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The UAE is hoping for a breakthrough in negotiations between Iran and the United States while being prepared for the worst, a senior official said on Sunday, following threats of a resumption of the Middle East war. “We’re hoping that there is a diplomatic breakthrough,” diplomatic adviser to the UAE president Anwar Gargash said during a conference in Manama, Bahrain. “It is not the interest of the region to go through another round … But I think we’re also, as we’ve shown before, braced for the

Thousands protested in Delhi on Sunday to demand the resignation of India’s election chief over a revision of voter lists, the latest in more than a month of ‌opposition demonstrations challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Led by Congress party chief Rahul Gandhi, Sunday’s protesters say the controversial revision benefits Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Analysts say the protests and growing support for the opposition form the worst crisis for Modi since he came to power in.

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has previewed a plan for a more autonomous AI agent that can handle multiple tasks with minimal human intervention, as it steps up competition with US rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in developing coding assistants. The proposed system, dubbed super agent, aimed to reduce the need for humans to coordinate multiple AI agents and monitor their progress, addressing a key bottleneck in managing today’s increasingly complex workflows, according to a...

China’s first female conductor, Zheng Xiaoying, is 97 years old, but she continues to give outstanding performances to audiences. In August, the nonagenarian conducted the Chinese-language version of the opera Carmen in Xiamen, in southeastern China’s Fujian province, where she lives. Tickets for the performance were like gold dust, and audiences marvelled, as always, at her elegant, expressive conducting. Zheng has led a remarkable life. Born in Shanghai in 1929, she began studying piano at age

For decades, China has supplied African militaries with small arms and land-based equipment such as armoured vehicles, trucks and artillery. Now, it is selling them more specialised weapons, including armed drones and electronic warfare systems. Analysts noted that China’s African arms sales were shifting qualitatively to air-defence systems, armed drones and electronic warfare gear once dominated by Russia and the West. In April, four vehicles identified by defence analysis group Janes as...

Turkey has moved the country’s Kurdish militant leader to a newly built part of an island prison where he has been incarcerated since 1999 as part of efforts to end decades of conflict, a senior Kurdish official said. Improving prison conditions for Abdullah Ocalan, who heads the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has been a key Kurdish demand in the push to end the 42-year-long conflict between the militant group and Turkish authorities. Ocalan has been imprisoned in a penitentiary on the island

Hong Kong sweltered through its warmest October on record, as an extremely strong El Nino, a weak northeast monsoon and a persistent anticyclone aloft over southern China combined to drive temperatures to unprecedented levels, the weather forecaster has said. The Hong Kong Observatory forecaster said on Sunday that the mean maximum temperature for October was 30.5 degrees Celsius (86.9 Fahrenheit), the mean temperature 27.6 degrees and the mean minimum 25.8 degrees – all the highest for any...

The 2026 Global Governance Forum in Xiongan, Hebei province, wrapped up on October 25. Against a backdrop of acute strains on multilateralism and a widening global governance deficit, the forum galvanised a shared sense of urgency across the international community for reform and solidarity. More than a century ago, Karl Marx noted that, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” That insight strikes at the very heart of today’s global...

India’s new high-altitude combat tank was designed to go where its heavier armoured fighting vehicles cannot: the thin mountain air, narrow roads and small bridges along its disputed border with China. In its base configuration, the Zorawar weighs some 25 tonnes – light enough to be flown all the way to the Line of Actual Control – but a push to make it strong enough to withstand high-calibre autocannon fire could add an extra seven tonnes to that loadout. Reports of renewed stand-offs between..

Beijing has stepped up its maritime presence around Taiwan, deploying coastguard patrols from the island’s eastern approaches to waters near Quemoy and remote Dongsha Island. Chinese coastguard spokesman Jiang Lue said on Saturday that a formation led by the vessel Hushi carried out routine law enforcement patrols east of Taiwan to reinforce administrative control and safeguard maritime navigation. “Since October, the Hushi task group has been strengthening control over the relevant waters to...

The Trump administration’s online accounts are circulating images of a pumpkin carved with a sombrero design and a fake Halloween-themed background around a black man apparently accused of food assistance fraud, in social media posts slammed by critics as inflammatory rhetoric. Only days before the midterm election, the posts coincide with the government’s sweeping campaign to show its aggressive immigration enforcement and highlight efforts to crack down on fraud to save taxpayers money when...

Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke Siew Fook has dismissed a recent claim on social media that students were forced to serve alcohol at an old boys’ association reunion and centenary dinner, calling the allegations a politically motivated attack against him. The DAP secretary general, who is also a former student of St Paul’s Institution, claimed the individual who allegedly uploaded the post had been looking for every possible opportunity to attack him. “In the social media post, the...

The Hong Kong government’s reforms to crack down on bid-rigging are intended to bring about a “revolutionary overhaul” of the city’s building maintenance ecosystem, the justice minister has said. Three days after the government unveiled a range of measures in response to an independent committee report on the Tai Po fire, Secretary for Justice Paul Lam Ting-kwok said on Sunday the proposed legislative amendments aimed to raise standards and strengthen oversight. “The market currently offers too.

Taipei Mayor Wayne Chiang Wan-an faces an unexpectedly tough re-election fight in a race closely watched for its potential to damage the main opposition party Kuomintang and further strain the island’s relations with Beijing. Just five months ago, Chiang appeared comfortably positioned for a second term in a city where the KMT has traditionally enjoyed an advantage over the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. A poll by local cable news network TVBS in late May put him 28 percentage points ahead

Driving along the wide boulevards of Astana during a recent trip to the Kazakh capital, signs of China’s growing commercial footprint were everywhere. Chinese cars were becoming a common sight on the streets here, as brands from BYD to Changan made aggressive inroads in a market once dominated by South Korea’s Hyundai and Kia, said the driver who picked me up from the airport in a gleaming Changan electric vehicle. But it was not the rise of Chinese tech that had brought me to this energy-rich..

Long dubbed an “air-conditioned nation”, Singapore is experimenting with cooling alternatives from chilled beams to “passive displacement” to curb its thirst for energy-guzzling air conditioning. The city state has the highest per-capita air conditioner ownership rate in Southeast Asia, with about 99 per cent of private residences equipped with cooling units. Singapore’s local building sector accounts for one-fifth of its emissions, while cooling itself accounts for 40 to 60 per cent of a...

For Singaporean flight attendant Chloe Tan Zi Ling, 35, the problem with paper straws is their impracticality. “It softens before we can finish the drink, so we have to gulp it down without a straw,” she said, adding that reusable metal alternatives left an unpleasant taste in her mouth. Her frustration reflects a wider debate over Asia’s shift away from plastic straws, with a recently released South Korean study finding that conventional plastic straws performed better than paper and other...

Former Japanese adult film actress Mao Hamasaki was admitted to intensive care at a Hong Kong hospital after being allegedly drugged while working in a club in Tsim Sha Tsui on Sunday morning. Hamasaki’s manager published a post on her Facebook page at 5.40am on Sunday morning, with two photos showing her in a wheelchair being taken to an ambulance. The post read “drugged while working”. Hamasaki, 33, had performed as a disc jockey at several clubs on Halloween night until the early hours of...

Celebrating one’s 18th birthday is not typically a poignant occasion, but for Hongkonger Chen Tsz-kin, adulthood began with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. At 18 months old, Chen was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition that causes muscles to weaken over time. Doctors told his mother, Michelle Li Yuan-feng, that people with the incurable illness had an average life expectancy of 18. The latest medical consensus, however, is that those with the disease might live..

Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport has reclaimed its position as China’s busiest airport, handling more than 67 million passenger trips in the first nine months of 2026 following a major expansion last year, the municipal government announced. The airport overtook Shanghai Pudong International Airport, which handled 66.58 million passenger trips during the same period, official data showed. Baiyun had fallen behind Pudong in 2024 and 2025. The expansion took half a decade to complete and...