New Zealand’s foreign minister said he had raised concerns over China’s recent live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea during meetings with Chinese leaders on Wednesday. The issue was a lack of notice given to New Zealand over the military exercises off its coast, Winston Peters told reporters in Beijing after meetings with Chinese foreign minister…
Qantas has posted a bumper $1.39bn half-year pre-tax profit, fuelled by a 10% uptick in customers. The airline rewarded shareholders with hundreds of millions in dividend payments out of the windfall. The airline’s $1.39bn half-year underlying profit, announced on Thursday, is an 11% increase on the same period last year, and was driven by a…
The Trump administration has ordered New York City to end its congestion pricing program by 21 March. In a letter dated 20 February and publicized on Wednesday, the US transportation department’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) executive director, Gloria Shepherd, informed New York state and city officials that they “must cease the collection of tolls on…
Power has been restored to most of Chile’s 19 million people after the country’s most disruptive blackout in 15 years, the government said, as authorities lifted a strict curfew imposed when the outage left 98% of the population without electricity. Chilean interior minister Carolina Tohá said on Wednesday that electricity had largely returned to Chile’s…
US government agency heads have been given a 13 March deadline to produce a plan for drastically slashing the federal workforce as Donald Trump reinforced warnings that workers who failed to account for what they do could be fired. A White House memo issued on Wednesday directed bosses to provide details of their workforce reduction…
A cliff on the edge of the Yangtze River has become an overnight sensation in China after a Shanghai-based designer posted a photo of it earlier this month likening it to a dog. Guo Qingshan took the photo, which he captioned “Puppy Mountain”, while on a hike near his home town of Yichang, in Hubei…
Romanian prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Călin Georgescu, the far-right, Moscow-friendly populist who surged from almost nowhere to win the first round of the country’s cancelled presidential election last year. The announcement of the investigation covering a number of separate accusations took place after Georgescu, 62, was stopped by police in Bucharest traffic…
The ex-007 star Timothy Dalton has weighed in on last week’s announcement on the future of the James Bond franchise. On 20 February, Amazon announced it had struck a deal to have “creative control” over the movies after negotiating with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the heirs to the series. Dalton, who played Bond…
The Covid inquiry will hear detailed evidence about the multimillion-pound PPE contracts awarded during the crisis to a company linked to the Conservative peer Michelle Mone, but in private, the inquiry chair has ruled. The National Crime Agency has since May 2021 been investigating potential criminal offences committed in the procurement of the contracts awarded…
Donald Trump is facing a backlash on his Truth Social platform after sharing an AI-created video of him sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, in a future imagining of the Palestinian territory devastated by Israel’s war. The video presented a computer-generated vision of Trump’s property development plan for Gaza, under which he…
