Day: June 27, 2025

A Shandong Airlines flight from Qingdao to Shanghai was forced to make an emergency landing in Nanjing on Friday, with passengers saying they smelled a burning odour. Advertisement According to a social media post by the airline on Friday, flight SC4667 experienced an “aircraft malfunction” and the crew diverted to an airport in Nanjing after handling the situation in accordance with procedures to ensure passenger safety. “All affected passengers have been properly accommodated, and another aircraft has been dispatched to operate subsequent flights,” the post said. A user claiming to…

As Israeli jets and American bombers streaked across Iranian skies earlier this month, the world watched a familiar game plan unfold – one that had its origins in secret meetings, veiled ambitions and the relentless logic of regional dominance that has haunted the Middle East for generations. Advertisement The process began decades earlier, in the smoke of American air strikes on Iraq and the calculations of US policymakers determined to keep Israel unrivalled. It was the late 1990s when a small, bipartisan delegation of senior US senators touched down in…

The rain and gloomy skies during the SNEC PV Conference – the biggest in China’s solar-panel manufacturing industry – summed up the mood in the market, whose major players congregated in Shanghai earlier this month for the four-day annual event. Advertisement The scale was noticeably smaller this year. Several leading companies opted out for a variety of reasons, including tight budgets. More tellingly, CEOs from major producers Longi Green Technology and Tongwei – keynote speakers last year – gave it a miss. The weariness is not surprising. The industry, billed…

For the first time in four years, the leaders of South Korea and Japan were nowhere to be seen at the annual Nato summit. Advertisement The four countries are not Nato members, but the security bloc has identified Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand – also known as the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) – as key partners in the alliance’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific region. Leaders of all four countries had attended annual Nato summits since 2022, at the invitation of the alliance, but this year, Japan, South Korea and…

Watching as missile bombardments threaten key shipping routes and blow up some of their trade deals in the Middle East, with Iran at the centre of the firestorm, Chinese exporters are feeling the heat. Advertisement After finalising a deal with an Iranian buyer she met at China’s Canton Fair in April, Miya Yu, a trader of light industrial goods – valves, toys, aluminium containers, etc – collected the necessary materials to begin production and fill the order. Production never began. The contracted client vanished without a word as his country…

With the July 9 deadline for “Liberation Day” tariffs nearing, US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington would inform countries “what they have to pay” to do business with America “over the next week and a half or so”. Advertisement His remarks came hours after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested trade talks could continue to September. Trump also directed a new salvo at Canada, announcing an immediate halt to trade talks in retaliation for Ottawa’s plan to introduce a digital trade tax that could largely target American tech…

Advertisement The pre-emptive strikes also risked setting a precedent for US adversaries to justify similar action against any serious efforts by the US’ Asia-Pacific partners to gain their own nuclear weapons, they said. After a series of Israeli assaults on Iran’s nuclear sites, the US on Sunday deployed more than 125 aircraft and a submarine in an operation to attack three Iranian nuclear sites. The targeted action against Iran – which Israel sees as an existential threat – was one of the largest efforts to set back Iranian enrichment efforts.…