It has love but also hatred, intrigue, revenge, poisoning rivals and even killing babies. The Chinese drama Story of Yanxi Palace is the most Googled TV show of 2018 globally, despite Google being largely blocked in the country. The search engine’s analytics suggested that the top interest in the drama has come from Asian regions […]

JAKARTA (WASHINGTON POST, NYTIMES, REUTERS) – Rock band Seventeen was playing its second song of a set when a wave burst through a backdrop behind the stage, crashed into the drummer, his drum set and the other musicians, and swept the temporary stage into the audience. A video posted on YouTube showed the tsunami slamming […]

In the two months after Aariz Mikhail Aldillan was born in Parkway East Hospital prematurely at 32 weeks in April, his mother Ayunina Banez barely slept at all. Her baby boy, who had a hole about 7mm wide in the wall of his heart, suffered from ventricular septal defect, a congenital heart defect. Simply breathing […]

Big steps in the e-payments scene here were made in 2018, as Singapore moved closer to its aim of becoming a cashless society. The launch of SGQR was welcome news to consumers and merchants alike, as the universal QR code sought to unify the fragmented e-payments space. Nets also said it would streamline e-payments for […]

BEIJING (AFP) – China’s legislature is considering a new law governing foreign investment that will streamline existing rules and prevent the forced transfer of technology, state media reported on Sunday (Dec 23). The new “unified law” will replace three existing laws on Chinese and foreign equity joint ventures, non-equity joint ventures and wholly foreign-owned enterprises, the […]

SINGAPORE – Singapore is deeply saddened by the news of the tsunami which struck the Banten and Lampung provinces in Indonesia on Saturday, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs press statement released on Sunday (Dec 23) said. President Halimah Yacob and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong have written condolence letters to Indonesian President Joko Widodo. The […]

BEIJING (REUTERS) – China’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday (Dec 20) that a Canadian woman is undergoing “administrative punishment” for working illegally, after Canada’s government said a third Canadian had been detained in China. Chinese state security agents last week detained two Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, saying they were suspected […]

JAKARTA (REUTERS) – A tsunami killed at least 168 people on the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra and injured hundreds following an underwater landslide caused by a volcanic eruption on Saturday (Dec 22), the disaster mitigation agency said. Indonesia sits on the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire and is regularly hit by earthquakes. […]

With chances of G20 breakthrough always slim, experts say brief truce and restart of negotiations was next best thing. Beijing, China – A sense of relief spread across China as President Xi Jinping and his United States counterpart, Donald Trump, agreed over the weekend to a 90-day halt to new tariffs as the world’s two […]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Friday laid out objectives for trade talks with Japan, setting the clock for them to begin as early as Jan. 20, as the administration seeks to slash the United States’ $69 billion trade deficit with the world’s third-biggest economy. According to the document, the United States is aiming […]