After seven months of spaceflight—and a decade of planning—NASA’s Mars InSight robotic lander is scheduled to complete its 300-million-mile journey (480 million kilometers) and touch down on the Red Planet today (Nov. 26).
The Italian luxury house Dolce & Gabbana has faced the full wrath of China’s internet users and fashion lovers this week, over a series of ads it posted to its social media accounts to promote a major fashion show in Shanghai slated for Nov. 21. Chinese citizens accused the ads of trafficking in racist and sexist stereotypes, stars backed out of the show in protest, and it was eventually canceled.
After a landmark meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June, Donald Trump shocked many by referring to joint military exercises with South Korea as “very provocative,” and announcing that he planned to cease them.
By 2020, the Philippines will finally have its very own IKEA. At 700,000 square feet, it will be the largest of the Swedish furniture manufacturer’s outposts of Scandinavian minimalist living.
Boeing will hold a conference call with airline operators today (Nov. 20) to answer questions about the new 737 Max aircraft and its flight systems, three weeks after a Lion Air plane of the same model crashed into the sea, Bloomberg reported (paywall).
Since Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte came to power in 2016, he’s been noticeably warm to China, and cold to the country’s traditional ally the United States. Soon after he was elected, he made a state visit to China—where he called this the “springtime” of their relations—and chose not to use a 2016 international tribunal decision in favor of the Philippines to push back against China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Sri Lanka is in political turmoil, lurching from a surfeit of prime ministers in October to apparently none at the moment.
Investigators in Indonesia have zeroed in on the role of a new feature on the Boeing 737 Max 8 as they try to pinpoint what led to the crash of Lion Air flight JT610, which killed 189 people when it went down in the Java Sea on Oct. 29.
Countries with vast populations—like India and China—can afford to lose large numbers of their people to other countries as migrants or expats, depending on your preferred nomenclature. Countries with small and shrinking populations can’t be so blithe.
The resignation of attorney general Jeff Sessions this week highlighted fears his replacement, Matthew Whitaker, could imperil special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russian operatives.
On Sunday (Nov. 11), Alibaba will mark the 10th edition of Singles’ Day, a one-day shopping event so big it eclipses both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and leaves Amazon’s Prime Day trailing in the dust.
This is a developing story, last updated at 3:23am PST.
Last year, the World Internet Conference—China’s five-year-old gathering in Wuzhen to legitimize its walled internet—saw Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google chief Sundar Pichai at the podium. But in 2018, America’s biggest tech firms are far less in evidence.
On a stage in Beijing, Bill Gates took out a beaker of yellowish-brown fluid and put it on a nearby podium.
Numbers released so far this month show China’s economy running out of steam faster than expected. Upcoming economic data isn’t likely to be reassuring, either.
It’s been eight years in the making, but finally Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s towering tribute to the independence-era leader who helped forge India into a nation is ready. The Statue of Unity, which portrays Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, is nearly 600 feet tall—about twice the size of New York’s iconic Statue of Liberty. It also has its own website—which dubs him the Bismarck of India—and Twitter account.
Louis Cha, whose martial-arts fantasies about heroes who triumphed over the corrupt forces of society won him legions of lifelong fans, died on Tuesday at the age of 94 in Hong Kong.
Airline travel is safer than ever. Given the large number of people who fly each year—some four billion passengers in 2017 compared to about 1.5 billion 20 years ago—the risk of any single person dying in a commercial air crash has fallen dramatically. And yet, when there’s a deadly accident, like today’s crash of Indonesian budget flight Lion Air JT610, it doesn’t feel that way. Flight JT610 crashed in the waters off Indonesian capital Jakarta less than 15 minutes after takeoff, with all 189 passengers and crew on board believed dead.
Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate who once said in a newspaper interview that a fellow lawmaker was “too ugly” to rape, has won Brazil’s second-round presidential election.
In the wake of the 2013 revelations of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program, and amid increasing worries that private firms are using our phones to eavesdrop on us, it’s understandable that many people are now paranoid that their private communications can be intercepted. The president of the United States, however, is apparently not among them.
In its first economic growth numbers since the US-China war kicked off for real this summer, China posted economic growth of 6.5% for the July-September quarter compared with a year earlier, lower than the 6.6% forecast by economists surveyed by Reuters.
In January, e-commerce giant Alibaba joined the tiny club of tech companies with valuations above $500 billion. Tencent, China’s messaging and gaming empire, had touched that milestone briefly late last year.
Hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims in China’s far west have been forced into propaganda camps for patriotic “re-education,” according to rights groups. Now the practice has the backing of local law, thanks to an Oct. 9 revision.
Jair Bolsonaro—the Brazilian right-wing presidential candidate who has made denigrating comments about democracy, women, and minorities—didn’t win an outright majority in national elections yesterday (Oct. 7), but he came close.
