donald Trump loyalists running the agency had undermined its abi...

The Communist Party’s top anti-corruption body has vowed to keep a close watch on state-backed technology and infrastructure projects and crack down further on graft at the grass-roots level.In a communique issued on Sunday after a three-day confer...

The patter of paws is being heard in the White House again following the arrival of President Joe Biden’s dogs Champ and Major. The two German shepherds are the first pets to live at the executive mansion since the Obama administration.Major burst ...

Despite warnings that Chinese authorities might block Australian wheat amid an escalating political row, wheat exports to China surged last month, underscoring a year in which overall trade between the countries approached a record high.After three m...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Nick Niedzwiadek on politico.com on January 25, 2021.US President Joe Biden is looking to resume work to redesign the US$20 bill to feature abolitionist Har...

US President Joe Biden’s administration has started a review of his predecessor’s trade war with China and other actions taken against Beijing, and will work with allies to stop the country’s “economic abuses on many fronts”.Pledging “an ...

A US voting machine company has filed a US$1.3 billion lawsuit against former president Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, accusing him of defamation in what it called his “big lie” campaign about widespread fraud in the presidential election...

A German court on Monday sentenced a man to 4½ years in jail after he used a vacuum cleaner to steal money from a supermarket safe during an armed robbery.The man cleaned up €60,000 (US$72,700) from a safe in a supermarket in the small southern Ge...

US biotechnology firm Moderna said its vaccine will protect against two known variants of the virus that causes Covid-19, but it plans to start human studies of a booster shot for a strain from South Africa that may cause immunity to wane more quickl...

China has deployed a large number of launchers for its new advanced intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) to the country’s eastern and western areas for intensive training, as it and the United States continue their posturing over the dispute...

Three more Chinese University students have been arrested for their suspected involvement in an incident in which a black-clad group threw an unknown white powder at campus security guards, bringing the total number of people caught over the case to ...

AstraZeneca is not doing enough to try to resolve a dispute over delayed Covid-19 vaccine deliveries to the European Union, the bloc’s top health official said on Monday, as news emerged the drug maker is also facing supply problems elsewhere.In a ...

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday urged world leaders to put aside ideological confrontations in a speech to the World Economic Forum.In the address, issued via video link, he warned that attempts to “isolate, intimidate, decouple and sanction...

Hong Kong’s two-day lockdown of a heavily populated neighbourhood ended early on Monday, with 13 new coronavirus infections found after more than 7,000 residents were screened.The city’s health minister has defended the move in the heart of the Y...

A former senior executive at Wirecard AG escaped from Austria to Belarus on a private aircraft last year with the help of a secret-service agent and a far-right politician, according to an arrest warrant seen by Bloomberg.Jan Marsalek, the German pay...

The Hong Kong government has sued a local mask supplier to win back nearly HK$100 million paid for 32 million surgical face coverings after finding not all of them were from Japan as required under the deal.The director of government logistics last F...

A historic UK pub in the centre of Oxford that has served students, scholars and literary greats for over 450 years is to shut down, a cultural casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.The Lamb and Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings aut...

Hong Kong recorded more deaths than births last year for the first time, in what experts said was a warning of an imminent decline in the city’s overall population.According to unpublished provisional figures from the Census and Statistics Departme...