Secular News

President Trump's Department of Justice sent a plane this week to Cuba to return a 10-year-old from Utah who is at the center of a custody fight involving the child's gender identity.

A court has convicted an Italian man of human trafficking by tricking a Singaporean woman into sex work in Dubai, after rejecting his defence arguments attacking the victim. Achraf Arjaouy, 31, had claimed trial to one count of recruiting a person by means of deception for the purpose of sexual exploitation in Dubai. The victim’s identity is protected by a gag order. The prosecution’s case was that Arjaouy had targeted a woman he met on Tinder by pretending to be a wealthy pilot from Qatar who...

France and "like-minded countries" must work together to avoid becoming "hostages" on critical minerals used in everything from phones to solar panels, Paris's trade minister said Thursday.

Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation has unveiled its first wheelset maintenance centre, set to open in the coming months, cutting the time for the labour-intensive process from more than three days to 10 hours. The rail giant said on Thursday that the new HK$300 million (US$38.3 million) Integrated Wheelset Maintenance Centre, located at the Ho Man Tin siding, would be capable of processing 1,500 wheelsets annually through automation. The capacity is designed to meet growing service demands on the Tuen...

Tencent Holdings has released a new flagship artificial intelligence model, the first since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined the Chinese tech giant to lead its foundational AI development efforts. The Shenzhen-based company said on Thursday that the closed-source HY3-Preview was its most powerful model yet, on par with leading Chinese models, while still lagging top US models from the likes of OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Notably, the model is relatively small with only 295 billion...

For years, Nasa funded a dream called SpiderFab – a spider-like robot that would crawl through orbit, weaving solar power stations and giant antennas from spools of carbon fibre – creating structures too large for any rocket to carry whole. Although SpiderFab never ended up in space, scientists from the Shenyang Institute of Automation in northern China say they have built the key technologies to reach a similar goal. The team first made the building blocks from a carbon-fibre composite, shaping...

A 74-year-old British grandmother who set off on a solo trip to China received an unexpected outpouring of support from Chinese netizens who took turns to guide her on her journey. The heartwarming story began with Xiao Yue, a senior university student from Hezhou in Guangxi Province, southern China, who first met the British grandmother while volunteering in Phuket. The woman, Gill, 74, has travelled to 72 countries on her own and has also volunteered in many countries before. Recently, Xiao...

Analysts say Russia made virtually no gains in March, its weakest frontline performance in two and a half years

Great Britain's Jess Warner Judd will make her London Marathon debut less than two years after a mid-race seizure left her fearing her career might be over.

Great Britain's Jess Warner Judd will make her London Marathon debut less than two years after a mid-race seizure left her fearing her career might be over.

Great Britain's Jess Warner-Judd will make her London Marathon debut less than two years after a mid-race seizure left her fearing her career might be over.

Great Britain's Jess Warner-Judd will make her London Marathon debut less than two years after a mid-race seizure left her fearing her career might be over.