By Andrew Hayley BEIJING (Reuters) -Russia’s prime minister signed a set of agreements with China on Wednesday during a trip to Beijing, describing bilateral ties at an unprecedented high, despite criticism of their relationship in the West as the war in Ukraine drags on. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the highest-ranking Russian official to visit Beijing…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department on Monday said Russia’s Wagner Group is trying to obscure its efforts to acquire military equipment for use in Ukraine, adding that Washington has been informed the mercenary force is seeking to move those acquisitions through Mali to aid Russia in its war. Wagner is willing to use…
TOKYO (Reuters) – China remains a high-priority market for Panasonic even as geopolitics have highlighted the need for robust supply chains elsewhere, the Japanese group’s chief executive said. Leaders at the recent Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima stressed the need for firms to “de-risk” but not “decouple” from the world’s second-largest economy. “We…
By Filipp Lebedev, Lucy Papachristou and Mark Trevelyan LONDON (Reuters) – The director of a top Russian science institute, arrested on suspicion of treason along with two other hypersonic missile technology experts, stands accused of betraying secrets to China, two people familiar with the case told Reuters. Alexander Shiplyuk, head of Siberia’s Khristianovich Institute of…
BEIJING (Reuters) – April sales of Chinese lottery tickets jumped to their highest in a decade, data showed on Wednesday, with economists saying young people in particular were keener to try their luck amid greater economic uncertainty in the wake of the pandemic. The world’s second-largest economy is recovering from three years of stringent COVID-19…
By Lewis Jackson SYDNEY (Reuters) -The Australian Treasury has referred a confidential document leak scandal involving professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to police, Secretary to the Treasury Steven Kennedy said on Wednesday. The government, a PwC Australia client, has accused the firm of using confidential information about new anti-tax avoidance measures to win more business,…
By Josh Ye HONG KONG (Reuters) -Lenovo’s fourth quarter revenue fell 24% and it cut 8% to 9% of its workforce, the Chinese group said on Wednesday, as demand for personal computers (PCs) continued to slump. The world’s largest PC maker said revenue for the January-March period was $12.63 billion, marking the third consecutive quarterly…
By Emma Farge GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations human rights chief on Wednesday described the situation in Sudan as “heartbreaking” and made a direct call to the two warring generals to stop sexual violence and spare the lives of civilians. Fighting in Sudan that broke out more than a month ago has killed hundreds…
By Mike Dolan LONDON (Reuters) -Hype or hope, this year’s boom in artificial intelligence along with other productivity-enhancing tech developments may be one of few ways to sustain an increasingly fragile “global balance sheet” over coming decades. There is little doubt about the market heat, corporate alarm and social anxieties created in the mere six…
By Eduardo Baptista BEIJING (Reuters) – In the years before China declared U.S. firm Micron Technology’s products a national security risk, authorities were already scaling back purchases of its chips, opting instead for domestic or South Korean options, documents showed. A Reuters review of over a hundred public government tenders found that while previously Chinese…
