MUMBAI (REUTERS) – India reported 78,512 new novel coronavirus infections on Monday (Aug 31), slightly fewer than its record set the previous day when it posted the biggest, single-day tally of infections of any country in the pandemic. On Sunday, India’s total of 78,761 new cases exceeded the previous record of 77,299 in the United […]
BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) – Dozens of senior Chinese government officials and business leaders gathered at the 2020 World Semiconductor Conference last week, but their usual agenda of trumpeting the nation’s chip innovation was coloured by fears their industry might be next to suffer trade sanctions from the Trump administration. The White House’s campaign to contain China’s […]
JAKARTA (THE JAKARTA POST/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) – The economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic has hit Indonesia hard, and the Southeast Asian largest economy urgently needs new growth engines. Exports fell 28.95 per cent year-on-year to US$10.53 billion ($14.3 bilion) in May 2020, the lowest levels since July 2016. The drop is largely due to […]
BEIJING (REUTERS) – Senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi said Czech senate speaker Milos Vystrcil will “pay a heavy price” for violating the one China principle by making an official visit to Taiwan, according to a statement released by the Chinese foreign ministry on Monday (Aug 31). Mr Vystrcil arrived in Taipei on Sunday. He said […]
TOKYO (NYTIMES) – In the 1880s, the first automobile was developed, and about two decades later, the Wright brothers in North Carolina invented the first successful airplane. Today, the world is closer to combining those two concepts as a Japanese tech company said it completed a manned test flight of a “flying car”. The company, […]
HONG KONG (BLOOMBERG) – Pro-democracy demonstrators gathered at a shopping mall in Hong Kong on Sunday (Aug 30) to chant slogans ahead of the one-year anniversary of a violent confrontation with police at a subway train station. Police officers arrived shortly after “dozens” of people gathered at the mall in the city’s Mong Kok district, […]
DUBAI (Reuters) – Qatar announced on Sunday changes to its labour laws, raising its minimum wage on Sunday by 25 percent to 1,000 riyals ($274.6) a month and scrapping a requirement for employees to get the permission of their employers to change jobs. It is the latest in a series of labour reforms by the […]
Discussions included the issue of Taliban prisoners whose release by the Afghan government has been delayed. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a video meeting with the Taliban’s chief negotiator, Mullah Baradar Akhund, to discuss the state of the Afghanistan peace process, the armed group’s spokesman said. The discussions included 400 Taliban prisoners still […]
SINGAPORE – The blue mask is a common sight these days but on Thursday (Aug 27) morning, it was spotted on a Cargolux Airlines Boeing 747-8 at Changi Airport. Flight CLX 7952 landed in Singapore “masked up”, four months after mask-wearing was made compulsory for those here on April 14 to combat the spread of […]
BEIJING (REUTERS) – Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies is focusing on its budding cloud business, which still has access to US chips despite sanctions against the company, to secure its survival, the Financial Times newspaper reported. Huawei’s cloud computing business sells computing power and storage to companies, including giving them access to artificial intelligence, and […]