Town Hall News

By Laurie Chen BEIJING (Reuters) – Applied maths graduate Liang Huaxiao tried to land a job with one of China’s tech giants for two years. Then she tried customer service and sales. Then she applied for assistant roles in a bakery and in a beauty parlour. Like a rising number of her highly educated peers, Liang keeps trading down to try and find a source of income in China’s worst […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Veering away from a default crisis, the House approved a debt ceiling and budget cuts package late Wednesday, as President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy assembled a bipartisan coalition of centrist Democrats and Republicans against fierce conservative blowback and progressive dissent. The hard-fought deal pleased few, but lawmakers assessed it was better than the alternative — a devastating economic upheaval if Congress failed to act. Tensions […]

By Hyunsu Yim SEOUL (Reuters) -North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, said her country would soon put a military spy satellite into orbit and promised Pyongyang would increase its military surveillance capabilities, state media KCNA reported on Thursday. “It is certain that (North Korea’s) military reconnaissance satellite will be correctly put on space orbit in the near future and start its mission,” Kim, a powerful government […]

By Farah Master HONG KONG (Reuters) -An absence of women among China’s top leadership is concerning, the United Nations said in a report, as it recommended China adopt statutory quotas and a gender parity system to quicken equal representation of women in government. The recommendations for China by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, published on Tuesday, was made alongside findings on Germany, Iceland, Sao Tome […]

By Lananh Nguyen, Saeed Azhar and Nupur Anand NEW YORK (Reuters) -Bank of America Corp expects good performance for its retail business in the second quarter, buoyed by resilient consumer demand, a senior executive said on Wednesday. “The consumer is still very healthy,” Holly O’Neill, Bank of America’s president of retail banking, said at a Reuters Newsmaker event. “Savings and account balances are still well above where they were pre-pandemic, […]

BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s factory activity unexpectedly swung to growth in May from decline, a private sector survey showed on Thursday, driven by improved production and demand, helping struggling firms that have been hit by slumping profits. The Caixin/S&P Global manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose to 50.9 in May from 49.5 in April, above the 50-point index mark that separates growth from contraction. The reading surpassed expectations of 49.5 in […]

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian business investment rose to a seven-year high in the first quarter, helped by a jump in spending on mining, manufacturing and transport, while firms affirmed plans for solid spending in the year ahead. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Thursday showed private capital spending climbed a real 2.4% in the first quarter from the previous quarter, compared with forecasts ranging from a rise of […]

By Hyunsu Yim SEOUL (Reuters) -North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, said her country would soon put a military spy satellite into orbit and promised Pyongyang would increase its military surveillance capabilities, state media KCNA reported on Thursday. “It is certain that (North Korea’s) military reconnaissance satellite will be correctly put on space orbit in the near future and start its mission,” Kim, a powerful government […]

By Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Members of an independent NASA panel studying UFOs, or what the U.S. government now terms UAP for “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” said in their first public meeting on Wednesday that scant high-quality data and a lingering stigma pose the greatest barriers to unraveling such mysteries. The 16-member body, formed last year among leading experts from scientific fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, held […]