News

From pop to politics, it’s been quite the year. Were you paying attention? Let’s find out …
1-5 Please pay more attention. 6-14 Very good. But spend less time looking up from your phone in 2026. 15-20 Please write this next year.

A reordering of the rules of trade, set on top of transformational change in technology, demographics and climate, is remaking jobs, politics and lives.

Minister says risk to ‘any individual’ from cyber-attack is low and that it is still unclear who is responsible
The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was hacked in October, a minister has said.
Chris Bryant, a trade minister in Keir Starmer’s government, told Sky News there was a low risk to “any individual” from the cyber-attack.

Joint venture will take over part of app’s US operations, including data protection, algorithm security and content moderation


TikTok has reached a deal to form a joint venture that will allow it to continue operating in the US, five years after Donald Trump over privacy and national security concerns, a move that further strained relations with China.
ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, has signed a deal with Larry Ellison’s Oracle, the private-equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX that will allow it to retain control of its core US operations.

Pandas have stood for friendship between China and Japan since 1972. But the last two are about to go, and a dispute over Taiwan could get in the way of sending more.

Exclusive: Clashes over rural plots are increasing, as people whose big-city plans have evaporated return home to face local governments groaning under huge debt
Standing inside the temple armed with buckets of rice, the villagers gaze out at police officers armed with riot shields and sticks, the sound of shouting audible over banging drums.
Then the tension erupts. A , some villagers throw handfuls of rice at the officers, a traditional custom for dispelling evil, while others hoist religious artefacts onto their shoulders and march away, past groups of police and other officials.

In 1989, Gen. Xu Qinxian defied orders to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing. Now, leaked video from his court-martial is on YouTube.

From 1 January, contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – part of a carrot-and-stick approach by the government to increase births
China is set to impose a value-added tax (VAT) on condoms and other contraceptives for the first time in three decades, as the country tries to boost its and modernise its tax laws.
From 1 January, condoms and contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – a tax from which the goods have been exempt since China introduced nationwide VAT in 1993.

Canadian Centre for Architecture, MontrealThe birth of the People’s Republic is seen as a time of drab buildings. But this dazzling show, featuring a factory in a cave and a denounced roof, tells a wildly different story
In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.”
Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind, rain or sun”, as a passerby observes. “Why don’t these buildings adopt the Chinese national style?” asks another bewildered figure, as he cowers beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of the corrupt, capitalist west.

In public, the White House says it is confronting Venezuela to curb drug trafficking. Behind the scenes, gaining access to the country’s vast oil reserves is a priority.

Her film “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” earned an Oscar nomination in 1988 and was inducted into the National Film Registry for its cultural significance.

Ex- Miss Universe contestant Sarah Dzafce has drawn backlash in East Asia and in her own country.