Le Journal

In a seismic shift for the global retail landscape, Temu, the budget shopping platform owned by PDD Holdings, has caught up with Amazon.com in cross-border market share globally. The platform, which launched in 2022, saw its share surge from less than 1 per cent then to 24 per cent last year, on par with American giant Amazon, according to a survey published by International Post Corporation (IPC), an association of 26 national postal services in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. Amazon’s...

More than 80 years after her mother narrowly survived the sinking of the steamer Tsushima Maru, Tsugiko Taira says the wreck still carries profound meaning and believes artefacts recovered from the seabed could give new voice to one of the worst civilian maritime tragedies of World War II. Her comments come as the Japanese government weighs whether to retrieve items from the deep-sea site for possible public display, following a recent seabed survey and remarks by Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru...

If you’re looking for a lengthy debate about the merits of authentic cuisine, ask a Bahamian about their grandmother’s recipe for guava duff. The national dessert of the Bahamas, the duff is a steamed, doughy dumpling furrowed with fresh mashed guava (canned fruit is not acceptable, we are told), served piping hot and swimming in rum-spiked butter sauce. After listening to our waitress wax lyrical, we had to order one at Daddy Joe’s, more a living room than a restaurant in North Eleuthera, on...

Italian officials ‍on Monday hailed the discovery of a more than 2,000-year-old public building attributed to Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architect and engineer known as the “father of architecture”. “It is a sensational finding … something that our grandchildren will ⁠be talking about,” Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli told a press conference. Vitruvius, who lived in the 1st century BC, is celebrated for having written De architectura, or The Ten Books on Architecture, the oldest...

Owning a home has long been an elusive dream for many young people in Hong Kong, but an alarming new study shows how much harder it now is to climb the housing ladder. Authorities should carefully review the research and redouble efforts to reverse the trend before it does more damage to society. The University of Hong Kong Business School study found the proportion of subsidised homeowners aged 30 to 39 had nearly halved to 16 per cent over the past three decades. The “Hong Kong Economic Policy...