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Brazil’s top military court has closed a dictatorship-era case against nine Chinese citizens who were arrested and tortured in 1964, ending a process that stayed open for more than six decades despite the lack of evidence behind the original charges. In a decision released on Sunday, Brazil’s Superior Military Court ruled that the case should legally have expired in 1981 but was never closed. As a result, a 50-volume case file remained on the docket. The closure lifts a lingering point of...

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Colombian President Gustavo Petro called for a high-level security meeting with the United States, China and regional partners, arguing that recent US military deployments and strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific are escalating tensions in the region. Joining other regional voices condemning the operations, he stressed that Latin America and the Caribbean should be treated with respect and repeated his proposal for talks in Pearl Harbour, noting that he...

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The EU’s European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Australian government said in a joint statement on Monday they would deepen cooperation on critical raw materials, as Western powers scramble to cut their reliance on China. With the exception of Japan, Group of Seven (G7) countries and the EU are heavily or exclusively reliant on China for a range of materials from rare earth magnets to battery metals. European officials and industry sources say financing remains a key hurdle in the bloc’s efforts...

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A US missile system that could strike Beijing has been withdrawn from Japan, Japanese media reported on Monday, amid sharply escalated tensions triggered by the Japanese prime minister’s recent remarks on Taiwan. The Typhon Mid-Range Capability (MRC) missile launcher system of the US Army, deployed to the Iwakuni base in Yamaguchi prefecture since September for the US-Japan “Resolute Dragon 2025” joint exercise, was already removed, the Japanese Defence Ministry confirmed on Monday. The news...

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When Nobel laureate James Watson died at 97 in November, obituaries around the world painted a divided portrait: a scientific visionary who co-discovered the double helix of DNA – and a controversial figure long condemned for making racially charged statements about intelligence and genetics. In the West, the American molecular biologist’s legacy was increasingly overshadowed by the fallout from those remarks, culminating in New York’s Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory (CSHL) severing ties with him...

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China will “actively consider” helping Syria’s post-war reconstruction, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, as he called for the two countries to get relations back on track. Wang made the comments in a meeting on Monday with his Syrian counterpart Asaad al-Shaibani, who was making his first trip to Beijing since the downfall of Bashar al-Assad last year. Wang also urged the new government to act against Uygur militant groups that have been linked to the fight against Assad. At Beijing’s request,...

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The most important outcome of the Communist Party of China’s fourth plenum, held last month in Beijing, was the review and adoption of the “Recommendations of the CPC Central Committee on Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development”. Leading the drafting team in person, Communist Party General Secretary and Chinese President Xi Jinping played a decisive role in formulating the recommendations by setting the overall vision and providing guidance throughout the...

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Taiwan is watching anxiously as it finds itself at the centre of a verbal clash between Beijing and Tokyo, fuelling fears that Taipei could be drawn into a major international conflict. Though the island’s government has openly embraced Tokyo’s stance and condemned Beijing’s response as “hegemonic”, critics and political analysts have cautioned that Taiwan is now at risk of becoming a flashpoint in a confrontation between two major world powers. The row erupted after Japanese Prime Minister...

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China’s market regulator has moved to tackle the hidden risks of algorithm-driven price manipulation with newly proposed anti-monopoly guidelines for online shopping, food delivery and travel platforms. A draft of the “Anti-Monopoly Compliance Guidelines for Internet Platforms”, published over the weekend by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), focused heavily on the sophisticated, often opaque ways in which online platforms with significant market power can exploit...

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The administration of US President Donald Trump hopes to confirm a deal to secure rare earth supplies from China by Thanksgiving, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview, framing the agreement as vital to shoring up America’s supply chains. The remarks came as the Council on Foreign Relations, a US-based think tank, warned in a new report that the US’ reliance on Chinese critical minerals remained a major strategic vulnerability that Washington needed to address. A rare earths deal...

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1. Beijing rejects G20 Japan meeting with Premier Li amid deepening Taiwan row China continued a diplomatic chill with Japan over the weekend by ruling out a leaders’ meeting at the coming G20 summit in South Africa amid heightened tensions.
2. Chinese student numbers in US fall as gap with Indian scholars widens: report Chinese student numbers in the United...

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A renowned mathematician who is also part of China’s Qian clan – a surname linked in the annals of Chinese scientific history to national pioneers in science and engineering – has become the latest US-based scientist to return to China. After more than 40 years in the United States, Qian Hong has left his endowed professorship at the University of Washington to join the prestigious and private Westlake University in eastern China. Qian’s appointment last month as a full-time chair professor with...

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Chinese tourists and students have expressed mixed reactions to Beijing’s travel and education advisories on Japan amid a spiralling diplomatic clash, with some downplaying the concerns as a peak travel season approaches. Tensions escalated following Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks earlier this month that suggested Tokyo could deploy its military forces in the event of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing has reacted with anger, including summoning the Japanese ambassador to...

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Chinese aircraft carriers have undergone intensive far-sea training to forge strong combat readiness, carrying out dozens of “train-as-you-fight” drills beyond the island chains and substantially increasing the frequency of aircraft launches, according to official media. The report by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily, the mouthpiece for the Chinese military, published on Thursday shed light on carrier training – a subject China has previously guarded closely – less than two weeks after...

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Yum China Holdings, operator of KFC and Pizza Hut restaurant chains across mainland China and Hong Kong, plans to ramp up expansion into more lower-tier cities based on its flexible store formats, expecting this push to generate higher returns for the company over the next five years. At the company’s Investor Day conference in Shenzhen on Monday, CEO Joey Wat said Yum China’s total number of outlets would increase to 30,000 by 2030, 76 per cent more than the firm’s estimated 17,000 outlets by...

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Chinese airlines have recorded about 491,000 cancellations of tickets to Japan since Saturday – roughly 32 per cent of their total bookings to the typically popular destination – after Beijing advised citizens to avoid travelling there amid a diplomatic spat, according to a veteran aviation analyst. The percentage of flights affected skyrocketed to 82.14 per cent on Sunday and 75.6 per cent on Monday, according to independent analyst Li Hanming, citing his research data covering all mainland...

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China’s ambassador to the United States has come to the defence of the country’s students and academics, saying they have been “smeared” as a threat to national security. “A few individuals in the United States have seen Chinese students, scholars, and friendly organisations … as national security threats through a biased lens and have tried every means to smear and obstruct them,” Xie Feng said in a video message to the US-China Hong Kong Forum. “People with vision in China and the US need to...

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Ant International, the Singapore-based spin-off of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, is stepping up its global treasury operations through a strategic partnership with Swiss bank UBS, as both companies also seek to explore innovations in blockchain-based tokenised deposits. Under a memorandum of understanding signed at UBS’ Singapore offices, Ant International will use UBS Digital Cash – a blockchain-based payments platform launched last year – for its global treasury operations to enhance...

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Xiao Mei, a kindergarten teaching assistant living in the suburbs of Hangzhou in eastern China, has barely seen her income rise for three years and is not optimistic about her chances of getting a pay rise any time soon. Still, she counts herself as relatively fortunate. “At least I haven’t had my pay cut or lost my job,” she said, adding that several of her friends had suffered such setbacks recently. Earning around 6,000 yuan (US$845) a month – well below the local average of 13,500 yuan for...

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A county-level sanitation office in southern China has invited ridicule and stoked a public debate after posting a job that requires a PhD to supervise garbage trucks and landfills – an unusual demand that critics say epitomises China’s runaway degree inflation. The posting in Guangdong province, by the office that manages urban environmental sanitation for Shixing county, appeared online last week under a notice for “urgently needed high-level talent for public institutions” issued by the...

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People’s Daily has urged Asian nations to stay “on high alert” for Japan’s potentially “dangerous” strategic tilt in an editorial published amid a trip to Beijing by a senior Japanese diplomat over the escalating bilateral diplomatic row on Taiwan. The commentary in the Communist Party mouthpiece on Monday condemned Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s recent remarks on potentially intervening in a Taiwan conflict, calling them “tantamount to invoking the ghost of militarism”, a reference to...

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Chinese companies expanding overseas are increasingly using the yuan for financing and payments to build their international operations, boosting the currency’s growing clout in international trade and investment. “Based on my calculation, 10 per cent of our company’s total orders were priced and settled in renminbi,” said Yang Feng, finance director for overseas marketing at Sieyuan Electric, in a panel discussion organised by Standard Chartered at the China International Import Expo in...

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Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies is expected to unveil a new artificial intelligence infrastructure technology on Friday that could double the utilisation efficiency of graphic processing units (GPUs), according to the state-owned Shanghai Securities News. The report said the technology would be able to lift the utilisation rate of AI chips – including GPUs and neural processing units (NPUs) – to 70 per cent, up from the current 30 to 40 per cent, in another major advance in “using...

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Under pressure from Beijing’s chokehold on rare earths and the simmering feud over chipmaker Nexperia, EU officials have been asked to tone down their public rhetoric on Beijing, even as the bloc moves forward aggressively with its de-risking plans. Brussels is in “de-escalation mode”, several official sources confirmed, as it looks to convince China to issue more licences for the export of the critical minerals vital to hi-tech manufacturing and ensure the supply of chips from beleaguered...

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Chinese student numbers in the United States have continued to decline over the past year, but they remain the second-largest student group after Indians and the biggest contributors to the US economy, according to new data released on Monday. A total of 265,919 Chinese studied in the US in the 2024-25 academic year, marking a four per cent decrease from the previous academic year, according to the latest annual survey of higher education institutions by the Institute of International Education...

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