News

The fallout from the Pentagon document leaks. Plus: the secret lives of squirrels
A major new cache of classified US military documents emerged last week, revealing sensitive western intelligence in areas such as the Ukraine war, Russia and Chinese affairs. But, just as astonishing as the information within the documents was the story of how they emerged.
This week we find out how a young, racist gun enthusiast and low-level US national guardsman came to be charged under the Espionage Act, suspected of leaking hundreds of top secret files on the gaming chat server Discord.

Extreme temperatures described as ‘worst April heatwave in Asian history’ as records threatened in India, China, Thailand and Laos
A severe heatwave has swept across much of Asia, causing deaths and school closures in India and record-breaking temperatures in China.
Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian, as the “worst April heatwave in Asian history”.

India has a young, vast work force that is expanding as China’s ages and shrinks. But the country’s immense size also lays bare its enormous challenges.

Some managed to escape from multi-storey building by fashioning bedsheets into makeshift ropes
A fire at a hospital in Beijing has killed at least 29 people and forced dozens to evacuate, a Chinese government official has said.
As clouds of black smoke billowed into the sky late on Tuesday, people trapped in the multi-storey building apparently tied bedsheets into makeshift ropes and escaped by climbing out of windows, as seen in videos circulating on social media.

On March 10th, Saudi Arabia and Iran surprised the world when they announced that their two countries had reached an agreement on the restoration of their diplomatic relations after Saudi and Iranian ...

Korean American author Julia Lee pulls no punches about the experience of being Asian in the U.S. today, in her memoir Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America.

Xi Jinping’s popular anti-corruption purges show trend to prosecute ‘tigers’ over lower-ranking ‘flies’
A moment of pity for the uber-wealthy. According to the Hurun Global Rich List, China has more billionaires than any other country. But it is also the place in which the monied must watch their back.
On Friday, Fu Xiaodong, a former senior official at China Development Bank, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for accepting 4.3m yuan (£503,466) in bribes during his tenure between 2007 and 2020. Days earlier, the former director of the supreme people’s court enforcement bureau was sentenced to 12 years in prison for accepting bribes worth 22.74m yuan (£2.65m). Meng Xiao was found guilty of abusing his position for financial gain for more than a decade.

The foreign ministers of the Group of 7 nations affirmed their shared visions on Russia’s war on Ukraine and China’s assertiveness after talk flared this month over different strategies.

The blaze appears to be the deadliest in the past two decades in the city, even though firefighters seemed to extinguish it quickly.

“My father’s not being there defined me, for better or worse,” she writes in “Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming” (Penguin Press). “When I was ...

Also, a cease-fire fails in Sudan.