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President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to let it enforce a new US Postal Service rule tightening the use of mail-in ballots, moving swiftly after a judge temporarily blocked the regulation ahead of November’s midterm elections. In an emergency request, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to lift Boston-based US District Judge Indira Talwani’s order ...
The United States should start preparing for scenarios where extreme measures must be taken to stop China from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a former White House official, including state-backed espionage and military strikes on Chinese data centres. Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), ...
Former Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno and a former Chinese ambassador to Quito asked the country’s highest court on Thursday to spare them the five-year sentences handed down last week over a US$76 million bribery scheme. Moreno was convicted of bribery by a three-judge panel of the National Court of Justice over contracts for Ecuador’s largest hydroelectric project secured by a Chinese state c...
A single juror in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is preventing the jury from reaching a unanimous verdict, her lawyer said in court on Thursday, after deliberations stretched into a sixth day over whether to convict the Massachusetts woman of killing her three young children. Defence lawyer Kevin Reddington made that statement shortly after the jury sent Judge William Sullivan in Plymouth, Massach...
A single juror in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is preventing the jury from reaching a unanimous verdict, her lawyer said in court on Thursday, after deliberations stretched into a sixth day over whether to convict the Massachusetts woman of killing her three young children. Defence lawyer Kevin Reddington made that statement shortly after the jury sent Judge William Sullivan in Plymouth, Massach...
Ten research teams were honoured on Thursday at a satirical science awards ceremony that was hosted outside the US for the first time due to travel concerns. Researchers who studied milk from cockroaches and analysed soil health using underwear received Ig Nobel prizes celebrating unusual and imaginative contributions to science. The awards organised by a digital magazine called the Annals of Impr...
Federal prosecutors have charged a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer with lying to investigators about the events leading up to the shooting of a Venezuelan man during the Minneapolis immigration crackdown earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person was not authorised to publicly discuss the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity. The perso...
Two Mercury-bound spacecraft left their mother ship behind on Thursday and headed down the home stretch of their nearly decade-long voyage to the solar system’s smallest and closest-to-the-sun planet. The linked European and Japanese spacecraft separated as planned from their cruiser, but controllers had to wait two anxious hours to receive confirmation via radio signals. The crucial operation was...
Only four of the 28 lifts at Queen Mary Hospital’s new clinical block will operate normally following minor repairs, while work must be carried out on the rest until the end of the year, according to Hong Kong’s architectural authorities. The Architectural Services Department said on Thursday only four lifts serving non‑clinical facilities at the HK$13.5 billion (US$1.72 billion) block were in acc...
A Hong Kong Nepalese man is searching for his cousin who is missing after the catastrophic flood struck the Himalayan border between Nepal and Tibet. Y.B. Gurung, a 64-year-old retiree, told the South China Morning Post that he last spoke with his tour guide cousin Raju Gurung, 40, at 8am on August 26, shortly before a massive glacial collapse triggered the flash flood that washed away villages an...
A Hong Kong Nepalese man is searching for his cousin who is missing after the catastrophic flood struck the Himalayan border between Nepal and Tibet. Y.B. Gurung, a 64-year-old retiree, told the South China Morning Post that he last spoke with his tour guide cousin Raju Gurung, 40, at 8am on August 26, shortly before a massive glacial collapse triggered the flash flood that washed away villages an...
A team of cybersecurity experts has announced they successfully compromised the latest Starlink user terminals, crossing the security boundaries of the world’s largest satellite constellation. In a post on its social media account on Tuesday, Darknavy, an independent cybersecurity research institute headquartered in Singapore and Shanghai, said it had used sophisticated hardware attacks to gain fu...
A leading Hong Kong charity has called off a student eco-bag design contest meant to counter domestic violence following public backlash over its directive for pupils to draw inspiration from objects commonly linked to household abuse. Po Leung Kuk confirmed on Thursday that it had scrapped the competition, which was organised by its family crisis support service and funded by the Social Welfare D...
Taiwan’s cabinet approved a supplementary defence budget of NT$145.7 billion (US$4.6 billion) on Thursday, pushing the island’s total defence-related spending for this year above NT$1 trillion for the first time. The additional funding is expected to raise this year’s overall defence spending from 3.32 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to about 3.83 per cent, the highest level in decades. T...
Another 777 students and teachers contracted food poisoning in Indonesia’s Central Java after consuming government-issued free meals, a school principal said on Thursday, bringing the total number of people made ill by the scheme to more than 1,700 in just a week. In separate incidents in three other locations this week, 950 Indonesians had fallen ill as a result of food poisoning linked to the p...
Another 777 students and teachers contracted food poisoning in Indonesia’s Central Java after consuming government-issued free meals, a school principal said on Thursday, bringing the total number of people made ill by the scheme to more than 1,700 in just a week. In separate incidents in three other locations this week, 950 Indonesians had fallen ill as a result of food poisoning linked to the p...
Hong Kong’s railway operator has sued the local distributor behind embattled beauty brand Opatra London for allegedly failing to pay more than HK$347,000 (US$44,248) in rent and other fees at one of its shopping malls. A court document reviewed by the South China Morning Post on Thursday showed the MTR Corporation, as the landlord of Citylink Plaza in Sha Tin, suing Sayles Retail, the local operat...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI – developer of the leading Kimi K3 model – has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, as the firm seeks to tap public markets to fund its rapid expansion. The Beijing-based company was targeting a Hong Kong listing as early as the first quarter of 2027, the sources ...
A man who engaged in sexual acts with his younger sister when he was just a teenager knew his behaviour was “seriously wrong”, prosecutors have told Hong Kong’s High Court. Senior Public Prosecutor Karen Ng Ka-yuet said on Thursday that the older sibling, believed to have been aged between 11 and 14 at the time of the alleged offences, was fully aware that the acts involving his sister, who is thr...
A cabinet secretary fretting about his daughter’s university choice might once have been considered a private family matter. In Donald Trump’s America, it has become official content. US transport secretary Sean Duffy recently appeared with his family in a road trip series carried on the department’s YouTube page. In one episode, his daughter, Paloma, said if she were admitted to Harvard Universit...
An adult male orangutan found struggling to breathe in a palm oil plantation on Indonesia’s Borneo died hours after being rescued, authorities said on Thursday. The orangutan, named Sampurna and believed to be around 20 years old, was found by residents on Sunday morning in Ketapang district, West Kalimantan, an area affected by wildfires. He was unable to stand and was struggling to breathe when ...
Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary Roberto Velasco arrives in China on Sunday for his first official visit as his country navigates increasing US pressure to roll back Chinese trade ties. The two-day visit will take place at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said in Beijing on Thursday. He said China expected the visit to be an opportunity to deepen ...
Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary Roberto Velasco arrives in China on Sunday for his first official visit as his country navigates increasing US pressure to roll back Chinese trade ties. The two-day visit will take place at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said in Beijing on Thursday. He said China expected the visit to be an opportunity to deepen ...
China’s military AI models trail their foreign equivalents in performance, concentrating on support functions rather than combat, according to a study by Chinese researchers. The findings appeared in a paper by researchers affiliated with the Armed Police Force Shandong Corps and the Engineering University of People’s Armed Police, published in the journal Defence Industry Conversion in China in J...
Gloria Steinem, the celebrated author and activist who became one of the most visible symbols and potent voices of the US women’s movement and a fierce advocate for feminist causes throughout her life, has died. She was 92. With her trademark streaked hair parted down the middle and large aviator glasses, Steinem, a co-founder of Ms Magazine, was a hugely recognisable presence wherever she went. A...
US business television network CNBC is closing its Hong Kong office and pulling the plug on several flagship international daily shows as part of a major operational overhaul across Asia and Europe. The decision was communicated to staff on Wednesday in an internal staff memo from the company’s executive management. According to the memo seen by the South China Morning Post, the broadcaster’s mana...
A wildlife expert and social media users have expressed concerns about the forceful approach used by a district councillor and two other men to free a trapped barking deer, warning they should have sought help from professionals. Tai Po district councillor Chan Siu-keen posted footage of the incident on social media on Wednesday, with the clip showing him and two other men freeing the animal, also...
Hong Kong’s market regulator has reclassified some of the city’s authorised funds with exposure to private market assets above a certain amount as complex products, raising the threshold for selling these products to retail investors. Funds with exposures to direct or indirect private market assets amounting to 50 per cent or more of their net asset value would be recategorised. The Securities and...
India is touting its locally manufactured AK-203 Sher assault rifle – an advanced version of Russia’s powerful Kalashnikov – as an important milestone for the “Make in India” initiative to reduce reliance on foreign-made weapon systems. The Sher, or Tiger, will replace the older, heavily criticised Indian National Small Arms System (INSAS) service rifles used by the Indian Army. Complaints about t...
Norway had seized a Russian ship in the Arctic to enforce a US$4.22 billion compensation claim won by Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz over Moscow’s seizure of its assets when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, officials said late on Wednesday. The vessel, the Professor Molchanov, was seized off the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, according to Covington, the US law firm representing Naftogaz. ...
