2023 Frankfurter Buchmesse presents Jade Cross Book 2: Before the Adventure by Harold Weist

Asian economies heavily dependent on imported energy are facing an even sharper squeeze after the shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline removed a key escape route from the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, deepening an energy shock that has already pushed crude oil above US$100 a barrel. Analysts said the loss of that bypass would hit Asian refiners first before feeding through to inflation, currencies and economic growth across the region. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil...

Singapore Airlines was awarded the title of world’s best airline in the annual rankings by Skytrax, taking the top spot from Qatar Airways in a year that saw Middle Eastern carriers come under significant pressure from the ongoing war in Iran. The award, which is based on a survey of almost 25 million travellers, was announced in London on Friday, with a list dominated by Asian carriers. Only one European airline – Air France-KLM – made the top 10, and not a single US company, despite their...

The suspect, a 16-year-old student, also died, officials said. It was the third high-profile school shooting in the Philippines in recent months.

President Lee Jae Myung’s comments followed President Trump’s repeated demand for “a little hand” from South Korea, a decades-old American ally.

The war with Iran revealed just how much influence the world’s biggest oil importer has over prices and other countries’ supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel.

An Australian accused of murdering a teenage girl in Thailand and abandoning her body in a suitcase pleaded not guilty in court on Friday, citing self-defence. Simon Peter Carman, 45, was arrested at a Bangkok airport in June as he prepared to take a flight back to Australia after the 17-year-old victim’s friend had reported her missing. The young woman’s body was found in a suitcase near a railway track in Pattaya, a seaside resort city south of the capital, Bangkok. Police said she died of...

Singapore Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing’s use of Mandarin and Chinese philosophy in his speech at a major security forum in Beijing has won him praise on Chinese social media, while shedding light on how cultural familiarity and language can be diplomatic tools for the city state. Videos of Chan at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum quoting ancient philosopher Mencius, or Mengzi in Mandarin, have gone viral on platforms such as Weixin and Baidu, with users hailing his command of the language and...

Thailand has moved to make weight-loss pens prescription-only, as a glut of the GLP-1 medicines – which mimic the hormones released once someone is full – floods the black market and influencers swarm TikTok to extol the quick wins of the simple injections. The Southeast Asian nation, which is never far behind wellness or aesthetic trends and has a notorious black market in counterfeit drugs, has seen the uptake of GLP-1 medicines skyrocket, doctors say, including the market-leading Ozempic...

Property agent Raymond Heng had suspected True Fitness was struggling, but he did not expect the gym he had visited for more than a decade to disappear overnight. The closure was not entirely surprising given the region’s fiercely competitive fitness industry, but its abruptness left Heng, 47, in disbelief after paying S$8,800 (US$6,900) for a lifetime membership in 2013. “I guessed that they might not have been doing that well since branches have been closing over the years, but I did not...

As Rodrigo Duterte’s crimes-against-humanity trial looms, an international tribunal faces the challenge of managing a sprawling prosecution case around the health of an 81-year-old former president of the Philippines, on top of shielding the proceedings from a highly charged media environment. Those pressures came into focus at an International Criminal Court (ICC) status conference on Wednesday, when Presiding Judge Joanna Korner urged prosecutors to trim their witness list and evidence ahead...

Chinese artificial intelligence models from seven major developers combined generate only about 10 per cent of the revenue reported for OpenAI and Anthropic, even as investor enthusiasm remains intense, according to US-based research firm Rhodium Group. The Chinese AI models earned an estimated US$10.7 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from March to August, a fraction of the more than US$100 billion combined for OpenAI and Anthropic, according to the Rhodium report published on...

The Bank of Japan’s widely expected move followed an unusual campaign by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for higher rates.