KARACHI -- Saudi Arabia has decided to shift a proposed $10 billion oil refinery to Karachi from Gwadar, the center stage of the Belt and Road Initiative in Pakistan, further supporting the impression that the port city is losing its importance as a mega-investment hub.

On June 2, Tabish Gauhar, the special assistant to Pakistan's prime minister on power and petroleum, told the media that Saudi Arabia will not build the refinery at Gwadar but will construct it along with a petrochemical complex somewhere near Karachi.

CORNWALL, U.K. -- U.S. President Joe Biden gave his support on Saturday to Japan's efforts to carry out a safe Summer Olympics as outlined by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit here.

"We will take all precautions against infections in carrying out a safe and secure" Tokyo Olympics and Paralymics, Suga told Biden as the two leaders met between G-7 events in Cornwall. Biden expressed his support for the prime minister.

The conversations,

ISTANBUL -- Producer Timur Savci knows a good story when he sees one.

In 2009, Savci was sent by his mentor and collaborator, the late respected screenwriter Meral Okay, the draft for a script on a legendary Ottoman sultan. By the time he had finished reading it at 2 a.m., "I knew we had a project that had vast international potential even on paper," Savci told Nikkei Asia.

The rest is entertainment history. "Magnificent Century," the epic Turkish drama

TOKYO -- Toshiba will hold an emergency board meeting on Sunday to address a commissioned report that concluded that the company's annual shareholders meeting last year was "not fairly managed."

An independent investigation, conducted by three lawyers, looked into alleged voting irregularities. Thursday's report found that the Japanese conglomerate had closely worked with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to pressure activist shareholders .

Toshiba's supervisory committee had said that a review of the 2020 shareholder meeting found no problems, a

TOKYO -- Japanese, U.S. and European carmakers and major cloud providers are among a group of 100 companies and organizations that will create international rules to accurately measure the carbon dioxide emissions of car batteries as early as 2022, Nikkei has learned.

Batteries account for about half the CO2 generated in the production of electric vehicles. By recording and sharing emission data from production to disposal, the group aims to create a mechanism to encourage the management and reuse of batteries and reduce the environmental

Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

The Chinese Communist Party prides itself on learning lessons from the fall of other dictatorships. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chinese leaders commissioned academic studies and held seminars trying to figure out how the once-mighty Soviet regime crumbled like a house of cards.

This was by no means a futile exercise. The lessons learned from the Soviet collapse, such as imperial

TOKYO -- The earnings of international airline operators reflect the uneven recovery from the pandemic as they struggle with debt taken on to weather last year's plunge in passenger traffic.

While carriers based in the U.S., where vaccinations have progressed, bottom out, Southeast Asian airlines continue to face headwinds.

AirAsia Group's operations will take about two years to normalize, CEO Tony Fernandes indicated during the Southeast Asian discount carrier's January-March earnings release.

Coronavirus infections remain high in AirAsia's service

CORNWALL, U.K. -- The Group of Seven leaders agreed Saturday on a new infrastructure investment initiative that would serve to counter China's influence in developing countries through the Belt and Road initiative.

China's increasing influence in developing countries across the Indo-Pacific and Africa has concerned the group of rich democracies, and a move to launch the Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership was hinted at by U.S. and U.K. leaders before the summit.

The White House

HANOI -- Vietnam has taken a new step to bolster its maritime presence as territorial tensions in the South China Sea.

Vietnam launched a new squadron -- the Permanent Maritime Militia Unit -- on Wednesday in Kien Giang, the country's southwesternmost province. It consists of nine ships and platoons equipped with light weapons trained to carry out paramilitary work with support from the country's Naval Academy and Naval Technical College.

Establishing a new maritime militia in Kien Giang Province, which faces into the Gulf of Thailand, shows