SCMP - Business Feed 5

Residents of the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, ravaged by years of war, began arriving in Ukraine on Saturday after being evacuated via Belarus during a rare truce brokered by US First Lady Melania Trump. “As of now, Ukrainian citizens from Oleshky have crossed the Ukrainian border in the Chernihiv region. All of them will receive the assistance they need,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky, thanking the US and Melania Trump for mediation. Ukrainian officials greeted the evacuees with...

After spending three months in a coma following a brain haemorrhage, a patient in China has regained the ability to speak, eat and walk with support – part of an early clinical trial using targeted sound waves to help “wake up” severely damaged brains, according to state media. The technology, developed by a coalition including the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, used focused ultrasound waves to stimulate regions deep within the brain without requiring...

The United States, South Korea and Japan reaffirmed their commitment to the “complete denuclearisation” of North Korea on Saturday, as Pyongyang continues to reject disarmament ahead of possible talks with Washington. Speculation is mounting over a potential meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at next month’s Apec summit in China, with Trump making repeated overtures to Pyongyang for nuclear talks. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, South Korean Foreign.

President Donald Trump on Friday insisted Republicans “have a shot” at success in the US midterms despite a feverish end to the campaign for elections that will decide control of Congress. Trump reversed course and reinstated two rallies in Kansas and Iowa a day after cancelling them, a move which had raised questions about his health and about the state of the race. “There’s such love in these all over the country,” Trump said, referring to his rallies, before rattling off a series of insults..

US President Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei faced mounting pressure on Friday to explain the role their countries played in helping Flavio Bolsonaro flee Brazil after he had his passports cancelled and claimed he was the victim of “persecution”. The 45-year-old Brazilian senator bolted his country two days after being defeated by incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in a presidential election on Sunday. “The persecution began even sooner than I imagined,” the senator said on Friday...

Russia showed no sign on Friday of softening its stance on Kyiv as G20 foreign ministers opened talks in the United States, with the Ukraine and Iran wars deepening rifts between the sprawling forum’s members. Sharp disagreements emerged around the table, with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas accusing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of presenting “lies” on issues like the conflict in Ukraine. “He put forward a lot of lies, a lot of false narratives” that Europeans were able to push...

Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki called off a visit to Africa mid-flight and returned to Warsaw, where police surrounded the constitutional court on Friday after the suspension of its chief justice triggered a stand-off between the centrist government and the nationalist right. Dozens of police guarded the entrance to the court as followers of the opposition right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) protested against the ousting of constitutional court president Bogdan Swieczkowski. The court’s...

A sell-off for tech stocks got even worse on Friday on worries that Wall Street’s frenzy around artificial intelligence technology sent prices too high. The S&P 500 tumbled 1.8 per cent for its worst day since June, and it closed out a third straight losing week. The weakness for technology stocks dragged the Nasdaq composite down a market-leading 2.9 per cent, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 572 points, or 1.1 per cent. The US stock market remains only 3.1 per cent below its...

Australia’s preparations for a possible conflict with China reflect “a relatively superficial understanding”, argues prominent economist John Edwards. Europe, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia and India, he notes, are not preparing for such a conflict. Why should Australia? Edwards, a former senior economic adviser to former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, makes the observation in a Lowy Institute paper released in October and in a newspaper interview. Instead, he sees US-China rivalry as a...

Russia’s flagship independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta announced on Friday it was closing, saying it had been “killed” by state pressure after years of repression targeting its journalists whose reporting was critical of the Kremlin and its Ukraine war. The closure of Novaya Gazeta – one of the last outlets to openly criticise Russia’s offensive – marks the latest outcome of Moscow’s campaign against dissenting voices, which intensified after the Kremlin sent troops into its neighbour in...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Friday he expects to conclude negotiations with the European Union in June on an unprecedented partnership that would make Canada the bloc’s first “associate member”, even though the designation was left out of a joint declaration launching a new economic and security alliance. Carney said he would attend a meeting of European leaders in June to conclude negotiations on the proposed relationship, which would stop short of full EU membership. “In...

Christa Pike said on Friday that she remained in constant pain and struggled to speak a month after surviving a lethal injection in Tennessee, a failure she blamed on “incompetence.” In her first public statement since the execution, Pike said she never contemplated a life beyond her execution date and was prepared to die in peace, but woke up alone and confused in a hospital bed. “There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands...

Starving residents ⁠of a Russian-held town in southern Ukraine began evacuating on Friday as part of a joint relief operation by the opposing sides, the first of its kind in four years and eight months of war. Under a local ceasefire brokered by US first lady Melania Trump, an aid convoy arrived in the town of Oleshky and people were given the opportunity to leave. Although it was a striking example of cooperation between the warring sides, the Kremlin described it as a special case that was...

Pope Leo has become the first pope to vote in a US general election. The Vatican confirmed on Friday that the Chicago-born pontiff had submitted a mail-in ballot in Chicago ahead of November’s midterm elections, citing his long-standing belief in civic participation. Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, “has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen” and has done so “whenever he was eligible to do so”, the Holy See press office said. The statement said he had also voted while living in...

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a ban on Chinese telecommunications companies obtaining American telephone numbers, citing national security concerns and the need to protect domestic networks. The proposed rules could prevent China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom and other service providers from obtaining numbers through internet-based voice services, the commission said on Thursday. The regulator is scheduled to vote on the proposal at its November 19 meeting.

At the recent Valdai Discussion Club, I asked Russian President Vladimir Putin if he would be open to meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum in Shenzhen. I also asked, more broadly, what role China could play in promoting peace in Ukraine, mediating and contributing to peacekeeping. Putin was receptive, warmly welcoming the idea of a China-hosted meeting. Trump, too, has expressed a willingness to meet Xi and...

Saudi Arabia said on Friday it intercepted and destroyed a drone launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels near Islam’s holiest city, a claim the Houthis denied. A coalition spokesman, Major General Turki al-Malki, said the drone was intercepted in the region surrounding Mecca, Islam’s holiest city and a destination for millions of Muslim pilgrims each year. In a statement, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree denied carrying out any operations targeting Mecca, saying the group’s military..

Amid attempts this year to impress each other with splendour, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping appear to have decided that the relationship between their two countries should primarily run through their personal relationship. This has been a hallmark of the Trump years. The American executive branch has always held near-unilateral authority over foreign policy, but Trump has concentrated that in himself. Dozens of ambassadors and senior national security advisers have..

A mobile network outage in France this week has raised questions about the reliability of Finnish telecoms giant Nokia’s products against the backdrop of continued European Union efforts to phase out Chinese suppliers Huawei Technologies and ZTE over security concerns. The problem first hit the network of France’s biggest telecoms provider Orange at 11.37am on Monday and lasted until 8.30pm, resulting in outages of up to nine hours for some customers, Orange France CEO Jerome Henique told French

France’s interior minister has warned of a “very high risk of public disorder” and announced the deployment of around 70,000 police officers for a new wave of protests this weekend. France has been rocked by widespread anger over the rising cost of living and inequality, with nationwide demonstrations on October 17 degenerating into some of the country’s worst rioting in years. The Yellow Vest movement and student unions have called for a new day of protests on Saturday. The demonstrations come.