Where there is political activism, there is Twitter. The popular microblogging platform was widely credited with accelerating the downfall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Now it has allowed users around the world to follow the removal of another Egyptian leader with the help of a new trial-run translation service.
What to watch for today
This article has been corrected.
An internal team dedicated to developing new businesses for Samsung was disbanded on Monday after failing to come up with a new cash cow for South Korea’s sprawling conglomerate.
A new partnership between two hospitals in China and the US will soon have Chinese patients on an operating table with a robot standing over them. At the controls will be a US doctor in Texas.
Chinese authorities have launched an anti-trust probe into several baby formula companies to investigate alleged price fixing and anti-competitive behavior. Almost all of the companies appear to be foreign manufacturers, raising questions about whether Beijing is targeting them in order to shore up its own damaged sector.
China’s biggest natural gas producer won a timely concession from the country’s leaders this week as Beijing announced it would raise natural gas prices for non-residents by 15% from July 10. Shares in PetroChina were up nearly 7% on Tuesday, as investment banks upgraded the company’s stock.
Asia’s two most populous countries are quietly fighting a strategic battle over the Middle East, centered around two little-known ports in Iran and Pakistan with access to the Persian Gulf.
For Japanese men, the budget for a Friday night out on the town has nothing to do with how much they earn. What matters is how much your wife gives you—and the bad news is that it’s not as much as it used to be.
For the first time, a Chinese bank has been ranked number one in the world. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is now the world’s largest bank by tier one capital—the basic measure of a bank’s financial strength—according to research on the world’s top 1,000 banks compiled by The Banker (paywall).
China’s new elderly protection law (link in Chinese) is fairly blunt about what the state expects from its younger generations: “family members who live apart should often visit or send regards to their parents,” and citizens must refrain from “overlooking or neglecting the elderly.”
Pity the poor finance minister. It’s an unglamorous job with lots of numbers and not much chance to shine—and apparently it’s hungry work.
The Chinese Communist Party turned 92 today, and for its birthday present President Xi Jinping unveiled a new doctrine: After decades of prioritizing economic growth above all else, Xi announced that party officials will no longer be judged solely on their ability to boost GDP.
A multi-billion dollar infrastructure project intended to protect Thailand from a repeat of the devastating floods of 2011 was shot down in court on Thursday over environmental concerns and doubts about the South Korean contractor’s ability to complete the job.
Inspired by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and his revelations about US spying operations, a Chinese human rights lawyer has sent a public letter (Chinese original) to China’s Ministry of Public Security asking for full disclosure of the government surveillance on its citizens.
South Korea upgraded its 2013 growth forecast from 2.3% to 2.7% on Thursday. For all the worry that Japan’s devaluation of its currency was going to cripple South Korea’s export-dependent economy, Asia’s sixth-largest economy is actually doing ok.
Demand for smartphones in Thailand is soaring, according to new research by GfK. Almost 3 million smartphones were sold in just the first four months of this year, and demand is particularly strong in the rural north, where sales have more than tripled in the last year, making Thailand the second biggest Southeast Asian market after Indonesia. GfK expects at least 70% sales growth in 2014.
The US Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, is in Tibet this week—the first visit by an American ambassador to the restive region since 2010. A spokesman said that Locke is on a three-day trip with members of his family and several embassy staff to meet with residents and government officials and raise concerns about the “deteriorating human rights situation,” specifically the self-immolations by Tibetans in protest against Chinese rule.
Attackers wielding knives launched an assault on police and government buildings in the remote northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang on Wednesday morning, according to state media, which reported that at least 27 people died, including 10 of the attackers.
Edward Snowden, NSA-leaker extraordinaire, is such a familiar face in world news that he’s almost a household name. But for all the extensive NSA spying capabilities he revealed, US authorities were still not able to get his name right on extradition documents issued to Hong Kong, according to Rimsky Yuen, the city’s justice secretary.
Foreign movie makers are scrambling over each other to make movies that appeal to Chinese audiences. That’s fair enough—it’s now the world’s second biggest movie market after the US, worth $2.7 billion, and a report last year by Ernst and Young projected that its movie audience would surpass all others by 2020.
So far this year Japanese companies have spent $6.6 billion in Southeast Asia, much of it on life insurance companies. Judging by reports on Tuesday that Meiji Yasuda is considering a $700 million offer for the unlisted insurer Thai Life, it looks like there’s more to come.
The carcinogenic petrochemical paraxylene has been the subject of heated protests in China in recent months, but the state-run The People’s Daily wants citizens to know that it is basically harmless—and even possibly delicious.
When revelations about the US’s PRISM spying program broke days before presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama met in California for their ”shirtsleeves summit,” there was little hope for real progress on cyber security negotiations. But the summit had other achievements: China and the US said they would work harder to reduce emissions of super-greenhouse gases known as HFCs. Now China has a chance to prove it.
