Maria Knapp, Recognized by BestAgents.us as a 2023 Top Agent

The driver’s seat was empty and the steering wheel was turning on its own. Sitting in the back of a Pony.ai robotaxi in Shenzhen, I felt a flicker of nervousness. But as the car glided into traffic, the initial unease gave way to an appreciation of something far less futuristic: the blissful absence of small talk with the driver. My test rides in two of China’s major tech hubs – with Pony.ai in Shenzhen and Baidu’s Apollo Go in Beijing – offered a first-hand experience of how autonomous vehicles...

Preliminary results showed the right-wing bloc slightly ahead but no clear winner after an election that was dominated by economic concerns.

New Zealand’s ruling centre-right National Party and main opposition Labour were nearly deadlocked in the popular vote after initial counting in the nationwide general election on Saturday. Results from the Electoral Commission show that with more than 95 per cent of the ballots counted, both parties were polling just short of 30 per cent of the popular vote, with just a few thousand votes separating the two. A projection from New Zealand’s Electoral Commission ‌showed the current three-party...

Malaysia’s king warned on Saturday that any attempt to ⁠challenge his order ⁠letting former prime minister Najib Razak go ⁠from jail to house arrest could amount to defying his decree, a day after authorities delayed Najib’s transfer. Najib has been in jail since 2022 after being found guilty of corruption and money laundering in a case linked to a multibillion-dollar ‌scandal at state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad. He has consistently denied wrongdoing. He was due to be transferred home on...

New Delhi ranked as the world’s ⁠most polluted major ⁠city on Saturday ⁠morning, according to Swiss group IQAir, as the Indian capital faced severe pollution forecasts a day before Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. India has ordered schools in and around Delhi to offer online classes and encouraged people to work from home ahead of Diwali on Sunday, which is usually marked by the widespread use of firecrackers ⁠that further worsen the air quality. IQAir ranked Delhi ‌first for air pollution...

Garment workers in Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest clothing exporter after China, are demanding that their wages more than double – and their protests have brought a halt to production in factories supplying global brands including H&M, Zara and Walmart. Tens of thousands of workers have marched through Dhaka and the key industrial towns of Gazipur, Ashulia and Narayanganj in recent days demanding higher pay. Protests turned violent in several hubs, with factories vandalised and roads...

North Korea rewards ⁠its top hackers, tasked with heists like the Binance crypto hack that netted a cool US$6.3 ⁠billion, with perks such as spacious apartments in the capital and huge hard currency awards in return for ⁠gruelling hours of work. Leader Kim Jong-un has assembled an army of world-class hackers using such incentives in a programme more than a decade old that picks 200 of the smartest middle school students each year to study computer engineering, defectors and analysts say. A...

A memo that circulated among U.S. policymakers cited intelligence that Alice Huang, a Chinese executive who developed a relationship with Nvidia’s leader, was an asset of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security.

Myanmar’s military-backed government may find its reluctance to address the international community’s concerns a greater obstacle to economic recovery than the threat of tougher international financial restrictions, according to analysts. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global money-laundering and terrorist-financing watchdog, warned on October 30 that it could consider further measures against Myanmar if it failed to remedy shortcomings in its financial safeguards by...

Russia’s seizure of the assets of a Japanese company could prove to be Tokyo’s red line after a series of bitter exchanges between both nations and ties that continue to spiral. The Japanese government on Friday lodged a formal complaint with Russia and demanded that Moscow immediately reverse a decree announced the previous day that transferred the assets of Japan Tobacco International (JTI) to Russian control. Analysts say the decree, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, is likely a...

All across Asia, anti-establishment protests have been flaring up, led by a generation that came of age in the digital era. Memes are mobilising a young, permanently online cohort against specific government policies, insults and injustices – its many members determined to seize their own destinies before the future they fear takes root. Asia is home to 60 per cent of the world’s adolescents and young people, or some 1 billion in total, according to UN estimates. Gen Z, roughly defined as those...

Suffield Academy placed its longtime head of school, Charlie Cahn III, on leave last month after learning that he was the subject of a federal investigation.