Free Republic

He’s not leading in the polls, but he is leading in donations. Jeb Bush is making fundraising calls to Americans living in China, the Financial Times reports. He is hosting a fundraising event in Hong Kong where he is expected to speak to supporters via video conference. Bush anticipates 40 guests to attend; at $2,700 per guest, his campaign is expected to raise around $100,000. The event is being hosted by Michael DeSombre, the Republicans Overseas global president, who helped Mitt Romney raise $2 million in Asia during his 2012 campaign. The group caters to the 8.7 million Americans living...

Ben MoshinskySeptember 7,2025China is spending billions propping up its struggling currency and as a result its foreign currency reserves fell by a record amount last month. China spent $93.9 billion in August, reducing its cash pile to $3.56 trillion. This is almost double the drop in July, when $50 billion was spent. The People's Bank of China is spending all this cash on propping up its currency, the yuan, which has been suffering since China devalued it against the dollar. China's central bank is selling the dollars it holds and buying yuan in a bid to boost the price by...

There have been many news stories in recent days about Donald Trump's proposed policy on H1-B visas and how that would be bad for India. Trump has advocated raising the minimum wage for H1-B visas, lowering the H1-B visa cap and generally making H1-B visas more difficult to obtain. Trump points out that his competitor Florida Senator Marco Rubio has introduced a bill to triple the H-1B visas and Trump contends that this would lower the average wage because the H1-B workers are willing to work harder for a lower wage because they want to get a green card. News...

David Scutt, Business Insider AustraliaAugust 20,2015Deflationary pressures across Asia are building, reaching a fresh six-year low in July. There is no better demonstration of this than examining recent movements in producer price inflation. In annualised terms, they’ve fallen for 41 consecutive months in China. South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore have all seen prices fall for more than 30 months. Indonesia, at 4.3%, is one of the few nations to have recorded an compared to a year earlier.#(snip)

NEW DELHI (DHNS) - As Tehran wants New Delhi to raise its stake in Chabahar Port in Iran, Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on Friday offered India a deal that not only involves developing the second phase of the port but also for operating it. New Delhi already pledged to build a container terminal and a multi-purpose cargo terminal on two berths at the Chabahar Port in south-eastern coast of Iran. Tehran's new offer appeared to be lucrative to India, as the strategically important port could give it a sea-land access to Afghanistan and Central Asia,...

An increasingly powerful Indon­esia may supplant Australia in the future as the go-to ally for the US in the Asia-Pacific region, the new report on ANZUS says. It calls for the creation of a trilateral security process to milit­ate against potential rifts between Jakarta, Canberra and Washington. The report, by the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says a stronger Indonesia is likely to attract far greater interest from Washington — to the extent that Jakarta would, over time, become­ a competitor with Canberra for US attention. “Under such...

The Asia-Pacific region steamed past Europe in terms of private financial wealth in 2014, according to estimates released by Boston Consulting Group on Monday. In 2014, BCG estimates that eastern and western Europe combined had a private wealth of $42.5 trillion, beaten by Asia-Pacific's rapidly growing pile, now worth $47.3 trillion. The Asia-Pacific figures exclude Japan, which gets its own estimate.BCG doesn't provide a long-run estimate for when the last time Asia-Pacific was likely wealthier than Europe. The report has been produced for 15 years, but given the performance of the two continents throughout history, it's likely to have been...

BUSAN, South Korea, May 21 (UPI) -- A South Korean man was arrested for slaughtering 600 stray cats and selling the meat for medicinal soups. The man, identified only by the surname Jeong, was taken into custody in May for violating South Korea's animal protection laws, reported Yonhap on Thursday. Jeong, who is in his 50s, said he sold the meat to traditional Korean health care centers – claiming the meat could be used in soups to treat arthritis. South Korea's Chosun TV reported Jeong employed a brutal method of butchering the cats. After trapping the cat, he would throw...

The National Spelling Bee preliminary round is being held today, and its officials are confronting the racism that has accompanied it in recent years. Indian American children have won the spelling bee for seven straight years and 11 of the last 15. Paige Kimble, the Bee’s director, addressed the question last week, partly because of the racially charged tweets that have grown to accompany the spelling bee. “We certainly followed the coverage last year,” Kimble said, “and we are aware of Twitter posts that are not nice, that indicate that we have a long way to go as a country...

Washington — An alliance of Asian American groups on Friday filed a federal complaint against HarvardUniversity, saying that school and other Ivy League institutions are using racial quotas to admit students other than high-scoring Asians. More than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani groups came together for the complaint, which was filed with the civil rights offices at the Justice and Education departments. They are calling for an investigation and say these schools should stop using racial quotas or racial balancing in admission. "We are seeking equal treatment regardless of race," said Chunyan Li, a professor and civil rights activist,...

Securing the “fast track” authority to finalize a new trade deal, covering 40 percent of America’s exports, is a top priority for the Obama White House. The agreement, named the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would set new rules for America’s economic relations with Asia.

Archaeologists working at the Rising Whale site at Cape Espenberg, Alaska, have discovered several artifacts that were imported from East Asia. Bronze artifacts discovered in a 1,000-year-old house in Alaska suggest trade was occurring between East Asia and the New World centuries before the voyages of Columbus.

An ambitious 12-nation trade accord pushed by President Obama would allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government for actions that undermine their investment “expectations” and hurt their business, according to a classified document. The Trans-Pacific Partnership — a cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s remaining economic agenda — would grant broad powers to multinational companies operating in North America, South America and Asia. Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals organized under the World Bank...

U.S. strategy on China’s new bank has been flawed from the start. Time to step back and regroup. It is time for Washington to take a step back and regroup. Its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) strategy, ill-considered from the get-go, has now taken a major hit with the announcement this past week by the United Kingdom that it plans to join the Chinese-led AIIB. Washington’s concerns over the AIIB are well-established: the competition the AIIB poses to pre-existing development institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank; concern over the potential for weak environmental standards and social...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

The most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived just a few thousand years ago, according to a computer model of our family tree. Researchers have calculated that the mystery person, from whom everyone alive today is directly descended, probably lived around 1,500 BC in eastern Asia. Douglas Rohde of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his colleagues devised the computer program to simulate the migration and breeding of humans across the world. By estimating how different groups intermingle, the researchers built up a picture of how tightly the world's ancestral lines are linked. The figure of 1,500...

Hundreds of millions of Asian men alive today could be descendents of just 11 dynastic leaders who lived up to 4,000 years ago, according to researchers at the University of Leicester in the UK. The study, published in the European Journal of Human Genetics, looked at the Y-chromosome - the chromosome passed from father to son - in around 5,300 Asian men from more than a hundred different ethnic groups and nationalities. Most Y-chromosome types are extremely rare and so the prevalence of common Y-chromosome types amongst those they found in the Asian men they tested suggests hundreds of millions...

Falling oil, rising dollar and fears over US rate increase present in 1997-98 Mark Twain reputedly stated that history does not repeat but it rhymed. In an eerie parallel to 1997-98, falling commodity — especially oil — prices, a rising US dollar and potential increases in US interest rates may presage a new financial crisis. Weak growth, high debt levels, disinflation or deflation, policy driven destructive competitive devaluations, inflated financial risk taking and mispricing compounds the problems. The impending crisis may develop as follows. First, US equity prices come under pressure from a stronger dollar. Given 40 per cent of...

One of the engines on TransAsia Airways Flight 235 went idle soon after takeoff, and the pilots apparently shut off the other engine before the plane crashed, according to Taiwan’s top aviation official.

North Korea may be attempting to restart its main nuclear bomb fuel reactor after a five-month shutdown, a U.S. research institute said Thursday. If true, the finding, which is based on recent commercial satellite imagery, will be an added worry for the United States and the North's neighbors at a time of increasing animosity over recent U.S. sanctions against the North and Pyongyang's fury about a U.N. push to punish its alleged human rights abuses.