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As Trump revamps White House, Rubio floored by Beijing hall’s fancy ceiling

Footage of the US secretary of state giving a thumbs-up to a ceiling in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People has gone viral The candid footage catches Rubio in the East Hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, his gaze fixed upwards on the ceiling’s ornate decorations. The sprawling Great Hall near Tiananmen Square is used for ceremonial and legislative events. Spanning over 1,120 square metres (12,055 sq ft) on the building’s second floor, the design of the East Hall’s ceiling draws inspiration from traditional Chinese architecture, notably the dou gong structure of interlocking wooden brackets and zao jing sunken ceiling panels that are often given intricate decorations. The hall’s ceiling features three large inset octagons with detailed wood carvings, each of which surrounds a large crystal chandelier.

May 14, 2026

Business

Why Hong Kong scientists think GLP-1 weight-loss drugs can help stroke patients

Chinese University of Hong Kong scientists call GLP-1 ‘superstar pathway in biological, medical and pharmaceutical fields’ Popular weight-loss injections have the potential to help patients recover from severe strokes when used alongside a surgical procedure to remove blood clots in the brain, scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have said. The scientists said on Thursday that administering a GLP-1 injection before and after a thrombectomy, a blood clot removal procedure, could have neuroprotective effects and improve the neurological recovery of ischemic stroke patients by as much as 20 per cent if they missed the window for an intravenous thrombolysis. Dr Ko Ho, director of the Gerald Choa Neuroscience Institute and an associate professor of CU Medicine, said the team made the discovery while pursuing effective interventions targeting ageing-related biological changes. “Our team began prioritising the GLP-1 signalling pathway about seven or eight years ago. GLP-1 is a ‘superstar’ pathway in biological, medical and pharmaceutical fields, primarily due to its success in treating type 2 diabetes and obesity,” he said.

May 14, 2026

Business

Don’t use GDP to judge China’s strength – look at this instead

Support us China's factories don't use capital as efficiently as they used to. Image: YouTube Screengrab When President Donald Trump arrives in Beijing on May 14 for his summit with Xi Jinping, China will be ready with a figure – 5%. That is China’s official GDP growth rate and growth target for 2025, and it will be presented as evidence of economic resilience. The target is real. Whether that figure measures economic resilience is a different question. There is a better metric to watch. It is called the Incremental Capital Output Ratio, or ICOR, and it measures how much additional investment is required to produce one additional unit of economic output. When an economy is healthy, the ratio stays low. When capital is wasted — when investment flows into projects that don’t pay off, when supply chases demand that doesn’t exist, when the excess is dumped on other countries to mitigate losses — the ratio rises. China’s ICOR is rising quickly. ICOR, which I calculated here as investment — formally, gross capital formation — as a percentage of GDP divided by the real GDP growth rate, is not an officially reported figure but is derived from China’s National Bureau of Statistics data.

May 14, 2026

Business

Xi cites Thucydides trap to Trump, says US and China responsible for managing ties

Presidents expected to discuss the Iran war, trade, tech and Taiwan, among other points of contention This live article is freely available to our registered users. Please log in or create an account below. US President Donald Trump is meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping for a much-anticipated summit that could shape the next stage of rivalry between the world’s two superpowers. It is the first visit to China by a US president since Trump’s last trip in 2017 and comes amid growing economic and geopolitical uncertainties arising from conflicts in the Middle East and the subsequent global energy shock that has taken a toll, particularly in Asia. Xi and Trump are expected to discuss the war on Iran, trade, technology and Taiwan, among other points of contention during the two-day visit. The stakes appeared to be higher for Trump, who is seeking trade concessions and Beijing’s support for ending the war in Iran to present to American voters ahead of the crucial midterm elections in November. Amid hopes the summit will provide stability to one of the world’s most consequential relationships, the talks may set the tone for future engagement between the two leaders.

May 14, 2026

Business

A year after USAID cuts, Philippine development groups struggle as anger lingers

An investigation by several regional media outlets shows USAID was a target of misinformation after Trump froze aid from the agency “On a personal level, it was the loss of income. But we lost a lot of critical projects in the country,” Sharon*, a former country representative for a US-based organisation overseeing these projects in the Philippines, said in an interview. For Sharon’s team, the cutback affected support for democracy and human rights defenders, environmental campaigners and journalists. Their report showed that publicly available funding records were recast as evidence that USAID was an instrument of US economic warfare, media control and political interference. In February 2025, the US State Department said it was eliminating over 90 per cent of USAID contracts and US$60 billion of support worldwide.

May 14, 2026

Business

Centuries ahead of Wall Street: how China’s Song dynasty pioneered global fiat currency

At least gold glitters. Long before the first paper banknotes fluttered through the financial houses of Europe, the bustling markets of 11th century China birthed an unprecedented financial “innovation”: the use of paper currency. In the 1020s, burdened by the shortage of bronze coins and a rapidly expanding economy, merchants in the southwestern province of Sichuan began issuing paper promissory notes. This marked the genesis of jiaozi, the world’s earliest paper money. Soon, with the imperial...

May 14, 2026

Business

Jimmy Lai case shows press freedom is not a get-out-of-jail-free ticket

To ignore or condone the Jimmy Lais and Apple Dailies of the world is to encourage the hypocrisy and abuses seen in news reporting today The rise of the internet and ever more channels of news delivery has enabled a global audience of news consumers, attuned to reports delivered from all around the world. This has turned the most successful news providers into some of the most powerful and influential communication tools of our time. Such power and influence are not lost on political leaders and interest groups. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine a major news outlet not taking a side in politics or having behind it some powerful political figure. For the high-minded, this is, of course, a disappointing turn of events for the journalistic profession. In one of the Spider-Man films, Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben tells him: “With great power comes great responsibility.” For those in the news business, any abuse of that power not only represents a denial of responsibility but also a betrayal of journalistic values. Sadly, such cases exist.

May 14, 2026

Business

Who is Ronald dela Rosa, the ICC-wanted lawmaker holed up in the Philippine Senate?

The ex-police chief, accused by the ICC of crimes in Duterte’s drug war, is evading arrest over the bloody campaign that killed thousands When Duterte assumed the presidency in June 2016, he appointed dela Rosa, his former police chief in Davao City, as head of the Philippine National Police (PNP), a post he held for 21 months. Duterte gave him broad authority to replicate Davao’s crime-fighting model nationwide. “He is leaving everything up to me,” dela Rosa, popularly known as “Bato”, or “rock”, said at the time. On his first day as PNP chief, dela Rosa ⁠issued a directive launching the nationwide anti-illegal drugs crackdown to fulfil Duterte’s campaign promise. The programme, called Project Double Barrel, was patterned after Davao City’s policing strategy and aimed ‌at the “neutralisation of illegal drug personalities nationwide”. Its roll-out was followed by a sharp rise in killings. Police reported more than 2,000 deaths between Duterte’s inauguration on June 30 and the end of that year, most described as occurring during shoot-outs.

May 14, 2026

Business

‘Basically a Chinese racket’: how China streaked ahead at a global AI conference

Mainland China accounted for 44 per cent of the top 50 institutions contributing to the ICLR in Rio de Janeiro, according to analysis Among the top 50 institutions contributing to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), held in Rio de Janeiro last month, mainland China accounted for about 44 per cent of the total, with Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University and Peking University taking the top four spots globally. Some social media users pointed out that if Hong Kong’s 7.7 per cent share was counted together with mainland China’s, the country’s contribution would exceed half of all papers presented at the conference. “If you count mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore as mostly Chinese, and add the many Chinese-American researchers [in the US], AI research is basically a Chinese racket,” one user identifying himself as a Silicon Valley hi-tech entrepreneur wrote, partly in jest. Tsinghua University alone had 332 accepted papers, based on an analysis by Ukrainian computer scientist Dmytro Lopushanskyy, who is now an AI technical lead at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

May 14, 2026

Business

China parent brings son, 12, to work, where he plays with fire, destroying entire office

Bored youngster picks up lighter and starts burning paper tissues in workplace; staff and firefighters battle to quell flames A 12-year-old boy in China who was taken to work by one of his parents literally played with fire and left an office completely destroyed. The parent, whose gender is unknown, took the boy to an office in Ningbo in the eastern province of Zhejiang on April 30 in an effort to enhance their emotional bond, the Red Star News reported. While busy with work, the parent left the boy alone in the office. The youngster became bored and came up with an unconventional way to kill time: burning tissues using a lighter. Flying sparks ignited clutter near the desk which developed into a massive blaze engulfing the office. The boy called his parent for help and the parent called firefighters. Meanwhile, the parent and some other employees tried to put out the flames using a dry-powder extinguisher. Before the firefighters arrived, they had put out much of the fire, but the premises was gutted. No one was injured but losses from the blaze are thought to amount tens of thousands of yuan.

May 14, 2026

Business

US’ Rubio calls on China to play an ‘active’ role in ending Iran war, despite Trump rhetoric

The Middle East crisis will come into sharp focus during the Xi-Trump summit as Marco Rubio says it threatens to ‘destabilise Asia’ Speaking to Fox News aboard Air Force One, Rubio said the Iran war was a “huge source of instability” and “threatens to destabilise Asia more than any other part of the world because it’s heavily reliant on the straits for energy”. “It’s in [China’s] interest to resolve this. We hope to convince them to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away from what they’re doing now and trying to do now in the Persian Gulf,” he said. When departing for Beijing on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that he planned to have a “long talk” with the Chinese leader about the Iran war, adding that “good things are going to happen”. But Trump also said he did not think he needed Xi’s help with Iran and that the US would “win it one way or the other, peacefully or otherwise”.

May 14, 2026

Business

Japan-South Korea ‘comfort women’ row stoked by statues abroad

The removal of wartime sex slave memorials in Germany and New Zealand has electrified certain LDP hardliners, risking a diplomatic rift Statues erected by South Korean civic groups on the other side of the world honouring the tens of thousands of women forced into sexual slavery by imperial Japanese forces during World War II have once again succeeded in making Tokyo’s elites deeply uncomfortable. In April, Auckland’s city council reversed a previous decision to allow a memorial’s installation. Berlin similarly ordered the removal of its statue after a limited public display. The ruling survived a subsequent appeal by the South Korean group behind it and the statue is now reported to be on show elsewhere in the German capital. A Japanese foreign ministry official briefed a joint meeting of the LDP’s foreign affairs division and its foreign affairs research council about the latest developments on Tuesday. “We should firmly assert Japan’s position,” one attending lawmaker was quoted as saying by the Yomiuri newspaper about the long-running dispute, which has proved a thorn in the side of successive governments in Tokyo and Seoul.

May 14, 2026