World

Trade ministers of Japan and Singapore on Wednesday pledged to maintain the high standards of market access and rules of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal, which China and Taiwan made a bid to join last year, Japan’s government said. In a joint statement, trade minister Koichi Hagiuda and his Singaporean counterpart Gan Kim Yong confirmed their countries’ commitment to “building a free and fair rules-based trading system including through maintaining” the high standards of the deal, according to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Japan and Singapore are part of the 11-member TPP, formally known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Singapore chairs the TPP Commission, the bloc’s decision-making body, this year, following J...

SEOUL: North Korea appeared to test-fire a ballistic missile on Tuesday (Jan 11) that may be more advanced than a "hypersonic" one it launched less than a week ago, South Korea's military said, as Pyongyang pursues increasingly powerful weapons. Tuesday's launch, condemned by authorities in Washington and Tokyo and prompting an expression of concern from the UN secretary general, underscored North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's New Year's vow to bolster the military with cutting-edge technology at a time when talks with South Korea and the United States have stalled. Initial estimates found the missile travelled more than 700km to a maximum altitude of 60km at up to 10 times the speed of sound (12,348 kmh), South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a statement. "We assess that this...

NEW YORK : The dollar fell against a basket of currencies on Thursday to a two-month low, a day after data that showed an expected surge in U.S. consumer prices in December fell short of offering any new impetus for the Federal Reserve's policy normalization efforts. The U.S. Dollar Currency Index, which tracks the greenback against six major currencies, was down 0.2per cent at 94.791, its lowest since Nov. 10. The index, which rose 6.3per cent in 2021, is down about 1per cent for the week, on pace for its worst weekly performance in about eight months. "Coming into the new year the dollar positioning was very much skewed to being long," said Mazen Issa, senior FX strategist at TD Securities. "Yesterday's inflation numbers, in conjunction with (Fed Chair Jerome) Powell's testimony for h...

Biendi Maganga-Moussavou had a problem. As Gabon’s minister of fisheries, agriculture and food security, he helps oversee the African country’s marine protected areas, some of the most extensive in Africa. Covering 27% of Gabon’s Exclusive Economic Zone, these waters are supervised using monitoring technology that tracks larger vessels, which are required to report their catch. But many of Gabon’s fishers run smaller operations that don’t have such systems, or even automated identification. “Thousands of boats were going out and we didn’t know where they were going or for how long,” Magana-Moussavou said in an interview. And since whatever they caught and where they caught it wasn’t registered, scientists couldn’t tell whether fishing restrictions were being respected or whether fish sto...

The final week of 2021 saw a third straight week of investment outflows from cryptocurrency funds, even as it capped a year of strong inflows into digital asset investment products, data from digital currency manager CoinShares showed. Outflows from the sector totaled US$32 million last week, taking the tally for the last three weeks to US$260 million, although the trend was diminishing following record weekly outflows in mid-December, CoinShares said. For 2021 as a whole inflows hit US$9.3 billion, a 36per cent jump from 2020 as the launch of bitcoin futures ETFs lured big institutional investors. By comparison, the increase in inflows from 2019 to 2020 was 806per cent. Total assets under management ended the year at US$62.5 billion in 2021 versus just US$2.8 billion at the end of 2019...

Flights are booked. Bags are packed. To cancel Christmas travel plans seems unfathomable at this point. But for many, so does the speed at which the omicron variant is spreading. The highly transmissible Covid-19 variant — which was first detected in late November but has since been detected in nearly 90 countries — is causing travel uncertainty around the globe. Still, some in the medical and research fields are striking a different tone this year than 2020's "stay home, stay safe" mantra — at least for now. "At this point in the pandemic, we've learned so much about this virus and how to keep ourselves from spreading infection to others — and from acquiring infection," said Stephen Kissler, research fellow at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, in an online discussion on Dec. 9 w...

The Hong Kong government has repeatedly said that rights and protections, including freedom of speech, are protected by a national security law that went into effect last year. In Sunday's election, only 20 out of 90 seats will be directly elected by the public, from a choice of 35 candidates. There are 153 candidates in the elections, all of whom were vetted before being allowed to run. Of these, only around a dozen moderates with different backgrounds say they are not aligned with the pro-establishment camp, with the rest comprising pro-Beijing and pro-establishment figures. A Hong Kong government spokesperson did not respond to Reuters questions on why the number of independent candidates running in the election is small. In February, police charged 47 Hong Kong democracy campaigners...

SEATTLE/PARIS : In Boeing Co's factory of the future, immersive 3-D engineering designs will be twinned with robots that speak to each other, while mechanics around the world will be linked by US$3,500 HoloLens headsets made by Microsoft Corp. It is a snapshot of an ambitious new Boeing strategy to unify sprawling design, production and airline services operations under a single digital ecosystem - in as little as two years. Critics say Boeing has repeatedly made similar bold pledges on a digital revolution, with mixed results. But insiders say the overarching goals of improving quality and safety have taken on greater urgency and significance as the company tackles multiple threats. The planemaker is entering 2022 fighting to reassert its engineering dominance after the 737 MAX crisis,...

LONDON : What was shaping up to be a gripping three-horse Premier League title race heading into Christmas is threatening to become a Manchester City romp to a fourth crown in five seasons. Pep Guardiola's side opened up an eight-point gap on Wednesday thanks to a 1-0 win nL1N2TE1PS at Brentford and will seek to begin the new year as they ended the old when they go to Arsenal on Saturday seeking an 11th straight league win. Should that happen they would be 11 points clear of Chelsea and 12 ahead of Liverpool, who have a game in hand, before their two rivals clash at Stamford Bridge on Sunday. While fourth-placed Arsenal have also been in impressive form with four successive wins, Mikel Arteta's side have fallen short against the big boys this season and were thrashed 5-0 away to City in...

BEIJING :The Chinese government has been expanding its practice of taking minority stakes in private companies beyond those specialising in online news and content to firms possessing large amounts of key data, two people with knowledge of the matter said. It has made a de facto special management stake or "golden share" arrangement with Full Truck Alliance Co Ltd, a Chinese platform arranging trucking services, according to one of the people. Troubled Didi Global Inc has also been in talks about a golden share for its core ride-hailing business, a third source with direct knowledge of the matter said. Seeking influence, Beijing began taking golden shares in private online media companies - usually about 1per cent of a firm - some five years ago. The stakes are bought by government-back...