Tag Archives: China

OPINION — In 1943, a body washed up on a beach in Huelva, Spain. It was the body of a Royal Marine officer, Major William Martin. Martin was carrying papers, cuffed to his wrist in a briefcase, suggesting that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. Spain was officially neutral, but a few Spanish officials sympathetic to the …

The Chinese state-owned construction giant that built the Mao Zedong-era Tanzania-Zambia railway is returning to the project with a US$1.4 billion commitment to overhaul and run the line as it increasingly becomes geoeconomically important for China. In a deal struck on Monday, China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) agreed to an initial US$1.1 billion investment plus a further US$238 million …

Beneath the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean lie small, black, potato-sized treasures – polymetallic nodules rich in valuable metals and rare earth elements – waiting to be unearthed. Strewn across the sea floor of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, the coveted nodules and other forms of ocean deposits are gaining widespread attention. Yet for all their vast potential, …

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr is facing growing unrest from retired generals, with some veterans even urging active commanders to withdraw support for the president, according to multiple senior military sources. At the centre of the discontent are two flashpoints: allegations that billions of Philippine pesos have been lost to fictitious flood-control projects and proposed pension changes that former officers …

TikTok is not just the most downloaded app in the world; it’s the most powerful information platform on the planet. The app is also a political flashpoint. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company under the shadow of Beijing. For years, US lawmakers have tried to rein it in, either by banning it outright or forcing a sale to …

Researchers at DeepSeek on Monday released a new experimental model called V3.2-exp, designed to have dramatically lower inference costs when used in long-context operations. DeepSeek announced the model with a post on Hugging Face, also posting a linked academic paper on GitHub. The most important feature of the new model is called DeepSeek Sparse Attention, an intricate system described in …

A 47-year-old Chinese woman on Monday told a UK court that she played a leading role in a multibillion-pound fraudulent bitcoin scheme. Businesswoman Qian Zhimin, alias Zhang Yadi, pleaded guilty at London’s Southwark Crown Court following what is believed to be the single largest cryptocurrency seizure in the world, now worth about £5.5 billion (US$7.4 billion). Qian admitted one count …

Authorities in Henan province, central China, have approved the merger of 82 small rural financial institutions into a single regional lender, in an effort to contain systemic risks in a region once at the centre of a major banking scandal. Approved by the Henan office of the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA), the consolidation will see Henan Rural Commercial Bank …

Afghanistan’s Taliban government released an American citizen from detention on Sunday, a week after freeing an elderly British couple. In a statement the country’s foreign ministry identified the detainee as Amir Amiri and said he had been handed over to Adam Boehler, Washington’s special envoy on hostages. Boehler made a rare visit to Kabul earlier this month to discuss the …

US President Donald Trump expressed optimism on Sunday about reaching a deal to end the war in Gaza, saying there is “a real chance for greatness in the Middle East”, ahead of talks on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump did not provide specific details of a prospective ceasefire-for-hostages agreement in Gaza, but Vice-President J.D. Vance said that …