Hyundai Motor Group will slash the number of combustion engine models in its line-up to free up resources to invest in electric vehicles (EVs), two people close to the South Korean carmaker told Reuters.The move will result in a 50 per cent reduction...

The head of a Japanese doctors union on Thursday warned holding the Tokyo Olympics in this summer, with tens of thousands of people gathering from around the world, could lead to the development of a new “Olympic” strain of the coronavirus.Althou...

Police have banned Hong Kong’s June 4 vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown for the second straight year, citing Covid-19 restrictions, the Post has learned.The force told organisers on Thursday it had blocked the Victoria Park ev...

Taiwan said it would prioritise medical and other frontline workers as it began administering the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines it received last week, after reporting a further 671 infections and a record 13 deaths on Thursday.The new cases included ...

Wu En-tzu has delivered more than 2,000 babies working as an obstetrician but she has no desire to have children of her own – an increasingly common position taken by Taiwanese families.Since they married 12 years ago, Wu and her surgeon husband ha...

European firefighters and salvage experts, as well as three Indian vessels on Thursday joined the battle to contain a major fire on a container ship off the Sri Lanka coast, amid fears that it could break up and spew out hundreds of tonnes of oil.The...

Hong Kong has marked a day of zero coronavirus cases for the first time in more than half a year, while health experts warned that coming cruise packages should have stricter control measures, even as one company touted the ships as the “safest pla...

With high commodity prices preventing many factories from being able to turn a profit, overall earnings at China’s industrial firms grew at a slower pace in April.Prices of some raw materials, along with weaker performance in the consumer goods sec...

Hindu priests at a temple in southern India are saying daily prayers to two coronavirus goddesses in an effort to tame the pandemic as the country battles a new surge of infections.Two “Corona Devi” idols have been set up in the southern city of ...

When news broke that Bill and Melinda Gates had filed for divorce, the global reaction was one of utter fascination. What had gone wrong in a marriage which had weathered 27 years, the raising of three children and the creation of a global empire whi...

Hong Kong lawmakers passed legislation on Thursday that overhauls the electoral system, enacting major reforms required by Beijing that slash the number of directly returned Legislative Council seats and restrict governance roles to “patriots”.A ...

Australian diplomats were denied access to the closed-door trial of Chinese-born Australian writer Yang Hengjun on espionage charges in Beijing on Thursday, in a high-profile case that looks set to put further strain on relations between the two coun...

More than 5 million people in Australia’s second-biggest city were ordered into a week-long lockdown on Thursday, as officials blamed a sluggish vaccine roll-out and hotel quarantine failures for another coronavirus outbreak.Residents of Melbourne ...

Top trade negotiators from China and the United States held their first telephone call since Joe Biden entered the White House, and stressed the importance of improving their bilateral trade ties.A brief statement on Thursday by China’s Ministry of...

Malaysia’s giant United Malays National Organisation (Umno), which ruled for 61 years before losing power in the 2018 election, is at a crossroads as it struggles to regain its primacy as the dominant political force in the Malay-majority country.W...

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, suspended a lending firm’s ability to access the country’s financial credit system after a sensational case in which a client was described as a prostitute in official documents.A branc...

HSBC, the biggest of Hong Kong’s three currency-issuing banks, said on Thursday it will exit its mass-market retail business in the United States and focus on serving wealthy clients and international companies there as part of the 156-year-old len...

Former Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying ramped up his criticisms of jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying’s Apple Daily on Thursday, questioning whether the tabloid actually had enough cash on hand to operate as long as it had claimed.The latest ...

Pandemic-battered cruise ship companies and travel agents have jumped straight into action after the Hong Kong government revealed plans to allow voyages to nowhere in the summer but the initial response from travellers was mixed.Officials on Wednesd...

More than 150 people were feared drowned in northwest Nigeria on Wednesday after an overloaded boat ferrying passengers to a market sank in the Niger River, local officials said.The boat was travelling between central Niger state and Wara in northwes...

Beijing was instrumental in preventing Taiwan signing a deal to buy Covid-19 vaccines from German firm BioNTech, the island’s President Tsai Ing-wen said on Wednesday.“Taiwan was close to sealing the deal with the German plant, but because of Chi...

Republicans are poised to block legislation that would create a commission on the January 6 insurrection, despite both a bipartisan effort to salvage the bill and a last-minute push by the mother of a Capitol Police officer who collapsed and died aft...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Doug Palmer on politico.com on May 26, 2021.The Joe Biden administration said on Wednesday that it wanted the issue of slavery on the high seas to be part o...

This is the 12th in a series of stories about China’s once-a-decade census, which was conducted in 2020. The world’s most populous nation released its national demographic data in May and the figures will have far-reaching social policy and econo...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Graham Lanktree and Anna Isaac on politico.com on May 26, 2021.The UK must not become “dependent” on trade with China, Trade Secretary Liz Truss warned,...

A Chinese national and South Sudanese soldier were killed on Wednesday along a major road linking the capital Juba to the town of Rumbek, a regional government official told Agence France-Presse.The almost 400-kilometre (250-mile) road is undergoing ...

People around the world stayed up on Wednesday to watch a cosmic event called a super blood moon, a combination of a total lunar eclipse and a brighter-than-usual super moon.During the build-up, a glittering moon rose above the horizon. As the Earth�...

China’s Landbridge Group will carry on with its investment in Australia’s Darwin Port but will consider legal advice to protect its commercial interests if further political threats to “tear up” the deal negatively affect its business.In its ...

Senior diplomats from the United States and European Union met on Wednesday to discuss their litany of grievances about Beijing, from human rights in Xinjiang and the erosion of autonomy in Hong Kong to economic “coercion” and China’s actions i...

US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the United States is going to look further into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and urged China to be transparent in the investigation.Biden, in a statement, said that an investigation by the US intellige...

Families of 96 Liverpool football fans who died in a stadium overcrowding disaster in 1989 criticised a British judge’s decision to end the trial of two former police officers and an ex-lawyer on charges of perverting the course of justice.After fo...

In California’s largest mass shooting this year, a gunman killed eight people at a light rail yard on Wednesday before dying of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, US authorities said.Police said the attacker set his house on fire before he d...

Beijing should set out expectations for Hong Kong’s pro-establishment lawmakers, a loyalist has suggested ahead of the imminent passage of new legislation to implement an electoral overhaul of the city’s political system.Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, ch...

Hong Kong students should learn about history with a new emphasis on national security and territorial integrity, according to fresh guidelines issued by education authorities.Under the latest directive handed to schools, topics covered will include ...

Beijing has called on France to help restart discussions on an investment treaty between China and the European Union (EU), after Brussels voted last week to freeze talks until sanctions on European lawmakers were dropped.China’s commerce ministry ...

A French court on Wednesday found four students guilty of inciting racial hatred online by posting anti-Asian tweets blaming Chinese people for the spread of coronavirus.The four, aged between 19 and 24 and without criminal records, were sentenced to...

Questions over what the next steps will be in the search for the origins of Covid-19 hang over an annual meeting of the World Health Organization’s member countries this week. Answering those will be a steep challenge for the UN body, experts say.T...

The Indian airline SpiceJet is feeling the heat after a young couple chartered one of its jets for a mid-air wedding ceremony with more than 160 guests, many of whom flouted Covid-19 restrictions.Photographs and video footage of the wedding have gone...

A Dutch court ordered oil giant Shell on Wednesday to slash its greenhouse gas emissions targets in a landmark victory for climate activists.Dubbed “the People versus Shell”, the case was launched in 2019 by the Netherlands branch of Friends of t...

Nineteen Chinese men looking for love found themselves sharing two wives and tricked out of more than 2 million yuan (US$312,000) in a marriage scam, authorities in Inner Mongolia said earlier this week.The two women and their three accomplices were ...

An executive for a Hong Kong taxi drivers’ association has been convicted of conspiring with his younger sister and son to bribe 36 people to vote for a pro-establishment candidate in the 2016 Legislative Council elections.Lui Ah-fook, a 47-year-ol...

Fred Hu, the former Goldman Sachs banker who founded one of China’s most active private equity firms, has splashed out on a mansion in Hong Kong following a blockbuster year of deal making, continuing the trend of wealthy mainland Chinese buyers sn...

Thousands of pupils have withdrawn from school over the past year with many departing Hong Kong, according to a survey by a teachers’ union, which found a quarter of institutions reported more than 20 of their students had left since September.The ...

A US religious official was sanctioned by China on Wednesday for “promoting cults” in retaliation for an earlier United States sanction on a Chinese official over religious freedom.Johnnie Moore, a US Commission on International Religious Freedom...

Italian police on Wednesday arrested three managers from the operator of a cable car that crashed into a mountain killing 14 people, accusing them of deliberately disabling the emergency brake.A five-year-old boy, the only survivor of Sunday’s trag...

The top US envoy to Taiwan has assured the island that America remains committed to its security and wants to maintain a close partnership in the face of protests from Beijing.“Our obligation to support Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defen...

Marked by delay, disorganisation and erratic supply, the Philippine effort to achieve herd immunity from Covid-19 faces two emerging problems: most Filipinos don’t want to get inoculated, and of those who do, many reject vaccines from China.On May ...

Beijing has accused Washington of “political manipulation” after the United States renewed calls for further investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and more transparency from China.Members of US President Joe Biden’s administration a...

A defiant President Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday defended Belarus’s diversion of a European flight and arrest of a dissident on board, lashing out at critics at home and abroad.In his first public statement since the Ryanair flight was diverte...

The rally in China’s yuan in the past month has fuelled a public debate among central bank officials on whether China should tolerate greater appreciation of the yuan to help combat surging commodity prices and imported inflation.After slipping aga...