Thousands of people marched through Madrid on Saturday to protest the eviction earlier this week of an 87-year-old woman from her lifelong home, calling for greater protection for tenants. Images of Maricarmen Abascal being carried from her Madrid flat on a stretcher on Wednesday after police broke down her door have thrust Spain’s housing crisis back into the spotlight ahead of a general election due in 2027. Protesters rattled keys, blew whistles, chanted slogans and held banners calling for...

China and the United States have agreed to pursue a new military crisis-communication pact following the summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, according to Beijing, potentially giving commanders another mechanism for managing dangerous encounters across the Indo-Pacific. China’s Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that the two militaries had agreed to conclude a memorandum of understanding on “crisis communication and prevention” as soon as possible. The two militaries already have...

There is little question that Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, the heads of US semiconductor chip giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), had secured two of the best seats in the house at the White House state dinner on Thursday evening: at the head table alongside the two presidents and their wives. But what remains unclear is how much progress they were able to make on their primary goal of restoring access to the Chinese market, amid entrenched opposition to that happening in both China and...

US President Donald Trump on Saturday rejected a truce deal proposed by Iran that Tehran said could have reopened the Strait of Hormuz to shipping within a week. The waterway is key to the world’s energy supply and is now central to the conflict between the US and Iran, which is at a stalemate after nearly seven months. “I reject their proposal,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “They want to make a deal where they open the Strait immediately because they’re losing so badly. “They...

Pope Leo on Saturday celebrated an open-air mass in front of hundreds of thousands of faithful in Paris after riding in the Popemobile along the iconic Champs Elysees to the cheers of huge crowds clutching French and Vatican flags. The leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics is on a four-day trip to France, a secular country with deep Catholic roots, on the first official papal visit to France in nearly two decades. In the highlight of the visit’s second day, the 71-year-old pope led...

When Donald Trump arrives in Shenzhen for the November Apec summit, he will face a Chinese leader even more confident than the one who left Washington this week after a state visit heavy on pageantry but light on concrete deliverables. Experts attributed this confidence to three key factors – a newly upgraded bilateral framework seeking a “constructive relationship of strategic stability based on respect, fairness and reciprocity”, the warmer tone during Xi’s three-day visit, and – crucially –...

The Brics-founded New Development Bank could help launch a fund by the end of the year to guarantee cheap loans for poor families in Africa and Latin America, Brazil’s social development minister said. The scheme would be the Shanghai-based lender’s first financial commitment to Brazil’s global anti-hunger alliance, an initiative sidelined by Washington’s presidency of the G20 this year. Wellington Dias told the South China Morning Post on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in...