Chinese ⁠Premier ⁠Li Qiang on Monday extended congratulations to Andy Burnham on ‌becoming Britain’s new prime minister. Strengthening dialogue and cooperation between ⁠China and Britain will benefit ‌the two countries and “inject stability into global ‌peace”, Li said in ⁠his ⁠message, Reuters reported. “I am willing to ‌work with the prime minister ‌to strengthen exchanges, ‌enhance mutual ‌trust, promote communication and cooperation, ⁠and advance the long-term, ⁠stable comprehensive...

British prosecutors ⁠said on Monday ⁠that a 28-year-old ⁠man had been charged with murdering former government minister Ann Widdecombe, who was found dead at her home earlier this month. Widdecombe, 78, who was ‌a prominent member of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK, was found at her home in rural southwest England on July 9 after sustaining what police described as serious injuries. She stood down from parliament in ⁠2010. Joshua Kerry, a white British national from northern England, has ‌been...

Hungary’s government announced an investigation on Monday into a large foreign investment by Chinese carmaker BYD negotiated by a former foreign minister who last week resigned from parliament to take an executive position at the company. Peter Szijjarto’s announcement last Wednesday that he would take the job at the world’s top electric carmaker prompted accusations of a conflict of interest and criticism over his role in organising substantial government subsidies to the company while in...

Mexican drug kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was sentenced on Monday to life in prison in the US, after a plea ‌deal last year in which he admitted to shipping millions of kilograms of cocaine over decades as leader of the violent Sinaloa Cartel. US District Judge Brian Cogan handed down the sentence at a hearing in Brooklyn federal court. Zambada is one of the most high-profile Mexican drug traffickers to be sentenced in a US court since fellow ⁠Sinaloa leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was...

As trade tensions with China reach boiling point, EU officials are ramping up engagement with Beijing in search of an off-ramp. Quietly behind the scenes, though, Europe is preparing for a trade war. In Brussels, a steely determination has set in to ensure the bloc’s manufacturing heartlands are not deindustrialised by the “China Shock 2.0”. With some industries already haemorrhaging jobs, the EU’s resilience-building and de-risking plans are now laced with deterrents as Brussels looks to...

Chinese start-up Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 has narrowed the country’s artificial intelligence gap with the US to “a matter of weeks”, fuelling jitters in Silicon Valley over its lead in frontier AI as China doubles down on its open-source strategy. The Beijing-based unicorn released the Kimi K3, a massive 2.8 trillion-parameter large language model, late last week. According to the company, the model featured native vision capabilities and was built for long-horizon coding, knowledge work and...

Beijing and Manila have exchanged fresh accusations over a clash in the South China Sea, just as China’s top diplomat is due to attend the Asean foreign ministers’ meeting in the Philippines. On social media late on Monday, the China Coast Guard said that at around 9am that morning as a small Chinese coastguard vessel was patrolling near Second Thomas Shoal, two rubber dinghies were launched “illegally” from the Philippine Navy’s BRP Sierra Madre, a vessel grounded on the shoal by Manila about...