Amazon retrenches 9,000 workers: Singapore employees ‘abruptly cut off from work terminals’

Amazon started laying off employees in its cloud services division on Wednesday (April 26) as part of a retrenchment exercise that is expected to affect 9,000 employees, and those from the Singapore office were not spared. The exercise, which was announced in March, comes on the heels of layoffs that cut 18,000 jobs between November 2022...

Taiwan says Chinese combat drone circled island

A new type of Chinese combat drone that China's state media says can carry a heavy weapons payload has flown around Taiwan, the island's defence ministry said on Friday (April 28), in the latest uptick in military tensions. China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has increased military pressure on the island...

Trump paints doomsday scenario if Biden wins White House again

Donald Trump said on Thursday (April 27) that if he wins the 2024 presidential election, he will order the Justice Department to investigate "radical" county and state prosecutors whom he accused, without evidence, of targeting conservatives. In a campaign speech, the former president, who faces multiple criminal investigations, said the prosecutors were "persecuting conservatives" and touched...

China CDC urges WHO to take scientific fair position on Covid-19 origins

The head of China's Center For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Saturday (April 8) urged the World Health Organisation (WHO) to return to a "scientific, fair" position in tracing the origin of Covid-19. At a news conference, Shen Hongbing warned the WHO against politicising the source of the virus, which was first detected in...

India asks states to ramp up testing as Covid-19 cases climb

India's federal government asked states to identify emergency hotspots and ramp up-testing for Covid-19, after the country recorded its highest daily case count since September, a Reuters tally showed on Friday (April 7). There were 6,050 new cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, the federal health ministry said on Friday, continuing a sharp...

US searches for source of highly-classified intel leak

  Highly classified military and intelligence documents that appeared online, with details ranging from Ukraine's air defences to Israel's Mossad spy agency, have US officials scrambling to identify the leak's source, with some Western security experts and US officials saying they suspected it could be someone from the US. Officials say the breadth of topics addressed in the...

More Singapore billionaires on Forbes’ 2023 rich list, including co-founder of Raffles Medical Group

Mr Li Xiting, founder and chairman of Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics, a global provider of medical devices based in China, has again topped Forbes' list of billionaires in Singapore. Mr Li was among 35 billionaires from the Republic – up from 26 in 2022. Their collective net worth came to US$118.9 billion (S$157.6 billion), compared with US$106.7 billion...

China holds the key to understanding Covid-19 origins: WHO chief

The World Health Organisation chief pressed China on Thursday (April 6) to share its information about the origins of Covid-19, saying that until that happened all hypotheses remained on the table, more than three years after the virus first emerged. "Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that," said...

Macron meets China’s Li as EU leaders begin Beijing talks

French President Emmanuel Macron began a series of meetings with Chinese leaders in Beijing on Thursday (April 6) on a visit with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen that could set a course for the bloc's future relations with China after years of strained ties. Newly-appointed Premier Li Qiang greeted Macron at the Great Hall...

US, South Korea, Japan express concern over North Korea’s ‘malicious’ cyber activities

The US, South Korea and Japan expressed deep concern over North Korea's "malicious" cyber activities to support its weapons programmes, in comments released in a joint statement on Friday (April 7). Crypto currency funds stolen by North Korean hackers have been a key source for financing the sanctions-stricken country's weapons programmes, officials and experts in the...