WASHINGTON: United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday (Dec 22) he will seek China’s help in persuading North Korea to sit down for talks after Pyongyang’s slew of missile tests ratcheted up tensions. Blinken, who plans to visit Beijing in early 2023 in the first trip byContinue Reading
Prigozhin – who also controls the notorious St Petersburg internet “troll farm” that allegedly disrupted the 2016 US election – has been a vocal critic of the Russian defense establishment’s handling of the war in Ukraine. His mercenary-like army has been carrying out operations, ostensibly private but implicitly approved byContinue Reading
BANGKOK: Three Southeast Oriental foreign ministers along with a regional envoy tasked with solving the Myanmar crisis met with the junta’s top diplomat at an “informal” meeting in Thailand on Thursday (Dec 22), the Thailänder government said. The meeting came shortly after the particular United Nations Security Authorities adopted itsContinue Reading
HONG KONG: International arrivals to Macao, including from Hong Kong and Taiwan, will no longer need to undergo a nucleic acid test after landing and will be able to move freely, the government said on Thursday (Dec 22), the biggest steps yet to relax stringent COVID-19 measures. However, travellers fromContinue Reading
BioNTech said on Thursday (Dec 22) it had shipped 11,500 doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to China to be administered initially to German expatriates, marking the first foreign coronavirus vaccines to be sent to the country. BioNTech said the delivery, which landed in China on Wednesday, contained both the originalContinue Reading
Beijing claims almost all of the resource-rich South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in trade passes annually. Along with the Philippines, rival claimants are Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. China has ignored a 2012 ruling from a United Nations-backed tribunal that its claim is without basis. In recentContinue Reading
KUALA LUMPUR: There were 92 people who were caught in the Batang Kali landslide and not 94 as earlier reported, said the Selangor police on Thursday (Dec 22). This meant that there is one victim of the landslide who has yet to be located, said Selangor police chief Arjunaidi Mohamed.Continue Reading
MUMBA: India will start randomly testing 2 per cent of international passengers arriving at its airports for COVID-19, Mansukh Mandaviya, the country’s health minister, told parliament on Thursday (Dec 22), as the country steps up surveillance for new coronavirus variants. “The global pandemic is not yet over. The virus is changingContinue Reading
TOKYO: Japan has approved a blood test kit to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, its manufacturer announced on Thursday (Dec 22), a rare advance in tackling a condition that affects tens of millions worldwide. Sysmex Corporation said it was now working to get the kit, which measures the accumulation of a proteinContinue Reading
TOKYO/BEIJING: The government in Tokyo is investigating a report that China has set up covert police stations inside Japan, amid similar checks by authorities in European countries, the United States and Canada. Safeguard Defenders, an Asia-focused rights group based in Spain, has published two reports since September alleging that ChineseContinue Reading