The lawmaker representing Hong Kong’s embattled tourism industry has urged officials to press ahead with negotiating the return of international travel, saying most countries are open to setting up a quarantine-free system for those vaccinated agai...

Indonesia’s Food and Drug agency (BPOM) on Friday said it had approved the usage of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine after reviewing reports the vaccine had caused blood clots among some recipients in Europe.In a statement, the agency said that eve...

The run-up in commodity prices, sparked in part by China’s strong economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic last year, is entering a new phase. Iron ore, copper and oil are among commodities recording steep price gains this year as abundant ...

The court hearing for a Canadian man detained in China for more than two years on espionage charges finished after less than three hours on Friday, a Canadian diplomat said.Michael Spavor is one of two Canadians detained, in apparent retaliation for ...

A potential loophole that could allow a mutant Covid-19 strain to penetrate Hong Kong’s borders will be plugged from midnight on Friday, with the government tightening the “closed-loop” arrangements for quarantine-exempted local aircrew.The gov...

Myanmar security forces shot dead eight anti-coup opponents on Friday, a funeral services provider said, as Indonesia sought an end to the violence and urged that democracy be restored, in an unusually blunt call from a neighbour.Ousted lawmakers exp...

Myanmar has deployed more forces to strengthen security at an industrial zone where Chinese businesses are concentrated, said a top Chinese envoy to Asean, as Beijing is increasingly caught in one of its neighbour’s worst episodes of political chao...

Seven mainland Chinese residents entering Hong Kong illegally are among a gang of suspected swindlers who have been arrested on suspicion of cheating local women out of more than HK$2 million (US$258,000) in roadside blessing scams.The commercial cri...

Droves of internet users in China have expressed sympathy for a 76-year-old Chinese woman assaulted by a white man in San Francisco in the United States and applauded her for standing up against a racist bully.Xie Xiaozhen, originally from Guangdong,...

Actor Armie Hammer is under investigation for sexual assault, Los Angeles police said on Thursday.Hammer’s lawyer denied the allegation.Hammer is the main suspect in a sexual assault that was reported to police on February 3, LAPD spokesman Officer...

While India will warmly receive US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday in a sign of their strengthening defence ties, analysts say New Delhi will be careful to signal that it is not forming a coalition against China.Austin’s three-day trip to ...

Opposition district councillor Andy Chui Chi-kin, one of the 47 charged in Hong Kong’s largest crackdown to date under the national security law, was denied bail on Friday for the second time, while five co-defendants withdrew their applications at...

North Korea on Friday said it was cutting diplomatic ties with Malaysia to protest a court ruling that allowed a North Korean to be extradited to the United States to face money laundering charges.North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called the charges a...

With the coronavirus vaccination take-up rate remaining low, Hong Kong is a long way from achieving herd immunity.As of Thursday night, just 276,600 people had received Covid-19 shots, representing about 4 per cent of the population aged 16 or above....

Pet feeding and play services, or pet caring, are booming in China’s big cities with some carers earning up to 1,000 yuan (US$153) per day. The customers are mainly young people who travel for business or leisure in China’s increasingly mobile s...

Like the vast majority of the Japanese public, Hiromi Murakami says the solution to the nation’s long-running conundrum over the future of the Imperial Family is really quite simple: an empress. “It’s unpopular with the traditionalists, but ch...

Pro-Beijing forces have stepped up pressure on the arts funding body and the flagship museum in Hong Kong for allegedly sponsoring or displaying “anti-government” works, in a move critics fear could dampen artistic freedoms.The campaign has force...

Members of a syndicate that buys mainland Chinese schoolchildren’s personal information and sells the data to online education centres have been arrested by police in eastern Jiangsu province, as the country with the world’s largest internet popu...

A 76-year-old woman from China who fought back against a man who punched her on a downtown San Francisco street corner said the unprovoked attack left her scared and traumatised. Her alleged assailant was arrested on Thursday.Xiao Zhen Zie told KPIX-...

A European Union proposal to open up travel within the bloc using digital health certificates would allow countries to decide whether to recognise Covid-19 vaccines not approved by the European regulator, as some look to China and Russia for doses.Th...

In a hearing that at times turned emotional and confrontational, Asian-American congresswomen told their colleagues on Thursday that the killings Tuesday in Georgia of eight people, six of them Asian women, were a culmination of rising hostility and ...

Shaken by fatal shootings of six Asian women in the Atlanta area, minority groups and leaders in the US are pushing back against anti-Asian racism, as police consider whether to pursue hate crimes charges against the suspect.Robert Aaron Long, a 21-y...

Beijing has announced a plan to overhaul Hong Kong’s electoral system, which goes against Articles 45 and 68 of the Basic Law. These articles state that the methods for selecting the chief executive and for forming the Legislative Council “shall ...

Nasa successfully carried out a key static test of its troubled Space Launch System rocket on Thursday, a win for the agency as it prepares to return to the moon.The second “hot fire” test saw all four of the rocket’s RS-25 engines fire simulta...

“There’s a meeting? How curious. Why it would be in Anchorage?” Jim Moore, a retired motorcycle racer and Alaska native, asked about talks between US and Chinese officials this week. “We’re just a speck on the map. We’re about as far away...

The first day of talks between China and the United States in Alaska on Thursday started off on a predictably contentious note after days of posturing and talking past each other by the two powers, although there was some indication that the mood imp...

China’s rocket force is using virtual reality to train its soldiers to use missile systems, a move that means exercises can be carried out more frequently and at reduced cost.The People’s Liberation Army’s strategic and tactical missile force i...

Meng Wanzhou’s lawyer has accused a Canadian border agent of falsifying testimony about how the Huawei Technologies executive’s phone passwords ended up in the hands of police.Canada Border Services Agency officer Scott Kirkland had told Meng’s...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday mocked Joe Biden for calling him a “killer” – saying “it takes one to know one” – as ties between Moscow and Washington sank to new lows.US President Biden’s comments sparked the biggest cris...

The US is planning to send a combined 4 million doses of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine to Canada and Mexico in its first export of shots, the White House said on Thursday.Press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration is in the process of...

US Republican lawmakers reintroduced on Thursday a bill that would revoke the permanent normal trading status that Washington has had with Beijing for the past two decades, the latest in a series of efforts by China hawks in Congress to decouple the ...

The EU’s drug watchdog said on Thursday it is still convinced the benefits of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine outweigh the risks following an investigation into reports of blood disorders that prompted more than a dozen nations to suspend its use....

The German-made BioNTech vaccine should be effective in protecting people from the coronavirus variants found in Britain and Brazil but is less protective against the South African one, health experts advising the Hong Kong government have concluded....

Moves by the United States to maintain its loose monetary policy until at least the end of 2023 to support its economic recovery and labour market have reinforced concerns in Beijing as it tries to reduce the risk of domestic asset bubbles by gradual...

A construction worker has been jailed for 13 months for inciting an unlawful assembly around a controversial detention centre during the 2019 Hong Kong protests, after prosecutors won another review of non-custodial sentences.The Court of Appeal on T...

Finland’s domestic security agency on Thursday said that the cybergroup APT31, which is generally linked to the Chinese government, was likely behind a cyberspying attack on the information systems of the Nordic country’s parliament.The Finnish S...

Asian-Americans were already worn down by a year of pandemic-fuelled racist attacks when a white gunman was charged with killing eight people, most of them Asian women, at three Atlanta-area massage parlours.Hundreds of Asian-Americans and Pacific Is...

A Hong Kong woman on trial for murdering her five-year-old stepdaughter was mentally sound despite feeling so stressed by childcare she “hated” the girl, a court heard on Thursday.“She didn’t look depressed to me,” psychiatrist Dr Amy Liu t...

Lawyers for Johnny Depp on Thursday told Britain’s Court of Appeal that the actor’s ex-wife, Amber Heard, did not donate all of her US$7 million divorce settlement to charity as she claimed, part of arguments seeking to overturn a ruling that the...

The United States is expected to be high on the agenda when top diplomats from China and Russia meet next week, just days after much-anticipated talks between Beijing and Washington.The Chinese foreign ministry said on Thursday that Russian Foreign M...

While the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has taken a hefty toll on the world’s two most populous nations, India’s middle class has been hit much harder than China’s, according to findings by the Pew Research Centre.And a year in...

Testosterone can reduce a man’s “social brain” function and dampen his generosity, according to a new study.The higher the testosterone level, the less neural activity occurred in the temporoparietal junction, an area in the upper human brain a...

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said the state of emergency in the Tokyo region would end on Sunday, after targets for relieving strain on the health care system were reached, even as coronavirus cases in the capital rose slightly.Suga on Thur...

One of the most powerful men in China has told Communist Party officials in Xinjiang to “optimise” governance of the region as criticism grows of Beijing’s policies on religion and treatment of ethnic minority groups there.“[We] must scientif...

China can achieve its goal to become carbon neutral by 2060 as long as it adopts a structured approach to reducing its dependence on coal for power, according to an American study.Achieving the target would require an immediate halt to the constructi...

China has sent condolences to Tanzanians for the death of President John Magufuli, who Beijing described as “an outstanding leader and a staunch defender of national sovereignty against foreign interference”.China’s foreign ministry said in a s...

Hong Kong police have arrested a man, 38, and his father for allegedly claiming a HK$10,000 government coronavirus handout by using the identity of his 99-year-old grandfather, who died two days before the cash scheme opened.The two men were accused ...

Spain’s parliament on Thursday voted through a law legalising euthanasia, becoming one of the few nations to allow terminally-ill or gravely-injured patients to end their own suffering.A priority for Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s gover...

CK Hutchison Holdings and CK Asset Holdings, the listed flagships of billionaire Li Ka-shing, reported sharply lower annual profits as economic disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic took a toll on their retail, ports, hotel and property oper...