As Ukraine’s war with its larger aggressor, Russia, continues, so does the propaganda battle between the two sides. As the conflict reaches its fourth week, the fight for supremacy in the information domain has extended beyond the confines of the t...

Finland has been named the world’s happiest country for the fifth year running, in an annual UN-sponsored index that ranked Afghanistan as the unhappiest, closely followed by Lebanon.The latest list was completed before the Russian invasion of Ukra...

Hong Kong’s iconic, 134-year-old Peak Tram is set to make a summer comeback following an eight-month closure for a final phase of renovations, with recently completed test runs on new carriages.The sixth-generation tramcars, sporting deep green ext...

Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky made a fresh appeal for talks with Moscow Saturday, while Russia said its soldiers had entered the centre of besieged port city Mariupol. As bitter fighting between local forces and Russian troops rages across t...

The president of Turkey, South Korea’s prime minister and other officials inaugurated a massive suspension bridge Friday over the Dardanelles Strait that connects the European and Asian shores of the key waterway. With a 2,023-metre span between i...

For Lynda Meeks, the most harrowing experience of her 14-day compulsory quarantine was not spending the Lunar New Year holiday in February inside a government-run isolation facility at Penny’s Bay, but having her six-year-old dog Kennedy go missing...

Weeks after the United States unveiled its Indo-Pacific strategy outlining its diplomatic and security engagements in the region, Beijing accused Washington of trying to establish an Indo-Pacific version of Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organizatio...

China has reported its first deaths caused by Covid-19 since January 2021, as the country battles a surge in Omicron cases in almost all provinces.Two deaths were reported on Friday in Jilin, the northeastern province worst hit by the current wave, t...

Britain’s communications regulator on Friday revoked the license of the state-funded Russian broadcaster RT amid concern that its coverage of the war in Ukraine was biased. The decision comes as the regulator, Ofcom, conducts 29 investigations into...

Hong Kong announced on Friday two sets of relief schemes to help ease the heavy economic burden on the city’s workforce caused by stringent social-distancing measures amid a fifth wave of coronavirus infections.The Employment Support Scheme (ESS) w...

United States President Joe Biden’s campaign to unite the globe against the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being challenged not only by adversaries such as China but also by the world’s most populous democracy, India. An Indian government offici...

Local governments in China are facing a growing financial burden to meet Beijing’s hardline zero-Covid strategy amid rising health care costs and efforts to control debt, analysts said.China is battling its biggest virus surge in two years and nume...

Hong Kong officials have pledged to improve conditions at the new community isolation facilities, including offering bestselling books and TV dramas, after the administration was flooded with complaints from the public about their poor quarantine exp...

Indonesia’s cooking oil shortage has turned deadly following the deaths of two residents who died after queuing for the liquid gold in East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The tragedies occurred despite the area being one of the largest produce...

Hong Kong has tightened cross-border Covid-19 control measures by requiring outbound travellers to mainland China to be tested again free of charge at checkpoints – on top of a negative, self-paid PCR result – in a bid to curb further exportation...

Three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station on Friday wearing yellow flight suits with blue accents, colours that appeared to match the Ukrainian flag. The men were the first new arrivals on the space station since the start o...

One afternoon last July, storm water crashed an underground retaining wall at Guangzhou Metro’s Shenzhou Road station, forcing the subway operator to shut Line 21 for seven hours, as a torrential downpour lashed southern China’s largest metropoli...

Australia’s competition watchdog filed a lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta Platforms on Friday, alleging the social media giant failed to prevent scammers using its platform to promote fake ads featuring well-known people.The advertisements, whic...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday called for comprehensive peace talks with Moscow, saying Russia would otherwise need generations to recover from losses suffered during the war.Zelensky said Ukraine had always offered solutions for ...

He Yuxin sat in front of the camera and started to play the piano, a typical activity for many young children. But for the 11-year-old girl, it was an act of perseverance; a statement that she would triumph over the explosion that left her severely i...

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is suffering widespread and severe coral bleaching due to high ocean temperatures two years after a mass bleaching event, a government agency said on Friday.The report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority, which...

Cindy Chan, in her forties and donning a tattered and stained face mask, desperately sweeps items such as biscuits and canned food into her bag from a “Gift and Take” fridge at a food court in Dragon Centre shopping centre in Sham Shui Po.The fri...

South Carolina has given the greenlight to firing-squad executions, a method codified into state law last year after a decade-long pause in carrying out death sentences because of the state’s inability to procure lethal injection drugs.The state Co...

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepGlint, which once targeted a US$300 billion valuation, made its trading debut in Shanghai on Thursday, but quickly saw its share price decline amid the rout in tech stocks this week.Shares of DeepGlint...

Mainland Chinese health officials have urged older people to get vaccinated against Covid-19, pointing to the high death rate among elderly Hongkongers in the city’s fifth wave of cases.“The epidemic in Hong Kong has taught us a particularly prof...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad held talks in the United Arab Emirates on Friday, his first official visit to an Arab country since civil war erupted in 2011, UAE state media said.The meeting is the latest sign of warming ties between Syria and the ...

An easing of trade rules for some African countries by the Chinese customs authorities is allowing more agricultural products from the continent into China.South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe are among the African countries that have recently signed rev...

Had I been born a decade later, would I still have aspired to come to the United States to be a scientist? Over the past few years, I’ve asked myself this question countless times and am nowhere near an answer.As a child in China in the 1990s, I lo...

Black people who wear natural hairstyles such as Afros, cornrows or tightly coiled twists should not face bias in society, schools and the workplace, the US House said on Friday in voting to make it explicit that such discrimination is a violation of...

Final preparations are under way for the 94th Academy Awards and a long-awaited return to Hollywood’s usual glamour after a muted ceremony and ratings low last year. Here’s everything you need to know about the 2022 Oscars, including where to wat...

Palaeontologists have unearthed the skull of a ferocious marine predator, an ancient ancestor of modern-day whales, which once lived in a prehistoric ocean that covered part of what is now Peru, scientists announced on Thursday.The roughly 36-million...

I have covered Russia, Belarus and post-Soviet issues since 1997 and also worked as a translator of Russian to English. Unlike many Western journalists, for a long time I was impressed overall with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s performance.Man...

A Grey’s Anatomy writer who has been accused of fabricating parts of her medical history in the writers’ room of the long-running ABC drama as well as in personal essays has been placed on administrative leave pending review, the network confirme...

Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally at a Moscow stadium on Friday and lavished praise on his troops fighting in Ukraine, three weeks into the invasion that has led to heavier-than-expected Russian losses on the battlefield and increas...

Amid severe tensions between Russia and the West due to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, an all-Russian crew has departed for the International Space Station (ISS).The Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft with cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergei Kor...

Tennis player Roger Federer, “horrified” by the images from Ukraine, announced on Friday that he is donating US$500,000 (€452,000) through his foundation “to establish access to continued schooling for Ukrainian children.”“My family and I...

Two days after the heavy bombing of a theatre in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, hundreds of people are still buried under the rubble, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.“Despite the shelling, despite all the difficulties, we w...

The US Commerce Department will on Friday move to effectively ground 100 aeroplanes that have recently flown to Russia and are believed to violate US export controls, including a plane used by Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, officials said.The ...

Trade unions protested at British ferry ports on Friday after Dubai-owned P&O Ferries abruptly sacked 800 workers via a video message, drawing widespread condemnation and raising the prospect of disruption to key tourist and goods routes.P&O, which i...

Fourteen-year-old Anna-Maria Romanchuk’s lip trembles after a Russian missile exploded outside Gymnasia No34 Lybid, her school in Kyiv. “Scary,” Anna-Maria says in halting English, her face pale with shock as her mother Oksana comforts her. “...

Nearly 200 nations gather on Monday to confront a question that will outlive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: how do we stop carbon pollution overheating the planet and threatening life as we know it?The answer is set to arrive on April 4 after closed...

Japanese actor Akira Takarada, who starred in the original 1954 Godzilla and several later films featuring the city-wrecking monster, has died in Tokyo aged 87.Takarada, who appeared at the premiere of his latest film earlier this month, passed away ...

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden spoke on Friday for about two hours in a virtual meeting called to address the conflict in Ukraine, with Xi appealing for negotiations to bring the crisis to a halt and Biden stressing tha...

As the interest in consumer protection rides high in China amid an annual TV gala which focuses on the issue, New York-listed online fresh grocery giant Dingdong Maicai on Thursday apologised after Beijing’s local market regulator ordered it to “...

China plans to launch a satellite in July to test a new technology that aims to give smartphone users almost instant access to high-definition cameras in space, according to scientists involved in the project.Wang Mi, a professor of remote sensing en...

More than a year after China’s technology industry was hit by a massive regulatory storm that upended business expansion plans and wiped trillions of dollars off stock markets from Hong Kong to New York, fears of more crackdowns could soon subside ...

The girlfriend of the prominent Chinese legal activist Xu Zhiyong is facing trial for “inciting the subversion of state power”, according to an indictment issued by prosecutors.Xu, a former lawyer, is one of China’s most well known and vocal le...

A top legal body in Hong Kong has said it is working with the judiciary to explore the possibility of expanding the use of remote video hearings after court closures amid the coronavirus pandemic dealt a blow to lawyers’ businesses.Law Society pres...

China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen has lifted restrictions in five districts, saying the Covid-19 outbreak is now mostly under control, as the government pledged to step up support for businesses in areas still under lockdown.Government agencies...

FAW Group, China’s oldest carmaker and once a symbol of the Communist Party’s manufacturing might, has not yet fixed a date for the resumption of production at its five assembly lines in Changchun, in China’s northeastern Jilin province.FAW, wh...