Insurtech Leader FastTrack Unveils New Logo and Refreshed Website

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, said two pandas would arrive soon at Zoo Atlanta. Panda diplomacy has been a cornerstone of U.S.-China relations.

Ma Yansong, China’s reigning starchitect, lets his buildings wrapped in nature do the shouting.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said one soldier tried to kill himself when he was captured. “This is how they raise people in the North,” he said.

Singapore’s major financial institutions have pledged to train more than 80,000 local employees in AI skills as the country moves to cushion white-collar workers from potential job disruption. A pioneer batch of 23 banks, insurers and asset managers has committed to train all their Singapore staff by 2028, and more than half of them have already gone through programmes recognised by an industry association, according to Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong. The firms would also study how jobs were...

China’s technology sector is facing fresh pressure in the United States as lawmakers seek to broaden the range of products that can be placed on a trade blacklist, while Lenovo Group has been drawn into a patent dispute involving memory devices. The Communications and Technology Transparency Act, unveiled by the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, would expand the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Covered List from “communications equipment or service” to the much...

Sri Lanka’s main opposition took to the streets on Thursday to protest against judicial reforms, including raising the retirement age for judges, that the government says are needed to reduce legal delays. Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa told thousands of supporters outside parliament that the legislation proposed by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s left-wing administration would “annihilate” judicial independence. The government unveiled two bills last month to increase the number of...

A decade after the sale of Germany’s Kuka, Europe is seeking to shift into a higher gear to unlock the potential in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that U.S. negotiators had restarted conversations about Iran’s nuclear program, but that there were no breakthroughs.

Efforts to detect multiple cancers through a single blood draw are gathering momentum after US regulators endorsed the technology for the first time, although experts say wider adoption in Hong Kong still faces challenges as doctors remain cautious about its clinical value. In a landmark decision for the emerging field of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) blood tests, a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel on Thursday voted in favour of US company Grail’s “Galleri test”, recommending it...

For millions of Indians, buying a cup of chai or groceries from roadside vendors has come to mean reaching for their phones rather than wallets – a habit made possible by a system that has so far charged consumers nothing for such everyday transactions. Now, a decade after the government launched the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India is asking some merchants to pay for the hugely popular system – raising questions over whether it can preserve the low-cost model that drove its mass adoption...

The Americans being held in China are U Min Zin, a scholar who studied Myanmar, and Youlin Chen, a seismologist who researched North Korean nuclear tests.

The artificial intelligence road map presented at its flagship Apsara Conference this week showcased a pragmatic pivot by Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding, offering a clearer path to monetisation despite a sharp escalation in capital expenditure, analysts said. The conference, which ran from Tuesday to Thursday under the theme “Intelligence goes beyond”, highlighted “Alibaba’s disciplined execution across its full-stack AI ecosystem”, said Cathy Chan, an analyst at CCB International. She...