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Lindsay Clancy sobbed in court on Wednesday as jurors listened to the anguished emergency call her then-husband made after returning from an errand to find she had strangled their three children in their Massachusetts home. On the roughly seven-minute recording, Patrick Clancy can be heard speaking with his wife upon finding her badly injured and bleeding in their yard, after she jumped from the h...
Donald Trump’s demands that American allies in the Asia-Pacific region share more of the defensive burden have renewed questions about how far they can rely on the United States to help deter the likes of China and North Korea. Such concerns have led to an increasing focus on developing their own defence industries – but analysts have said that may eventually weaken American dominance in the globa...
US President Donald Trump unveiled a US$22 billion plan on Wednesday to rebuild Washington Dulles airport by replacing concourses and adding a large parking garage while preserving the landmark main terminal. The announcement is the latest in a series of major projects he has announced in and around the US capital. “It’s considered one of the worst airports anywhere in the world, we’re going to m...
Brazil overtook Russia and Belgium in the first five months of this year to become the world’s largest importer of Chinese cars, buying US$5.2 billion worth of vehicles as brands raced to land shipments before a tariff increase took effect in July. The figure, drawn from Chinese customs data, is up 146.9 per cent from the US$2.1 billion recorded a year earlier, when Brazil ranked sixth among buyer...
The man who stabbed and partially blinded author Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in 2022 was found guilty on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges for the attack, which prosecutors said was incited by death threats over Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Hadi Matar, 28, already serving a 25-year prison term on state charges of attempted murder for the knife assault, now faces a maximum ...
A man was convicted on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges in the 2022 stabbing of Salman Rushdie, the author who has faced a decades-old death threat over his novel The Satanic Verses. A jury found Hadi Matar guilty of all the charges against him, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism. A message seeking comment was sent to Matar’s lawyers. Matar, 28, is already serving a 25-y...
Hwaseong, South Korea, past midnight. An engineer watches a defect pattern surface on her screen – the kind that, caught now, saves a week of wafers. She is locked in, fully absorbed, the way engineers get when a breakthrough is close. But she has to go home. The law says so. Yet something is disrupting the clock she races against. Artificial intelligence is quietly rewriting what her hours are wo...
China may increasingly seek to use its dominance in the global electric vehicle industry as geopolitical leverage, giving Beijing greater influence over countries dependent on its technology and supply chains, according to analysts. “With China, the strategy is different. It’s to overwhelm the industry, capture it, and use it ultimately as leverage,” said Michael Dunne, CEO of Dunne Insights, an a...
Global K-pop sensation BTS said on Wednesday they will not submit their music for next year’s Grammy Awards, following the Recording Academy’s introduction of new categories that include the Best Asian Pop Music Performance. The South Korean megastars had been widely tipped to be in the running for several of the Grammys’ top honours, including Album of the Year, after their comeback album, Ariran...
Four women have accused Jared Leto of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers, to which the actor and musician responded Wednesday that he has “never sexually assaulted anyone”. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false,” Leto, 54, said in a statement. The BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, released on Wednes...
Four women have accused Jared Leto of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers, to which the actor and musician responded Wednesday that he has “never sexually assaulted anyone”. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false,” Leto, 54, said in a statement. The BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, released on Wednes...
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday, a choice that may intensify questions about how US central bank chief Kevin Warsh will deliver on his commitment to bring inflation back down to the 2 per cent target. The widely expected decision to leave the benchmark interest rate in the 3.50 per cent to 3.75 per cent range drew dissents from three of the 12 members of the policy-set...
Two directors of a contractor linked to the deadly inferno at Hong Kong’s Wang Fuk Court have denied all allegations of bid-rigging, corruption and collusion with consultants, with one saying he was never told the housing estate’s fire safety system had any problems. A district councillor, Peggy Wong Pik-kiu, who has been criticised for her links to the former owners’ committee of the Tai Po compl...
The United States on Wednesday sanctioned a group of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong shipping companies accused of operating vessels that transported Iranian oil to China, extending Washington’s economic campaign against Tehran alongside its naval blockade. The US State Department said eight companies were designated for operating vessels that moved Iranian crude oil and petrochemical products to C...
The United States on Wednesday sanctioned a group of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong shipping companies accused of operating vessels that transported Iranian oil to China, extending Washington’s economic campaign against Tehran alongside its naval blockade. The US State Department said eight companies were designated for operating vessels that moved Iranian crude oil and petrochemical products to C...
Anthony Fauci repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination at a contentious US Senate hearing on Wednesday, refusing to answer questions about American funding for coronavirus research in China and allegations that he misled Congress about the origins of Covid-19. The extraordinary appearance reopened one of Washington’s most politically divisive disputes: whether the pan...
Anthony Fauci repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination at a contentious US Senate hearing on Wednesday, refusing to answer questions about American funding for coronavirus research in China and allegations that he misled Congress about the origins of Covid-19. The extraordinary appearance reopened one of Washington’s most politically divisive disputes: whether the pan...
Hong Kong’s main public research funding body for universities has approved a record 12 projects worth about HK$478 million in its latest financing round, with artificial intelligence featuring in more than a third of successful proposals, including one aimed at cutting AI data centre power use by up to 20 per cent. The higher education institutions receiving the most funding are City University, ...
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged on Wednesday to take difficult decisions to overhaul England’s adult social care system, saying he wanted to work with other parties to end unfair high costs for users that he likened to US healthcare. Successive governments have failed to reform adult social care, for which families can pay hundreds of thousands of pounds, after previous proposals were ...
Hong Kong is gearing up for a September launch of its revamped Huanggang Port border crossing, with drills set to begin next month under the new “joint inspection” model, the South China Morning Post has learned. Sources said Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung and other officials were set to inspect the checkpoint on Friday, when Hong Kong will begin exercising jurisdiction over its desi...
The death of a six-year-old girl after receiving an experimental gene-editing therapy has been described by scientists as a tragedy that highlights the need to improve trial safeguards. But some in the biotechnology industry fear Chinese policymakers may curtail the regulatory flexibility that scientists have long enjoyed in initiating clinical trials – a key mechanism behind China’s competitive e...
India is planning a new law to combat AI deepfakes and impersonation scams amid a surge in cyber fraud and fake videos targeting top military officers. The cases have deepened concerns over the potential for misinformation to sow discord in India during a geopolitical crisis, such as in the war against Pakistan last year. The proposal aims to close a gap in India’s laws by clearly defining punishm...
Hong Kong police have recorded 150 WhatsApp account hijacking cases in the past two weeks, with total losses exceeding HK$26 million (US$3.31 million), including one in which a victim was scammed out of HK$10 million by fraudsters impersonating his father. In a social media post on Wednesday, the force’s Cyberdefender platform warned residents against “blindly” trusting voice messages as fraudster...
Copies of the official paper of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Committee of the Communist Party of China are not usually a hot commodity. But the Saturday edition of Guangxi Daily became an overnight collector’s item after its front-page story on Wang Hong – who last week received the prestigious Fields Medal alongside her compatriot Deng Yu – went viral online. Wang, who hails from the sout...
French DJ and musician Kavinsky, known for his electronic classic “Nightcall”, has been found dead at his home in Paris, prosecutors said on Wednesday. The self-taught pianist, whose real name is Vincent Belorgey, would have turned 51 on Friday. It was not immediately clear how he died, but emergency crews late on Tuesday noted nothing suspicious, the Paris prosecutor’s office said. “Nightcall” be...
At least 15 elephants have died from exposure to a suspected poison in the Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya over a four-week period, the country’s nature conservation authorities reported on Wednesday. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said the animals had died in the park, which lies along the border with Tanzania, between June 24 and July 24. The nearby Kimana Conservancy and the Kuku Ran...
As the Chinese military expands its autonomous underwater capabilities, the US Coast Guard is seeking new ways to counter undersea drones, highlighting what analysts describe as a gap in America’s defence. The law enforcement agency said it was requesting information on commercially available systems capable of detecting, tracking and disabling unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). While the July 2...
A Norwegian teenager was convicted on Wednesday of conspiracy to commit murder in Britain after being recruited by a Swedish organised crime group that prosecutors said was being used by the Iranian government. Johannes Natland, now 19, was arrested in a hotel room in Huddersfield, northern England, in March last year with two firearms and ammunition in his possession. Prosecutors said Natland...
Firefighters in southwest France battled an uncontained wildfire four times the size of Paris on Wednesday as temperatures were forecast to reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), threatening to turn a calm night into only a brief reprieve. Authorities in the Gironde region said the blaze had not spread overnight, but rising heat and afternoon winds could revive smouldering hotspots, ca...
Philippine Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jnr urged heightened vigilance over academic exchange programmes with China following reports that language teachers in Manila had been trained by a Chinese university at the centre of a recent controversy over the Batanes Islands. Speaking on Wednesday in Manila, Teodoro cautioned that foreign-linked educational initiatives risked being exploited as c...
