Town Hall News

By Kirsty Needham SYDNEY (Reuters) – Bank of China chairman Ge Haijiao has travelled to Papua New Guinea (PNG) as the world’s fourth-largest bank seeks an operating licence in the Pacific Islands nation, which is seeking to boost China trade while expanding U.S. defence ties. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week travelled to PNG to sign a defence cooperation agreement, prompting some domestic political criticism and student protests […]

By Brendan O’Brien and Steve Gorman (Reuters) -Dev Shah, a 14-year-old boy from Largo, Florida, won the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday, nailing the word “psammophile,” meaning an organism that thrives in sandy soils, in the 15th round of the contest’s finals. He edged out fellow eighth-grader Charlotte Walsh, 14, from Arlington, Virginia, who finished in second-place after she misspelled “daviely,” a Scottish-rooted word for listlessly, in the […]

By Brendan O’Brien and Steve Gorman (Reuters) -Dev Shah, a 14-year-old boy from Largo, Florida, won the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday, nailing the word “psammophile,” meaning an organism that thrives in sandy soils, in the 15th round of the contest’s finals. He edged out fellow eighth-grader Charlotte Walsh, 14, from Arlington, Virginia, who finished in second-place after she misspelled “daviely,” a Scottish-rooted word for listlessly, in the […]

(Reuters) – Detainees in overcrowded cells in Haitian police stations are living in “inhumane, degrading conditions”, a human rights group RNDDH said Thursday, with police relying on makeshift prisons amid insecurity and a crippled judicial system. Six police stations that the group RNDDH visited in Haiti’s Ouest Department showed “very alarming” conditions, it said, urging immediate action from the judicial system, which has struggled for years and is facing strikes […]

By Leika Kihara TOKYO (Reuters) – Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda said on Friday the central bank did not have a set time frame for achieving its 2% inflation target but that it would strive to hit it at the earliest date possible. Speaking in parliament, Ueda said the country’s trend inflation was likely to heighten ahead, but that achieving the BOJ’s target would take time. He also said […]

By Tim Kelly, Nobuhiro Kubo, Yukiko Toyoda and Kaori Kaneko TOKYO (Reuters) – The United States is seeking to secure supplies of TNT in Japan for 155mm artillery shells, as Washington rushes weapons and ammunition to Ukraine for a counteroffensive against Russian forces, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. For war-renouncing Japan, any procurement would test its willingness to court controversy to help Kyiv because export rules ban […]

By Kevin Buckland TOKYO (Reuters) – The U.S. dollar wallowed near a one-week low versus major peers on Friday, on course for its worst week since late March, amid strengthening views that the Federal Reserve will forgo an interest rate hike this month. Signs that a bill to suspend the U.S. debt ceiling and avert a disastrous default would soon become law also removed a pillar of support for the […]

By Tommy Wilkes LONDON (Reuters) – The success of Republicans in triggering the break-up of a coalition of insurance firms aimed at tackling climate change is down to U.S. states being the industry’s primary regulator, interviews with industry executives and former officials show. The U.N.-backed Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA), formed in 2019 to get insurers to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in their underwriting portfolios to a net-zero level […]

HONG KONG (Reuters) -Casino revenues in Macau, the world’s biggest gambling hub, surged 366% from a year ago to total 15.6 billion patacas ($1.93 billion) in May, the highest since January 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic had still to fully grip China. The monthly take was bolstered by a five-day national holiday that saw hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to the special Chinese administrative region, which is the only […]