Day: February 15, 2026

The Ministry of Emergency Management has warned officials of the urgent need to prevent a repeat of the fireworks explosion that killed eight people in Jiangsu province, eastern China, on Sunday, the start of the country’s nine-day Lunar New Year holiday. The ministry convened an emergency meeting following the blast at a fireworks shop in Dongan village in Donghai county, which happened after a villager “improperly set off fireworks near the store”. According to state broadcaster CCTV, two people sustained minor burns in the explosion. Officials from the emergency, fire,…

Arthur Konnerth, a recipient of the prestigious Brain Prize, has joined the Shenzhen Bay Laboratory (SZBL) on a full-time basis, the institute announced on January 29. Konnerth is a leading figure in neuroscience whose work has helped transform the understanding of how the brain processes information. His research focuses on the fundamental mechanisms of learning and memory, employing a combination of electrophysiological, imaging and cellular techniques. Konnerth pioneered the in vitro brain slice patch-clamp recording method – a technique that has become a cornerstone of modern neuroscience – and made…

Chinese military activities – and the need to respond to them – were framed as a major driver of cooperation between US allies in the Indo-Pacific and Europe during this year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC). It comes as Washington pushes its allies to spend more on their own defence and in the collective defence of the “first island chain” to deter potential war with China. Speaking at the conference on Saturday, Elbridge Colby, US undersecretary of defence for policy, said that while Washington wanted a “stable and respectful” relationship with…

Chinese tech companies are competing to make their mark during the Spring Festival Gala presented by state-run broadcaster CCTV, a variety show and annual spectacle that provides a rare nationwide marketing opportunity, like the Super Bowl in the US, and is also an unmistakable signal of political alignment with Beijing’s industrial priorities. This year, ByteDance’s cloud computing arm, Volcano Engine, secured an “exclusive AI cloud partnership” with the gala, scheduled for Monday, taking the baton from last year’s sponsor Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing and artificial intelligence unit of Alibaba…

In the South China Sea, conference rooms and contested shoals operate on parallel tracks. Whether this compartmentalisation can hold or whether the next incident drags everyone into a crisis is fast becoming a regional question, not merely a bilateral one. Days after the diplomatic talks in the Philippine city of Cebu, a multilateral senior officials’ meeting on the South China Sea – attended by China and other claimants within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – endorsed a road map to advance code of conduct negotiations. Manila’s recent 14-day visa-free…