Beijing and much of the northern mainland have been blanketed in choking smog since last Sunday, as heavy industries step up production to help with the country’s economic recovery.Beijing sounded the alarm about severe air pollution and stopped al...

Residents of the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu have lashed out at a government ban on people driving “dirty cars”.From Tuesday, vehicles that have “apparent stains, dirt or mud on the exterior” or “dust on the roof”, “mud on the ...

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday defended the government’s decision to set a modest gross domestic product (GDP) growth target of “above 6 per cent” for this year, adding it could surge beyond that level.Speaking at a press conference on ...

Top Beijing officials are expected to meet more than 1,000 Hong Kong business leaders and pro-establishment politicians next week to solicit their feedback on plans for the drastic overhaul of the city’s electoral system, sources say.Two government...

Visits to relatives in Champhai, Mizoram, used to be effortless for Maisek Thanhawla. She would leave her home in Tahan, western Myanmar, reach the border of Mizoram in the far north east of India, show her passport and visa at the immigration checkp...

The US navy has sent a warship through the sensitive Taiwan Strait prompting an angry protest from Beijing.The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John Finn conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit on Wednesday in accordance with intern...

Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation lost money last year for the first time since its listing two decades ago, posting a record deficit totalling HK$4.8 billion as the Covid-19 pandemic and a troubled mega project took a heavy toll on the rail operator.The...

A 26-year-old woman stabbed herself in the stomach with a fruit knife and lost consciousness after slashing her former boyfriend’s neck with the weapon in a Hong Kong flat on Thursday.The attack took place in the 25-year-old man’s flat on the thi...

Google has paid tribute to a Chinese-Malaysian epidemiologist, whose early invention of a face mask is still saving lives today during the coronavirus pandemic.On Wednesday Google’s logo tribute on its homepage, Google Doodle, celebrated Doctor Wu ...

China’s political elite wrapped up their annual parliamentary session on Thursday.  In the centenary year of China’s Communist Party, the leadership sent a clear message that internal stability is paramount, particularly in Hong Kong.  At the...

In the dog-eat-dog world of hedge funds, giving an internship to a 16-year-old is a rarity. But when local talent is hard to find, teaching a minor how to generate alpha can be a worthwhile investment.And so last summer, high schooler Yi Ke Cao spent...

More than 800 sheets of paper soaked with HK$13 million (US$1.7 million) worth of liquid cocaine were among 50kg of drugs seized in a crackdown on a local syndicate that resulted in the arrest of three Hongkongers, police said on Thursday.The sheets ...

China’s national legislature has approved a resolution to drastically overhaul Hong Kong’s electoral system to ensure only “patriots” can rule the city, in a sweeping move critics fear will further quash opposition voices.The National People�...

Police recovered more than HK$1 million (US$129,000) worth of high-end products bought with stolen credit card information and intended for buyers in mainland China during a raid of a Hong Kong flat on Tuesday.Officers arrested a 26-year-old insuranc...

When Dr Aqsa Shaikh announced on Twitter last week that she had been appointed to head a Covid-19 vaccination centre in New Delhi, her timeline was inundated with hundreds of congratulatory messages. Most notably, the 38-year-old was lauded for being...

Syria’s 10-year-long civil war has killed or wounded almost 12,000 children and left millions out of school in what could have repercussions for years to come in the country, the UN children’s agency said.The grim statistics were released in a Un...

A decade ago, a massive tsunami crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Three of its reactors melted down, leaving it looking like a bombed-out factory. Emergency workers risked their lives trying to keep one of history’s worst nuc...

The World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11 one year ago. The question now is when will it be over?Experts say an end to the pandemic will be less defined than its start, as different countries subdue the disease at differe...

More than 240 people linked to a growing coronavirus cluster at a gym in Hong Kong would be sent into quarantine after 16 of the 22 new cases confirmed on Thursday were tied to the popular fitness centre in Sai Ying Pun, health authorities said.Nine ...

An officer in London’s diplomatic protection branch was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of murder, police said, as investigators searching for a missing 33-year-old woman discovered human remains.The Metropolitan Police said the officer, who is ...

The police chief on the Hawaiian island of Kauai mocked people of Asian descent and in one case “squinted his eyes” and bowed his head while mimicking someone with a Japanese accent, a discrimination investigation found.In another incident, Kauai...

Jen Armado, a 32-year-old mother of two, was supposed to mark her 10th year as a secretary in a private school in Tanza, Cavite, a coastal town south of Metro Manila, when she was laid off in August.While troubled and downtrodden, Armado quickly thou...

The China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA), a state-backed association of 774 Chinese businesses in the chips industry, said on Thursday that it has set up a working group with the United States technology companies to create an avenue for c...

Hong Kong’s Covid-19 vaccination drive has got off to a rocky start, with the take-up rate continuing to drop since the programme first began rolling out jabs in early February.The minister handling the mass inoculation programme, civil service chi...

A film accusing Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on gilded residences, planes and Rolls-Royce and Maybach cars has gained more than 3.7 million YouTube views since its release on Monday.The film by...

A former executive for a Singapore-based defence contractor linked to a sweeping corruption scandal that cost the US Navy some US $35 million appeared this week in a California courtroom to face federal charges.Pornpun “Yin” Settaphakorn appeared...

A farmer in China who became an unwitting celebrity for serving up cheap ramen noodles has now decided fame is the recipe for him.Cheng Yunfu – nicknamed Ramen Brother by online fans – was stunned when a video released on social media late last m...

Warren Buffett’s fortune reached US$100 billion on Wednesday, as investors drove the stock price for his company Berkshire Hathaway to a record level.Buffett’s net worth, as measured by Forbes magazine, comes almost entirely from owning about one...

A former opposition lawmaker, one of 47 Hong Kong activists charged in the largest crackdown under the national security law to date, was released on Thursday after a judge rejected prosecutors’ appeal of a lower court’s decision to grant her bai...

A tourist bus plunged into a ravine on Indonesia’s main island of Java after its brakes apparently malfunctioned, killing at least 27 people and injuring 39 others, police and rescuers said on Thursday.The bus was carrying a group of Islamic junior...

Hongkongers’ fears over the safety of Sinovac Covid-19 vaccines – exacerbated by recent medical emergencies involving people who received the shots – are an “unnecessary” side effect of broad reporting guidelines and a failure by authoritie...

Gavin Chin, a Malaysian living in Macau, is desperate to hop on the next flight back to his hometown of Sabah. He was working as a diver technician on The House of Dancing Water show in the Chinese special administrative region when he was laid off i...

When Chinese Vice-Premier Han Zheng met a group of Hong Kong representatives last weekend during the nation’s annual parliamentary meetings to brief them on the planned shake-up of the elections system, he also mentioned that the city’s housing p...

The global community will find out “fairly soon, within the next few years” what started the coronavirus pandemic, a key member of a World Health Organization-led investigation into the pandemic’s origins said on Wednesday.In a press briefing o...

Europe’s drug regulator was worried about the efficacy and safety of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine early in the treatment’s review, according to a new article in The BMJ, a British medical journal.The article cites classified information from the E...

A Hong Kong judge accused of bias has been cleared of any wrongdoing after an investigation by the city’s judiciary.In May last year, Principal Magistrate Don So Man-lung sentenced an elderly man to six months in jail for assaulting an officer and ...

Meghan Markle has filed a complaint to broadcaster ITV after former Good Morning Britain anchor Piers Morgan made disparaging comments about the Duchess of Sussex and her mental health.According to CNN, Markle contacted ITV out of concern that Morgan...

Million-dollar price tags on a record number of Singapore’s public housing sales are a sign the city state is joining the frenzy gripping property markets from Hong Kong to Toronto.Twenty-three resold government-subsidised flats were bought for at ...

With Hong Kong moving towards full adoption of more environmentally friendly transport by 2035, the city’s biggest motor vehicle distributor has issued a warning about the lack of skilled technicians to repair the growing number of electric cars.In...

Beijing’s plan for the next five years includes a call to mitigate risks and prepare for legal battles over its maritime disputes, which analysts say reflects growing concerns over the South China Sea.The plan – tabled at the ongoing annual legis...

Russia is aiming to supply more coal to the world’s biggest energy consumer, as Beijing is also seeking to diversify China’s coal supply away from Australia amid ongoing tensions with Canberra, according to analysts.China remains Russia’s bigge...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Josh Gerstein on politico.com on March 10, 2021.The US Senate has confirmed President Joe Biden’s pick for attorney general, Judge Merrick Garland, by a v...

Beijing has long touted its national legislature as a representative mechanism for China’s people, but the make-up of its delegates show that women do not yet hold up half the sky.Women and members of China’s 55 recognised ethnic minorities remai...

A Congress split along party lines approved a landmark US$1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill on Wednesday, as US President Joe Biden and Democrats claimed a triumph on a bill that marshals the government’s spending might against twin pandemic and ec...

German police said on Wednesday they had arrested a man over an apparent early-morning arson attempt on the Chinese embassy in Berlin.“This morning, police officers arrested a man alleged to have thrown several incendiary devices onto the premises ...

Myanmar’s military government accused deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi of accepting illegal payments as eight people were killed on Thursday when security forces opened fire on protests against the coup, witnesses and local media said.Rights group A...

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will hold talks with top Chinese officials next week in Anchorage, Alaska, the State Department announced on Wednesday, a meeting that America’s top diplomat said would not herald further high-level talks unless...

Brazil’s former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made his return to politics on Wednesday with a virulent attack on President Jair Bolsonaro and his “imbecile” handling of the coronavirus pandemic.Lula, who led Brazil from 2003 to 2010, has eme...

A highly infectious variant of Covid-19 that has spread around the world since it was first discovered in Britain late last year is between 30 per cent and 100 per cent more deadly than previous dominant variants, researchers said on Wednesday.In a s...

China wants to lure more skilled migrants, including tech industry professionals, to help achieve its goal of becoming a self-reliant “technology power”.The policy was set out in the next five-year plan for the nation’s social and economic deve...