Day: October 18, 2025

Battery fire aboard Air China flight to South Korea forces emergency landing

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An Air China flight from Hangzhou to Seoul was forced to make an emergency landing in Shanghai on Saturday after a lithium battery caught fire in the plane’s cabin. Advertisement In a statement on social media, Air China confirmed the incident. “On October 18, on flight CA139 from Hangzhou to Incheon, a lithium battery in a passenger’s carry-on luggage stored in the overhead compartment spontaneously ignited,” the airline said. The crew handled the situation quickly, it added, and “to ensure flight safety”, the plane had to “make an unscheduled landing”…

Europe slowly awakens to its entry into US-China wars

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This article is an onsite version of our Europe Express newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter sent straight to your inbox every weekday and fortnightly on Saturday morning. Explore all of our newsletters here Welcome back. De-risking rather than decoupling. This neat phrase to describe the EU’s way of dealing with China was first coined by Ursula von der Leyen in early 2023 before becoming official EU policy a few months later. The European commission president frequently recites it. But the formulation is looking a little threadbare. There…

Nexperia said to halt salaries and system access for Chinese employees

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Nexperia has withheld access to work accounts and halted salaries for its employees in China, according to local news reports citing a letter from the Chinese unit of the Dutch chipmaker, marking the latest escalation in a growing political dispute between the Netherlands and China. Advertisement The Chinese unit of Nexperia informed customers on Friday that it had been notified by headquarters that salary payments would cease and employees’ access to company systems would be suspended, according to Chinese media reports. “We are deeply puzzled and disappointed,” the unit said…

Expelled Chinese generals ‘disloyal’, dealt ‘serious blow’ to army: PLA Daily

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China has accused the nine generals expelled from the Communist Party on Friday of seriously undermining the principle that the military should be loyal to the party and dealing a serious blow to the army’s unity and the image of senior officers. Advertisement An editorial published by PLA Daily on Saturday also said the nine generals – including He Weidong, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and a member of the 24-man Politburo – were “being disloyal” and losing their “chastity”. It further accused them of “a total collapse…

Chen Ning Yang, Chinese-American physicist and Nobel laureate, dies at 103

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Chen Ning Yang, one of the world’s most renowned physicists and a Nobel prize winner, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103 after an illness, state media outlet Xinhua has reported. Born in eastern China’s Hefei in Anhui province in 1922, Yang was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics. Yang shared the 1957 Nobel prize for physics with Tsung-Dao Lee, who died in 2024. They were awarded the prize for work that overthrew the widely accepted “parity laws”…

Chinese Nobel laureate and physicist Chen Ning Yang dies aged 103

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Chen Ning Yang, Nobel laureate and one of the world’s most influential physicists, has died at the age of 103, according to Chinese state media. An obituary released by CCTV cited illness as the cause of death. Yang and fellow theoretical physicist, Lee Tsung-Dao, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their work in parity laws, which led to important discoveries regarding elementary particles – the building blocks of matter. Yang was also a professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and an honorary dean of the…

Overseas expansion adds fuel to Chinese energy storage firms’ hunt for bosses

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Openings at overseas energy storage operations flood John Yang’s screen anytime he browses recruitment websites, with listed giants and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) alike offering salaries well above those typically found in China’s manufacturing sector. Advertisement “Job seeking has never felt easier. The only worry is whether the new role could last beyond next year,” joked Yang, Thailand director at a Shenzhen-based energy storage firm. Yang’s experience reflects the recent, rapid overseas expansion of Chinese energy storage companies as they seek to establish themselves as global leaders amid a…

‘You’re in spy territory’: how two UK nationals got tangled in a Chinese espionage row

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For Christopher Cash it was а job he adored. The young parliamentary researcher, then in his late 20s, was a China specialist working successively for two influential backbenchers, Tom Tugendhat and Alicia Kearns. He had a parliamentary pass and was plugged into Westminster’s gossip network during 2022, a year of Conservative turmoil in Westminster, three prime ministers and future policy uncertainty. At the same time, Cash was in close contact with a friend, Christopher Berry, a teacher based in Hangzhou, eastern China, where the Britons had first met five years…

Chinese Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chen-ning Yang dies, aged 103

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Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Chen-ning Yang, died in Beijing on Saturday at the age of 103. Advertisement He was often ranked alongside Albert Einstein as one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists. In 1954, he co-authored a set of equations with the American physicist Robert Mills that turned out to be as important to physics as Einstein’s theory of relativity. The resulting Yang–Mills theory described how three of nature’s four fundamental forces — the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions — operate in the subatomic world. It laid the mathematical foundation…