Asia - Page 4

The government of Prime Minister Kishida Fumio on Tuesday relaxed Japan’s export controls on defense equipment.

Chinese author Liu Cixin’s monumental science fiction book The Three Body Problem, which has now been adapted into a Netflix series under the punchier title “3 Body Problem,” has a little something to annoy just about everyone – from climate change activists to skeptics, Chinese Communists to anti-communists, nationalists to open-borders fanatics. It is a big story with big ideas, and like most great works of fiction, not even the author can fully control how its events are interpreted. 

An unknown terrorist rammed a vehicle carrying explosives into a convoy of Chinese engineers working on a project in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, on Tuesday, the latest in a growing number of attacks targeting China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the region.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping told visiting Dutch PM Mark Rutte that attempts to restrict China’s access to technology will not stop it’s rise.

The Chinese state propaganda newspaper Global Times quoted film critics complaining that the Netflix adaptation of the Chinese science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem used “people of different skin colors.”

New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) revealed on Monday that Chinese state-sponsored hackers attacked two computer systems used by the New Zealand Parliament in 2021.

China’s TikTok is reportedly launching a global “Youth Council” that involves 15 teenagers from around the world being tasked with advising the comunist psyop app on how to make the platform “safer.”

Tesla shares experienced a significant decline on Friday as the electric vehicle giant grapples with various challenges, particularly in its crucial Chinese market.

The UK on Monday launched a new global social media campaign, aimed at Vietnam in particular, to deter small boat migrants.

The Chinese state propaganda Global Times newspaper blamed President Joe Biden’s disastrous extension of the 20-year Afghan war and subsequent Taliban conquest of Kabul for creating the conditions to allow a harrowing terrorist attack in Moscow on Friday, which the Islamic State claimed responsibility for.

Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong was abruptly removed from office on Thursday for allegedly violating the rules of the Communist Party.

The new Netflix sci-fi series “3 Body Problem” is provoking intense online debate over its opening sequence depicting a struggle session during China’s Cultural Revolution in which a physics professor is violently beaten by Mao’s Red Guard.

A U.S. judge who previously wrote a concurring opinion against Florida’s law barring Chinese nationals from purchasing land in the state has an activist history.

A pastor, recently released after spending seven years in prison, is stranded in China without legal documentation to help him get basic services.

Republican lawmakers are attempting to ban the use of a Chinese-owned tutoring company by U.S. military service members and their families.

Apple is in preliminary discussions with Chinese tech giant Baidu to potentially use its generative AI technology in Apple devices sold in China, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Journalists, academics, and other experts told Congress during a hearing on Wednesday that evidence indicates China is killing thousands of people to sell their organs and building the “world’s largest DNA database” that can be used to find a living “perfect match” for an organ buyer, arrest them for dubious reasons, and kill them to sell their organs.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) says the legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States unless its parent company ByteDance sells the social media platform “will benefit” the app’s users, adding that “TikTok needs to be an American company.”

Nothing to see here. That is the message being broadcast by Japanese schools taking part in the country’s annual spring baseball tournament to safeguard cheerleaders from upskirting pictures being taken by over-interested spectators.

United States intelligence officials created a “new framework and language guidelines” when talking about China so as not to offend employees of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage, according to a recent newsletter by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)’s Intelligence Community Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Office.

Former top Trump administration official and U.S.-China Commission Commissioner Cliff Sims on Thursday during a hearing on China pushed back against the argument that U.S. resolve to support Ukraine matters more than U.S. military capacity in terms of dissuading China from invading Taiwan.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman claimed that Middle Eastern countries hope Beijing plays “a greater role in deescalating” the ongoing Israeli self-defense operation in Gaza against the jihadist terrorist organization Hamas.

Ippei Mizuhara, the friend and translator of recently-signed Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, has been fired by the team amid accusations that he stole “millions of dollars” from Ohtani.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is currently in Shanghai to open the company’s eighth store in the city, has been vocal about China’s critical role in Apple’s supply chain and the company’s commitment to investing in the country. Cook’s desperate PR campaign comes as the iPhone has lost the crown as best selling smartphone in the communist country.

China sent a delegation to Qatar to meet with the head of the jihadist terrorist organization Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, the Foreign Ministry revealed on Tuesday, reportedly telling him that Beijing is “keen on relations” with the genocidal group.

China’s securities regulating agency announced on Monday that it had banned the founder of real estate giant Evergrande from the securities market and accused the company of $78 billion fraud.

The legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives regarding China’s TikTok app gives its parent company ByteDance six months to sell the social media platform before it faces a ban in the United States. Experts say that a sale in that short of an amount of time is unlikely.

The government of Pakistan confirmed the execution of “intelligence-based anti-terrorist operations” within Afghanistan on Monday, outraging the Taliban which claimed to have responded by bombing Pakistani military bases “with heavy weapons.”

North Korea reportedly fired several ballistic missiles on Monday, an apparent gesture of “welcome” to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

A growing list of human rights violators and authoritarian regimes around the world published messages congratulating Russian strongman Vladimir Putin on his overwhelming “victory” in a three-day sham presidential election that concluded on Sunday.

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday night forecast a financial “bloodbath” awaits the U.S. motor industry if he is not elected and China is enabled to swamp the country with their products.

The United States has more than doubled its reliance on imported needles and syringes from China and other countries in the last six years, putting Americans at risk, despite President Joe Biden recently touting efforts to manufacture goods in America.

Russia on Friday began a sham three-day election engineered to give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power, with any likely rivals long since intimidated into dropping out, jailed, or killed.

Scientists at China’s Air Force Medical University reportedly performed the world’s first successful transplant of a pig liver into a human.

China-owned social media giant TikTok could soon be forced to cease operations in the United States if a recently passed bill in the House of Representatives becomes law. The bill is expected to face quite a fight to get through the Senate.

The McDonald’s fast-food chain suffered a worldwide system failure on Friday that knocked out the ordering system in many of its restaurants.