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Helen Fung’s home felt empty. After her husband died last October, she found herself rattling around a house in Singapore with only a domestic helper she could not get along with for company. She turned down her children’s invitations to move to England, put off by London’s grey winters, and instead checked herself into an assisted living facility. On a recent Monday afternoon in St Bernadette Lif...
Tetris said on Friday that it did not give permission for the White House to use the game’s iconic imagery for a controversial online arcade that the Trump administration released on Thursday. “The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of Build the Wall and did not authorise or license the Tetris brand or intellectual property for the game,” Tetris said in a statement. “We are currently ...
One by one, Tesla Model Y Ls roll out of the company’s end-of-line inspection bays, gleaming in black, white and gold. They are a mix of left-hand and right-hand drive – one of many signs the electric vehicles (EVs) produced here are destined for ports around the world. The company touts a total assembly time of less than 40 seconds at its sprawling Gigafactory in Lingang, a coastal area on the fa...
The US government owns 9.9 per cent of Intel, converted out of US Chips Act grants, alongside a golden share in US Steel, US$400 million in the rare earth mining firm MP Materials and stakes in roughly 30 firms worth US$26.7 billion. In 2025, Nvidia and AMD gave up 15 per cent of their China chip sale revenues in exchange for export licences. The country that spent four decades advising its allies...
A judge declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial on Friday after jurors said they could not reach a unanimous verdict on whether she was criminally responsible for killing her three young children. The mistrial, on the seventh day of deliberations, leaves the case unresolved and allows prosecutors to take the 36-year-old former labour and delivery nurse to trial again. Neither Clancy...
The United Nations General Assembly voted on Friday to back a resolution spearheaded by several African countries to adopt a map that makes their continent bigger while shrinking North America and Europe. Aimed at “a more accurate representation” of continental landmasses, the resolution was supported by 164 countries while the US voted against it and six other states abstained. The new map – know...
President Donald Trump intensified pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, threatening to cut off trade with certain economies with which the US has a deficit if the central bank does not act. Trump issued his demands on Friday in a lengthy social media post after a stronger-than-expected August jobs report, which could bolster the case for Fed officials to raise rates at their ne...
Denmark and four other European Union countries agreed on Friday on a model for “return hubs” in non-EU nations and hope to begin sending migrants to the facilities as early as 2027, an official said. The announcement, made after a one-day meeting in Copenhagen, is the latest development in an effort by EU states to send people whose asylum requests have been rejected to third countries outside th...
As Beijing and Moscow double down on the Arctic shipping route, Europe is hitting the brakes. Despite being the main destination for goods along the route and accounting for most of the world’s shipping giants, Europe opposes the commercialisation of Arctic transits, wary of fragile polar ecosystems and navigational risks amid rising anxiety over Russia and China’s closer polar collaboration. “In ...
The US job market rebounded in August as employers added a surprising 162,000 jobs. The unemployment rate stayed at a low 4.1 per cent. The jobs report, issued by the Labour Department on Friday, could be good news for President Donald Trump two months before midterm elections in which the health of the economy is weighing on voters’ minds. Hiring far exceeded the 65,000 forecasters had expected, ...
The US job market rebounded in August as employers added a surprising 162,000 jobs. The unemployment rate stayed at a low 4.1 per cent. The jobs report, issued by the Labour Department on Friday, could be good news for President Donald Trump two months before midterm elections in which the health of the economy is weighing on voters’ minds. Hiring far exceeded the 65,000 forecasters had expected, ...
A public multi-storey car park in Hong Kong’s central business district will be partially closed for about six weeks from November as the city prepares to host a meeting of Interpol’s top governing body for the first time. Hong Kong police plan to take over the seventh and eighth floors of the Rumsey Street car park in Sheung Wan to set up a traffic coordination command centre. “The centre is plan...
A mix-up of embryo biopsy specimens may have been caused by “intentional unlawful conduct” at a private fertility clinic, which breached the code of practice for reproductive technology by lacking sufficient protective measures, a Hong Kong regulator has found. The Council on Human Reproductive Technology said on Friday that, following an investigation into the incident, it had ordered service pro...
Chinese researchers have found a way to extract uranium from seawater at several times the target rate set by the US Department of Energy, putting China at the forefront of a global quest to tap into a vast source of nuclear fuel. The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao did this using a material they developed called PhosCage – a sponge-like molecular structure filled with phospha...
Thailand’s embrace of data centres hit a speed bump after the government suspended construction of 49 server farms as public concerns about the power-hungry facilities’ impact on communities intensify. The projects were halted to give officials time to develop new industry regulations, expected to be announced in a month, Danucha Pichayanan, secretary general of the National Economic and Social De...
A Chinese defence industry research facility has unveiled what it calls the world’s first wheeled and legged robot guide dog for visually impaired people, in an example of the sector’s push into a growing range of civilian applications. Hangzhou-based Zhiyuan Research Institute, affiliated with China North Industries Group, the country’s largest defence contractor, launched the robot, dubbed Xiaoy...
This summer, David Chen, a Chinese national living in Japan, got an unexpected lesson in global industrial supply chains – delivered through a bag of potato chips. When popular Japanese snack brand Calbee replaced its signature colourful packaging with monochrome designs, Chen initially assumed it was a marketing gimmick. “Then news reports explained the switch stemmed from a naphtha supply crunch...
When China’s trade with Latin America reached a record US$518.4 billion in 2024, it marked a fundamental shift in hemispheric economics. Beijing is now the largest bilateral creditor and second largest trading partner of Latin America and the Caribbean, with President Xi Jinping pledging a new credit line of 66 billion yuan (US$9.2 billion) at the 2025 China-Celac (Community of Latin American and ...
The West African country of Burkina Faso has tested what observers say is a Chinese Sky Dragon 30 surface-to-air missile, in the latest sign that Chinese military equipment manufacturers are making inroads into the central Sahel state. In footage released by the Burkinabe president’s office on Tuesday, multiple missiles were fired from a mobile launch vehicle. A matching search radar vehicle also ...
The Amazon deliveries stopped reaching the USS Abraham Lincoln in February as it entered the conflict zone with Iran. A few weeks later – much to the chagrin of the sailors on board – even that most American of meals, the hamburger, was compromised by supply shortages when burger buns ran out. But as they unwind on their first shore leave in 286 days, the 5,000 crew of the Nimitz-class aircraft ca...
American ice-cream chain Dairy Queen will open four Hong Kong outlets in the fourth quarter of this year, as part of an ambitious expansion plan amid the widespread closure of food and retail shops. Dairy Queen, an 85-year-old brand, said on Friday that it would launch its flagship store at the One Causeway Bay shopping centre on Hong Kong Island in November, followed by three other outlets in Kow...
China and the US have ended a two-year break in command-level contact with a meeting in Canada between the top PLA officer overseeing the Taiwan Strait and his US Pacific counterpart. Chinese General Yang Zhibin, commander of the Eastern Theatre Command, and US Admiral Samuel Paparo met for the first time at the Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defence Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, on Monday. Th...
China and South Korea have exchanged formal protests over the highly sensitive Taiwan question and Korean unity. The two countries have been trying to improve relations in recent months, but South Korean national security adviser Wi Sung-lac said he had issued “a serious objection” after an official Chinese statement welcomed moves “towards the peaceful coexistence of the two states of South and N...
China and South Korea have exchanged formal protests over the highly sensitive Taiwan question and Korean unity. The two countries have been trying to improve relations in recent months, but South Korea’s national security adviser Wi Sung-lac said he had issued “a serious objection” after an official Chinese statement welcomed moves “towards the peaceful coexistence of the two states of South and ...
Britain’s populist Reform UK said two senior advisers to leader Nigel Farage stepped down on Friday after an undercover investigation alleged the party had broken electoral law by arranging for a foreign donor to pay for political polling. Reform denied any wrongdoing and said it had been the victim of a hoax perpetrated by climate activists. The governing Labour Party wrote to the police asking t...
Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel will temporarily close from October 12 for a comprehensive renovation and upgrade, with no completion date announced, as the resort shifts focus to seasonal culinary offerings and immersive storytelling. Hong Kong Disneyland announced on Friday that the Victorian-style property, open since 2005, will be revamped with Disney movie-themed rooms, while retaining the hotel’s...
Five former employees of Hong Kong supermarket chain ParknShop and its contractors have pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to defraud by falsifying workers’ attendance records to cheat the retail giant of HK$3.2 million (US$408,000). The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) on Friday said an investigation revealed that the former supermarket employees colluded with contractor staf...
OpenAI’s new model, GPT-6 Astra, has less direct visibility into how a model thinks, a development that has sparked concerns coming just weeks after the Hugging Face hacking incident that required a Chinese open model to investigate, according to analysts. When announcing Astra on Thursday, OpenAI said the GPT-6 Astra model was “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model,” with a “significant ...
A young Chinese man recently became colleagues with the doctor who saved him from a congenital heart defect 19 years ago, prompting many to marvel at the wonder of fate. Huang Hongxin, 23, has recently enrolled as a postgraduate student in the neurosurgery department at Xiangya Hospital, affiliated with Central South University. Nearly two decades ago, Huang underwent a life-saving surgery to addr...
Malaysia declared an emergency on Friday in a town in Sarawak state on Borneo Island after air pollution breached the country’s emergency-level threshold linked to fires in neighbouring Indonesia. The Air Pollutant Index in Serian, a small agricultural town of just under 90,000 near the border of Indonesia’s Kalimantan province, surged to 521 on Friday, according to Malaysia’s environment departme...
