World

related media assets (image or videos) available. Click to see the gallery. 2 related media assets (image or videos) available. Click to see the gallery. With nearly seven months gone, an ambitious US$36.5 billion target for Chinese imports of U.S. farm goods this year may not be quite out of reach, but it's looking like a big, big stretch. BEIJING/CHICAGO: With nearly seven months gone, an ambitious US$36.5 billion target for Chinese imports of U.S. farm goods this year may not be quite out of reach, but it's looking like a big, big stretch. By end-May, imports were running behind 2017 levels - rather than 50per cent ahead as needed - and while orders for China's main farm import, soybeans, have started to pick up, scorching levels of buying would be needed to hit the mark. Add i...

HANOI: Vietnam's health ministry reported six new COVID-19 infections and two more deaths on Monday (Aug 10), bringing the total number of cases in the country to 847, with 13 fatalities. Most of the new cases, including an 8-year-old boy, are linked to the central city of Danang, where the new outbreak began late last month. The ministry said more than 182,000 people are being quarantined in the country, including 5,139 at hospitals, 28,408 at centralised quarantine centres and the rest at home. Aggressive contact tracing, targeted testing and strict quarantining had helped Vietnam halt an earlier contagion, but it is now racing to control infections in Danang and beyond after a new outbreak was detected there on Jul 25. On Friday, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc warned that...

Aug. 15 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. How can we understand where Japan has come from, where it is today and where it is going? To answer these questions, it’s important to reflect on just how much the world has changed since Japan’s surrender. A good place to start is the 70th anniversary in 2015, arguably the low point in Sino-Japanese relations. To mark the occasion, the Advisory Panel on the History of the 20th Century and on Japan’s Role and World Order in the 21st Century released its report Aug. 6. It acknowledged Japan’s aggression in East Asia, writing that Japan “lost sight of the global trends, and caused much harm to various countries, largely in Asia, through a reckless war.” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reified much of the report in his Aug. 14 stateme...

The one common and peculiar aspect of most Shakespearean tragedies is the fact that the catastrophic events and unfolding misfortunes seem almost inevitable. While characters within the play are well aware of the fact that things are quickly going from bad to worse, it seems almost impossible to change the course of events. Unfortunately, the current U.S.-China relationship seems to be showing the same tendency. Many Shakespearean tragedies were caused by accidents, which in turn were a result of carelessness and miscommunication. U.S.-China relations have never been smooth and peaceful, and have in the past experienced various ups and downs and dangerous crises such as the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the 2001 military aircraft collision incident, among others. Th...