South China Morning Post

Since the Ukraine war began in 2022, Asia has been watching conflict as if enrolled in a study course. We have heard every argument: Nato enlargement, Russian insecurity, Ukrainian sovereignty, European fear, American power, energy politics, sanctions, nationalism and resistance. We have watched ...

US ⁠President Donald Trump suggested he might keep the Ultimate Fighting Championship cage-fighting arena being built on the lawn of the White House as a permanent fixture. The Republican compared ‌the structure, which is being built for a night of cage fighting to mark the 250th anniversary of U...

Prime Minister Peter Magyar said ⁠on Wednesday that Hungary ⁠and Ukraine reached an agreement on the ⁠rights of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, which could allow approval of the first cluster, or a group of negotiating chapters, in Ukraine’s EU accession talks. The agreement marks a potential ...

The administration of US President Donald Trump has proposed new tariffs of up to 12.5 per cent on imports from China and dozens of other trading partners, using a forced-labour investigation to advance what analysts see as a bid to rebuild its tariff regime after recent court setbacks. The Offic...

Portugal and Austria defeated Germany for seats on the powerful but deeply divided UN Security Council on Wednesday in a hotly contested race after intense campaigning. The 10 rotating seats on the 15-member Security Council are earmarked for different regions of the world. The assembly elects fi...

Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia are causing “panic” for the Kremlin, EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas said on Wednesday, saying Moscow was lashing out at Kyiv with increased attacks. Ukrainian drones hit energy and military sites in St Petersburg on Wednesday as officials gathered for Russi...

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva thanked China for clearing the country’s beef of foot-and-mouth disease and fired a barb at US President Donald Trump, saying “I will sell to someone else”, after Washington announced new tariffs on Brazilian goods. Lula made the remarks on Tuesday, h...

German filmmaker Wim Wenders on Wednesday said he has pulled his 1975 movie The Wrong Move over a nude scene featuring a then-13-year-old Nastassja Kinski. Kinski, now 65, has urged Wenders to re-edit the film. Last month, she told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung: “That was my first fil...

US President ⁠Donald Trump said ⁠in a podcast interview aired on Wednesday that Vice-President J.D. Vance and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, teaming up for a 2028 presidential run, would be ‌unbeatable. Both men are seen as contenders for the 2028 Republican nomination, and Rubio’s recent tur...

The non-executive chairman of Hong Kong rail giant the MTR Corporation has been elected as the new head of the city’s largest business chamber for a one-year term. Jacob Kam Chak-pui, 64, took over as chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday following an election among m...

A man holding hostages inside a building in California that houses a bank branch and school district office has been shot and killed by the FBI, police said on Wednesday. The suspect was killed in “an officer-involved shooting involving Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel”, the Bakersfield ...

Kenya’s health minister said on Wednesday that the US-funded quarantine centre would proceed, days after deadly protests erupted over the project. The US-built facility at Kenya’s Laikipia Air Base was due to open last week, according to US officials, to quarantine Americans arriving from the Dem...

Swedish authorities who have taken over the care of the daughter of a Hong Kong couple with a troubled parenting history have said that whether a child faces risks at home is one of the key factors when deciding if intervention is needed. But the social services department of Sweden’s Linkoping m...

Skipping pleasantries like “please” and “thank you” when talking to chatbots could save enough energy to power the annual needs of 760,000 residents in sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the massive but often hidden environmental toll of artificial intelligence, according to a new UN report. Releas...

The Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Centre (HKGAI) has officially launched a new DeepSeek-based large language model that can run on domestic chips, as the government-backed lab seeks to commercialise its products and export Chinese AI overseas. The HKGAI-V3 model, built on DeepS...

China is preparing to launch compute futures in Shanghai, signalling a push to link financial markets to computing power as the global AI boom drives new demand for digital infrastructure. The Shanghai municipal government has released guidelines stating the new financial derivative would form pa...

Quantum computing has long carried an aura of exclusivity, cloaked in dense academic papers and ultra-cold laboratory systems understood by only a small circle of physicists and mathematicians. However, a Chinese start-up has changed quantum computing into something closer to an AI chatbot. On Ma...

EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic will meet China’s international trade envoy Li Chenggang in Paris on Thursday, as the sides look to defuse tensions that have pushed them to the brink of a trade war. The officials will meet on the sidelines of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developmen...

A citizen watchdog has been launched in the Philippines to monitor Vice-President Sara Duterte-Carpio’s impeachment trial, as turmoil inside the Senate threatens to deepen public doubts over whether the politically explosive proceedings can be handled fairly and constitutionally. Members of civil...

Typhoon Jangmi on Wednesday ripped through the Pacific side of western and eastern Japan after making landfall in the morning, causing flooding and mudslides and leaving dozens of people injured. The typhoon made landfall around 4.30am in the southern part of Wakayama Prefecture in western Japan,...

In its latest bid to dominate China’s next-generation digital gateway, Alibaba Group Holding is opening its Qwen AI assistant to major brands, allowing users to order everything from fried chicken to bubble tea through simple conversation. The company announced on Wednesday that it was opening Qw...

Indonesian officials arrested the former head of the country’s free school meals programme on Wednesday, a day after he was fired by President Prabowo Subianto. Dadan Hindayana, an entomologist who had led the National Nutrition Agency since its inception in late 2024, stands accused of “crimes i...

A Hong Kong school principal has been fired after he swore at security guards during a student trip to Singapore last month, the institution has announced. The management committee of San Wui Commercial Society Secondary School in Tuen Mun announced on Wednesday the immediate dismissal of princip...

Japan and the Philippines are deepening defence and maritime cooperation over shared concerns about China, with broad implications that analysts said reached beyond the South China Sea. Following Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s state visit to Tokyo last week, the two sides agreed to l...

Many Hong Kong parents still sought a place with popular primary schools for their children despite a record-high of 86 per cent of pupils allocated to institutions they favoured. A day after the Education Bureau sent premature SMS notifications about the allocations that listed the correct schoo...

Two universities in Hong Kong have signed partnership agreements with a leading varsity in Kazakhstan in a move lauded by the city leader as deepening academic collaboration and strengthening people-to-people ties between the two places. The 70-strong delegation led by Chief Executive John Lee Ka...

South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party is projected to make sweeping gains in local elections on Wednesday, an exit poll showed, but a close race in the key city of Busan left it unclear whether President Lee Jae-myung’s party could claim a landslide victory. Voting had ‌largely closed in the firs...

China’s latest air-to-air missile, the PL-16, could have a range of more than 300km (186 miles) thanks to a variable-thrust rocket motor, according to an unverified image being circulated online. It comes weeks after the first image emerged of the US Air Force’s new AIM-260 air-to-air missile – a...

When individuals are troubled by their greying hair, some may find plucking it to be the easiest solution. However, many Chinese people hesitate to do so for a specific reason. A prevalent folk belief suggests that plucking one white hair will lead to three more white strands growing in its place...

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Wednesday presented her new cabinet, which for the first time in Danish history included more women than men. Following months of talks after inconclusive elections in March, incumbent Frederiksen said on Monday she had managed to form a minority gove...

A Malaysian power systems specialist has struck a deal with a Hong Kong battery storage firm to pursue large-scale projects aimed at helping the country prepare its electricity grid for more renewable energy. The two-year agreement between Mikro MSC Berhad and Hong Kong Cospower Technology Co Ltd...

At least 21 people were killed when a fire ripped through a hotel in New Delhi on Wednesday, police said, in one of the deadliest blazes in the Indian capital in recent years. Building fires are common in India due to a lack of firefighting equipment and routine disregard for safety regulations. ...

A Hong Kong couple has drawn public scrutiny after refusing a DNA test for their baby’s registration following his birth at home, raising potential gaps in the city’s legal and child welfare system. The infant’s father, Tsang Wai-bong, and mother, Kwan Pui-sin, were arrested on Tuesday on suspici...

The mainland Chinese coastguard’s first independent law enforcement patrol east of Taiwan on Monday – in response to the maritime border talks between Japan and the Philippines – marked an expansion of its patrolled area beyond the traditional focus. Since its launch in 2021, the China Coast Guar...

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek is finalising its first external fundraising round, securing over 50 billion yuan (US$7.4 billion) at a valuation of just under US$60 billion, according to people familiar with the matter – marking a six-fold leap from its US$10 billion valuation ...

China is one of the world’s largest buyers of gold as central banks shift towards the precious metal, which has overtaken US Treasuries to become the world’s top reserve asset amid higher valuations and its appeal as a geopolitical hedge, the European Central Bank said. The world’s second-largest...

South Korea has made peaceful coexistence the central objective of its North Korea policy. As outlined in a recent white paper, Seoul has not formally abandoned reunification but has chosen to prioritise the more immediate and achievable objective of establishing a stable framework for coexistenc...

Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory recorded its strongest monthly deliveries of the year in May as a broader recovery in China’s electric vehicle market gathered pace, although the US carmaker is likely to face intensifying competition from domestic rivals launching a wave of new models. The factory in...

A county-level Communist Party chief in China’s central Shanxi province was put under disciplinary review, 11 days after a deadly gas explosion at a local mine killed 82 people and left two missing. Zhao Yongjin, party secretary of Qinyuan county in Changzhi, Shanxi, was “suspected of serious vio...

Thailand’s former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has met the conditions for a royal pardon as part of clemency measure marking the queen’s birthday, the justice minister said on Wednesday. Thaksin, 76, served eight months of a one-year sentence for corruption and abuse of power before he was r...

More Hong Kong carriers including Cathay Pacific Airways and Hong Kong Airlines cancelled or rescheduled flights to Japan on Wednesday as Typhoon Jangmi headed towards Tokyo. Cathay, the city’s flag carrier, cancelled six scheduled flights between Hong Kong and Japan, affecting routes to and from...

We have put together stories from our coverage on science from the past two weeks to help you stay informed. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. Chinese archaeologist who discovered 5,000-year-old city pleads guilty to corruption Liu Bin, a Chinese arch...

Ukrainian drones hit energy and military sites in St Petersburg early Wednesday morning as officials gathered for a flagship economic forum in the city, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said. Some 20,000 guests from 130 countries are set to attend the three-day annual St Petersburg International...

Britain’s Sikh community has rejected calls to strip them of the rights to carry a ceremonial knife – known as the kirpan – as outrage snowballs over the murder of an 18-year-old student by a Sikh man. Vickrum Singh Digwa, 23, was handed a life sentence by a judge on Tuesday for stabbing to death...

Unassisted home births and vaccine refusal put mothers and newborns at life-threatening risks, a Hong Kong doctor and a children’s rights group have said, stressing that parental choice must not come at the expense of an infant’s well-being. Their warnings followed the arrest of a Hong Kong coupl...

Japan is positioning itself as a partner for Pacific Island nations struggling with rising seas and caught between the US-China rivalry, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi pledging on Wednesday to help fight climate change and boost maritime cooperation. Speaking at the inaugural Island States Oc...

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un personally received the country’s AFC Women’s Champions League winners in Pyongyang earlier this week, embracing the players and posing for photographs with them as they wept with joy and leapt in celebration. Naegohyang Women’s FC clinched Asia’s top club title wi...

Veteran Hong Kong theatre figure “King Sir” Chung King-fai has died at the age of 89. Chung’s nephew confirmed his death on Wednesday, saying he had died peacefully in his sleep at home in the morning. “My uncle dedicated his entire life to the theatre, leaving behind a lasting legacy through the...

A celebrity dog in central China was stolen and slaughtered, leaving its owner seeking justice but confronting gaps in the country’s legal protections for pets. Guo, a travel influencer from Henan province, raised Chutou, an eight-year-old Border Collie known for his intelligence, energy and gent...

An administrator appointed to oversee the affairs of Hong Kong’s fire-ravaged Wang Fuk Court has said it will arrange an extraordinary general meeting at the request of displaced owners, but stopped short of providing a time frame. In a written statement on Wednesday, Hop On Management Company sa...