Insults, beatings, arrests – health workers battling the coronavirus were subjected to more than 400 acts of violence related to Covid-19 worldwide in 2020, according to a report published on Tuesday by a health NGO.The Safeguarding Health in Confl...

An education authority in China is facing a backlash over its efforts to limit the amount of homework given to young students.Shaanxi province’s Department of Education last week issued a directive that forbids schools from giving written homework ...

The leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party the Kuomintang on Tuesday said he was in no rush to travel to the mainland to meet President Xi Jinping, and that Beijing’s proposals to get Taipei to accept communist rule had “no market” on the i...

Five people were killed on Monday when the plane they were in crashed in a residential area of eastern China during a cloud seeding flight.Three farmhouses were damaged and a villager was injured when the Beechcraft B300 King Air 350 twin-turboprop o...

Pan Sutong, the embattled real estate tycoon facing a breach of contract law suit, has been replaced in a venture in Hong Kong’s Ho Man Tin residential district, the latest twist in the financial struggles of one of the city’s high-flying develop...

Beijing has accused Taiwan of “meddling” in the prosecution of 47 opposition activists in Hong Kong, and accused the island’s authorities of plotting to seek independence for the city.“We are telling [Taiwan’s] Democratic Progressive Party ...

An emergency meeting of Asean foreign ministers began on Tuesday afternoon amid expectations that the bloc will demand Myanmar’s military rulers stop violence against demonstrators and immediately release civilian leaders.Ahead of the talks, police...

An elderly woman was killed in a fire at her home in a Hong Kong tower block on Tuesday following a suspected gas canister explosion.The blaze broke out at a 32nd-floor flat of Sau Wo House in Sau Mau Ping Estate, Kowloon East, at about 12.30pm.Dense...

All 279 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped from their boarding school in the northern state of Zamfara have been released and are on government premises, the governor of the state announced on Tuesday.Nigeria has been rocked by four mass abductions of st...

Boeing and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) said on Tuesday they had completed the first flight test on a pilotless fighter-like jet designed to operate in conjunction with crewed aircraft.The “Loyal Wingman”, the first military aircraft to ...

Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, on Tuesday released findings from anonymised customer accounts that show the city state is slowly making its way out of pandemic-induced recession, with the second half of last year showing improvements in income and ...

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The coronavirus pandemic could cost China the equivalent of 2.7 per cent of its gross domestic product this year, although the economy may still grow by over 8 per cent, according to a new study by Chinese and American researchers.The industrial and ...

China’s political elite will gather in Beijing this week for the year’s biggest legislative set piece, known as the “two sessions” or lianghui , facing a number of major political challenges, including the aftermath of the coronavirus and the...

The Philippines has sacked its former ambassador to Brazil, after she was caught on camera attacking a domestic worker at her official residence in Brasilia.Marichu Mauro was recalled to Manila late last year after Brazil’s GloboNews channel broadc...

China is willing to offer coronavirus vaccines to Poland and buy more of its agricultural products, Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Polish counterpart as Beijing tries to counter growing scepticism in central and eastern Europe about China.Xi t...

An upscale Hong Kong shopping centre has moved to end its tenancy agreement with a Chinese restaurant at the centre of a recent coronavirus outbreak, while the city confirmed 13 new infections on Tuesday.Seven of the latest infections were locally tr...

A painting of Marrakech by Britain’s famed wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, owned by Hollywood star Angelina Jolie, smashed expectations to sell for £7 million (US$9.75 million) at auction in London on Monday.Churchill, a keen artist, too...

Myanmar’s military has asked security forces responsible for deadly attacks on anti-coup protesters over the weekend not to use live ammunition as international condemnation grows.The announcement was made in a military-run broadcast after the coun...

[Sponsored article] Over the past few decades, numerous technological innovations have been introduced to make driving easier and safer, including the use of satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation services, collision avoidance ...

A man who electrocuted, then bludgeoned his mother to death to claim an insurance payout so he could buy a flat has been executed in China.Fu Bailian, 33, was put to death on February 24, having been found guilty in July 2019 of killing his mother at...

Forty-seven Hong Kong opposition activists charged with subversion over an unofficial primary election last year returned to court on Tuesday, after protracted bail proceedings the day before came to a halt in the early hours and four of the accused ...

US President Joe Biden told his Mexican counterpart Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador that Mexico’s success was crucial to the hemisphere and that he would view the US southern neighbour as an equal.In a virtual summit to discuss immigration, Covid-19 an...

A power failure that crippled India’s financial capital of Mumbai in western Maharashtra state last year could have been a case of cyber sabotage, a local minister said on Monday, as China denied a report that it was behind the outage.Mumbai police...

Practically two years to the day after Indian and Pakistan warplanes clashed in the skies over Kashmir, a ceasefire suddenly reinstated on Thursday is holding along the Line of Control (LoC) which divides the hotly disputed state.In the absence of an...

Zhou Jianjun drove 400km (250 miles) in mid-February from his hometown of Xiangyang in central China to an industrial chemical park to investigate pollution along the Yangtze River.As he neared the park, the smell of pesticides clogged the air. He go...

China’s political elite will gather in Beijing this week for the year’s biggest legislative set piece, known as the “two sessions” or lianghui , facing a number of major political challenges, including the aftermath of the coronavirus and the...

Lady Gaga’s dog walker, who was shot last week during a robbery in Hollywood when two of the singer’s French bulldogs were stolen, described the violence and his recovery “from a very close call with death” in social media posts Monday.Ryan F...

A Chinese court has upheld a ruling that a textbook description of homosexuality as “a psychological disorder” was not a factual error but merely an “academic view”. The Chinese LGBT community, and the 24-year-old woman who filed the lawsuit...

Myanmar’s envoy to the United Nations remains in his position as far as UN leadership and Washington are concerned.Two days after Myanmar’s government media outlet announced that Kyaw Moe Tun no longer represented Naypyidaw, American UN Ambassado...

Before leaving the White House on January 20, then President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine earlier in the month, a Trump adviser said Monday.The former first couple received their second s...

President Xi Jinping has pledged to hold legislation at China’s provincial level and below to greater scrutiny just six years after delegating lawmaking powers to more than 200 additional local legislatures.“Upholding the integrity of national la...

The Japanese government has requested China not to subject Japanese citizens entering the country to anal Covid-19 tests after receiving complaints of “psychological distress” from some of them, the top government spokesman said Monday.Chief Cabi...

One dreams of Hong Kong street food, but in a nightmare finds himself cornered by authorities in the city’s airport.A fellow activist mourns a grandmother whose Hong Kong grave she may never visit.And a teenager wonders shyly whether the friend he ...

The administration of US President Joe Biden will use “all available tools” to combat China’s unfair trade practices and will prioritise addressing Beijing’s forced labour programme targeting Uygurs and other ethnic and religious minorities, ...

China and the United States should work together to find the animal host of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, two top Chinese scientists said on Monday.Speaking at a webinar held by the Brookings Institution, George Gao Fu, director of China’s ...

HSBC bankers “fully knew” that Huawei Technologies controlled the accounts of affiliates through which it did business in Iran, undermining US claims that Meng Wanzhou defrauded the bank by allegedly lying about the relationships, a Vancouver cou...

An American man and his son who allegedly helped former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn flee Japan in 2019 will arrive in the country in the custody of Japanese prosecutors on Tuesday, investigative sources said.A plane carrying Michael Taylor, 60, a fo...

The number of new coronavirus infections globally rose last week for the first time in seven weeks, the World Health Organization said on Monday.“We need to have a stern warning for all of us: that this virus will rebound if we let it,” Maria Van...

A US national security commission urged Washington to compete head-on against China on artificial intelligence (AI), but not to completely decouple from the rival in research and business.The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (N...

Prince Philip was transferred on Monday to a specialised London heart hospital to undergo testing and observation for a pre-existing heart condition as he continues to be treated for an unspecified infection, Buckingham Palace said.The 99-year-old hu...

The Turkish fiancée of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said on Monday that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman should be “punished without delay” over the murder.The United States on Friday declassified a report that publicly accused t...

Bureaucrat Patrick Li Pak-chuen took the helm of Hong Kong’s trouble-plagued RTHK on Monday, but was greeted with news of the resignations of at least three senior employees and protests by its staff union over concerns about the public broadcaster...

More than 5,000 members of China’s political elite are expected to converge on Beijing in early March for the biggest event on the political calendar.Known as the “two sessions”, or lianghui , the annual gatherings of the Chinese People’s Pol...

A total of 47 opposition activists were charged under the national security law on Sunday with conspiring to subvert state power over their roles in an unofficial primary run-off election authorities linked to a plot to overthrow the government.While...

Hong Kong residents enjoy “extra protection” from violence under the national security law and their rights and freedoms remain intact, the city’s security minister told UN officials on Monday.John Lee Ka-chiu defended the controversial legisla...

Hong Kong’s civil service chief has thrown his support behind a recently promoted senior official who was accused by Beijing-friendly media of turning a blind eye to the so-called Lennon Walls that carried anti-government messages during the 2019 s...

A month after the coup in Myanmar, protesters are digging in their heels – and neither they nor the military are going to back down, analysts say. With this in mind, they are predicting that the protracted stand-off will cause further instability i...

Beijing has been on a vaccination drive in the lead-up to the country’s most important – and carefully choreographed – annual political meetings later this week.Most of the thousands of delegates who will stream into the Great Hall of the Peopl...

A Paris court on Monday found French former president Nicolas Sarkozy guilty of corruption and influence peddling and sentenced him to one year in prison and a two-year suspended sentence.The 66-year-old politician, who was president from 2007 to 201...