Day: June 24, 2025

Air crash tests India’s aviation boom

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Barely two months before India suffered its worst air crash in almost three decades, the country launched its first-ever lab for analysing “black boxes”, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders crucial to investigating aviation accidents. The facility was a testament to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign to upgrade air travel with a massive expansion of airports, airlines and infrastructure that has made India the world’s third-largest aviation market. “Only through effective and independent investigations can future accidents be prevented,” aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said when he inaugurated…

Air India crash tests Modi’s ambition to get country flying

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Barely two months before India suffered its worst air crash in almost three decades, the country launched its first-ever lab for analysing “black boxes”, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders crucial to investigating aviation accidents. The facility was a testament to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign to upgrade air travel with a massive expansion of airports, airlines and infrastructure that has made India the world’s third-largest aviation market. “Only through effective and independent investigations can future accidents be prevented,” aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said when he inaugurated…

China’s Li Qiang gives ‘Summer Davos’ keynote in tense global atmosphere

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Chinese Premier Li Qiang is scheduled to give the keynote speech at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions, also known as “Summer Davos”, in the northern port city of Tianjin on Wednesday morning. The world’s second-largest economy has largely withstood the tariff war launched by US President Donald Trump in April, but it still faces external challenges. The 90-day trade truce with the United States is set to expire, tensions are still high with the European Union and conflicts rage in the Middle East, exacerbated by the US bombing…

How the dance of death stars puts a new spin on the way suns are born

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Some stars nearing the end of their lives slow their spin in a “retirement solo” that not only shows the end is nigh but also how others are born. Advertisement Chinese astronomers have used this cosmic dance to look into the Milky Way’s past and find that stars born today spin much faster than those formed billions of years ago. Using data from Europe’s Gaia space telescope and other sky surveys, researchers at the Changchun Observatory in northeastern China studied thousands of stars, each with a mass roughly 1½ times…

Hong Kong investors hit jackpot in city’s IPO boom

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A blistering recovery in Hong Kong’s initial public offering (IPO) market this year has delivered a bonanza for investors, with returns above 30 per cent bucking a sluggish economy and languid property market. Advertisement Holding new shares from the 34 companies that have pulled off offerings in 2025 would generate an average return of 34 per cent, according to Bloomberg data. Even selling the stocks upon their debuts would have fetched a 10 per cent gain, the data showed. The eye-popping returns have coaxed institutional investors back to Asia’s third-largest…

Taiwan has upped the ante in the cold war over chips

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. For over a decade, the US has been waging its chip cold war with a familiar arsenal. Blacklists, export controls and extraterritorial rules — all staples of Washington’s well-worn playbook — were meant to deny China access to critical technologies and stall the ascent of its tech capabilities. The stall never came. In response, restrictions have grown increasingly severe. The US government is now weighing additional restrictions on China, including…

In a first, Xi will miss Brics in Rio as Li leads China delegation: sources

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Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend next week’s Brics summit in Rio de Janeiro, marking his first-ever absence from the gathering of leading emerging economies, the Post learned from multiple sources on Tuesday. Advertisement According to officials familiar with the matter, Beijing told the Brazilian government that Xi had a scheduling conflict. Instead, Premier Li Qiang is expected to lead the Chinese delegation, as he did at the G20 summit in India in 2023. Chinese involved in preparations, they said, cited Xi’s having met with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio…

North Korea mobilizes students to collect stones daily for flood prevention walls

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North Korea is mobilizing students in the northern border province of Ryanggang to gather rocks daily to help build flood walls as the region braces for seasonal monsoon rains, following devastating floods last year, sources told Radio Free Asia. Video: North Korea experiences heavy rains in Pyongyang, provincesLast July, large areas along the Amnok, or Yalu, River near North Korea’s border with China suffered extensive damage, prompting authorities to accelerate flood prevention measures this year ahead of monsoons that typically start in June and last until September. Last year, South…

Chinese carmaker Chery Auto ‘actively considering’ building UK factory

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The Chinese carmaker Chery Auto is considering building its second European factory in Britain. After launching two brands, Omoda and Jaecoo, in the UK in September, Chery’s UK director, Victor Zhang, said the company is making inroads in the British market with the appetite growing for Chinese cars. He was speaking at the annual conference of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, where the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, admitted that there was “still a lot of work” to do in negotiating away all of Donald Trump’s tariffs against the…