Month: January 2022

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s “lost” WeChat account may not have gone as far as to jeopardise national security but it raises questions about his relationship with the Chinese nationals and companies who owned and managed his account, analysts and experts say.Last week, senior members of his cabinet and the local media alleged Morrison’s WeChat account had been blocked and hijacked while accusing the Chinese Communist Party of foreign interference. There were also calls to boycott…

A new law is expected to be passed in France to allow cultural property looted by the Nazis and currently in the possession of the French state to be returned to descendants of their rightful Jewish owners.

People across Asia prepared for muted Lunar New Year celebrations on Monday amid concerns over the coronavirus and virulent Omicron variant, even as increasing vaccination rates raised hopes that the Year of the Tiger might bring life back closer to normal.The Lunar New Year is the most important annual holiday in China and falls on Tuesday, February 1 this year. Each year is named after one of twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac in a repeating cycle. The Year of the Tiger follows the Year of…

Kyoto, the ancient Japanese capital that tourists flocked to in their millions pre-pandemic, is in danger of going broke as it struggles to offset billions of dollars in debt racked up through big-budget infrastructure projects with persistently low tax receipts and millions in lost tourism revenue.Just a few short years ago, the city synonymous with Japan’s history, culture and traditional architecture would play host to as many as 50 million domestic and international visitors annually.But…

Bhutan’s success in avoiding coronavirus is almost unrivalled but a rare patient death – just the kingdom’s fourth – shows more work was needed to fight the pandemic there, its leader says.The remote Himalayan nation of around 800,000 people, sandwiched between China and India, has recorded fewer Covid-19 fatalities than almost anywhere else in the world.The only places with lower official tolls are a small handful of remote Pacific islands and countries that do not publish coronavirus data,…

North Korea launched a suspected ballistic missile on Sunday, governments in the region reported, in what would be the nuclear-armed state’s seventh weapons test this month – one of the most intense spates of launches on record as the regime flexes its military muscles while ignoring US offers of talks.The last time North Korea tested this many weapons in a month was in 2019, after high-profile negotiations between leader Kim Jong-un and then-US president Donald Trump collapsed.Since then,…

When renowned Singaporean ophthalmologist and scientist Wong Tien Yin agreed to take up a position at China’s top Tsinghua University last year, he felt he was making, as he describes it, a major “leap of faith”.China’s strict border controls and reduced air travel amid the Covid-19 pandemic meant Wong, 54, could not visit the campus in Beijing or interact in person with any of his colleagues.Yet, the series of Zoom video interviews with Tsinghua’s leadership impressed him enough that he agreed…

The UK and India have begun free trade agreement talks in Delhi aiming to sign a deal by end of the year, which will increase bilateral trade by billions of pounds.

Policy makers and regulators in Singapore, Spain and the UK have moved to tighten restrictions on the promotion of cryptoassets amidst concerns the public are being enticed into high-risk investments without sufficient warnings.