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SEOUL: Europe’s aviation regulator needs between three and six years to certify Chinese planemaker COMAC’s C919 single-aisle commercial jet, the agency’s executive director told a French publication on Monday. The C919 – designed to compete with best-selling narrow-body models of dominant planemakers Airbus and Boeing – entered service in China in 2023 after winning domestic safety certification in 2022. COMAC has previously said it was aiming for certification of the plane by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) this year, to help it start selling internationally. The C919 currently only flies within China and Hong Kong. “As we informed…

India’s benchmark indexes are poised to open higher on Tuesday, supported by easing trade tensions between the U.S. and its trading partners and sustained foreign inflows that have bolstered investor sentiment. Gift Nifty futures were trading at 24,484.5 as of 7:16 a.m. IST, indicating the Nifty 50 will open higher than Monday’s close of 24,328.5. The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here. Other Asian markets also opened higher, with the MSCI Asia ex-Japan index gaining 0.25%. Gold prices fell on Tuesday as easing trade tensions dented the…

A book by a US historian claiming Imperial Japanese Forces killed 30 million people across Asia in the early 20th century has faced a fierce backlash in Japan, with conservative scholars denouncing it as propaganda and the author receiving death threats.Japan’s Holocaust, published last year, argues that Japanese expansionism between 1927 and 1945 led to atrocities surpassing the death toll caused by Nazi Germany in Europe. The book, which its author Bryan Rigg began researching during his PhD at Yale in 1993, has sold 6,000 copies to date, with a Korean translation in the works and Chinese publishers expressing interest.The…

Alibaba Group Holding on Tuesday unveiled the highly anticipated third generation of its open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model series, which promises faster processing and enhanced multilingual capabilities, intensifying competition in an already crowded Chinese market.The Qwen3 family consists of eight models, ranging from 600 million parameters to 235 billion, with enhancements across all models, according to the Qwen team at Alibaba’s cloud computing unit. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.In AI, parameters are a measurement of the variables present during model training. They serve as an indicator of sophistication: larger parameter sizes typically suggest greater capacity.Benchmark tests cited by…

DreamSmart is working with Chinese fintech giant Ant Group to allow AI smart glass users to make payments, a feature that will be made available on its StarV Air2 eyewear in the third quarter this year, according to Guo Peng, general manager of the company’s XR (extended reality) business unit. Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.Payment is an important use case as it is “closely tied to consumers’ daily behaviour and frequently used”, Guo said in an interview with the Post on Monday.“I personally don’t believe that a single ‘killer…

China’s Tsinghua University has recruited a prominent American artificial intelligence (AI) researcher to join its newly established AI institution, underscoring the intensifying competition between China and the US for top industry talent.Alex Lamb, a senior researcher at the New York lab of Microsoft Research, will be joining Beijing-based Tsinghua University’s College of AI (CAI) as an assistant professor in the coming fall term, according to two people familiar with the matter. Lamb confirmed in an email to the Post that he was joining.Lamb’s profile on the professional social network LinkedIn still lists his employer as Microsoft. Tsinghua did not immediately…

ISLAMABAD: While accurate determination of electricity demand depends on timely weather forecasting, Islamabad Electric Supply Company (Iesco) has signed an agreement with the Pakistan Meteorological Department to determine the demand of electricity. Iesco spokesperson Raja Asim said that timely and accurate determination of electricity demand and then generation of electricity, according to demand, can ensure uninterrupted supply of electricity to the consumers. “In this regard Iesco and Pakistan Meteorological Department have signed an agreement,” he said. Met Office, power company sign agreement Iesco Chief Executive Mohammad Naeem Jan said that under the agreement, the Pakistan Meteorological Department will provide three…

ISLAMABAD: The business community and officials from relevant ministries slammed the Federal Board of Revenue and the FIA on Monday for their undue harassment of investors. Special Assistant Haroon Akhtar Khan chaired the meeting of the committee meeting constituted by the prime minister, to prevent undue interference by state functionaries. During the meeting, the business community raised concerns regarding unnecessary interference by the FBR, FIA and the provincial departments. Representatives from mainstream trade chambers and officials from commerce, industry, production, and finance ministries attended the meeting. The participants were also concerned about the lack of Business Facilitation Centres and one-window…

ISLAMABAD: Textile exporters have expressed grave concern over the ongoing transportation disruptions that have severely hindered the movement of nearly 30,000 containers, causing significant delays in shipments to international markets. The blockade of the National Highway at the Sindh-Punjab border for the past 10 days due to protests over the canals issue has suspended all vehicular movement between the two provinces, severely impacting the transportation of essential goods such as petrol and food items, with trucks and trailers stranded. Industry representatives have warned the government that the backlog from the ongoing strike by goods transporters and protests across Sindh against…

KARACHI: While anticipating an improvement in the overall outlook with economic activities picking up momentum in the second half, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) maintained its real GDP growth forecast on Monday at 2.5-3.5 per cent for FY25. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised the growth to 2.6pc from 3pc, and the World Bank to 2.7pc for the current fiscal year. “One of the prominent challenges long undermining the sustainability of growth is low and falling productivity that has adversely affected the country’s economic competitiveness,” the central bank noted in its half-yearly report, ‘The State of Pakistan’s Economy’.…