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Vietnam is seeking to end executions for drug trafficking under a draft revision to its Penal Code, a notable shift in a country with one of Southeast Asia’s toughest anti-drug regimes. The proposal, presented to lawmakers last week, would remove trafficking from Vietnam’s list of capital crimes. Last year, Hanoi kept the offence on the list during an earlier round of death penalty reforms. If pas...
China’s shrinking car market has received another reality check as regulators step in to police the hi-tech offerings that carmakers use to drive sales. A nationwide inspection campaign assessing the quality of Chinese-made cars that was announced this week would see some consumers shelve purchase plans, exacerbating a bearish outlook for the country’s auto sector, dealers and analysts said. Vice-...
Speak a few sentences of your hometown dialect into a microphone at a museum in central China, and a machine will pinpoint exactly where you are from. The interactive voice-recognition booth is among star attractions at a new language resources hall that opened on Monday at the Hunan Museum in Changsha. The hall showcases recordings and other language materials from Chinese dialects, minority lang...
Hongkongers can present either their identity card or home return permit at the revamped Huanggang border checkpoint instead of both documents under the latest agreement with mainland Chinese authorities, the security minister has revealed. Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung announced the measure after a drill at the crossing involving more than 20,000 civil servants on Saturday. “Reside...
Hong Kong’s Nepalese community and other local organisations have launched fundraising drives to support those affected by deadly flash floods at the Himalayan nation’s border with the Tibet autonomous region, as the city government earmarked HK$50 million (US$6.38 million) to support relief efforts. In a social media post on Saturday, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said the HK$50 million would ...
Hong Kong’s Nepalese community and other local organisations have launched fundraising drives to support those affected by deadly flash floods near the country’s border with Tibet, as the city’s government earmarked HK$50 million to support relief efforts. In a social media post on Saturday, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said the money would come from the Disaster Relief Fund and that its advis...
Hong Kong’s government has earmarked HK$50 million (US$6.3 million) from the Disaster Relief Fund for those affected by deadly flash floods near Nepal’s border with Tibet’s Gyirong county, which have left hundreds dead and thousands missing. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu announced the move in a Facebook post on Saturday. “I express my deep condolences for the victims and extend my heartfelt sym...
Hong Kong’s government has earmarked HK$50 million (US$6.3 million) from the Disaster Relief Fund for those affected by deadly flash floods near Nepal’s border with Tibet’s Gyirong County, which have left hundreds dead and thousands missing. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu announced the move in a Facebook post on Saturday. “I express my deep condolences for the victims and extend my heartfelt sym...
A woman in her fifties has been fined for repeatedly banging on her ceiling with a backscratcher and contacting her upstairs neighbour over noise, with a South Korean court ruling that her actions amounted to stalking. The Chuncheon District Court fined the 55-year-old woman, identified only as A, 2 million won (US$1,400) for violating the Act on Punishment of Crimes of Stalking, according to lega...
Norway opened a new chapter in its history on Saturday under King Haakon VIII, after the death of his father Harald, a unifying figure who was on the throne for 35 years. A national period of mourning was declared in the Scandinavian kingdom following the king’s death on Friday at 6.35am, aged 89. Norwegians gathered on Saturday to say goodbye to the king in front of the royal palace, where he ...
Seven words, spoken almost in passing on a recent afternoon in Srinagar, have set off a diplomatic tremor across South Asia. “This is an important part of India,” Sergio Gor told reporters on August 19, during the first visit by a US ambassador to Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir in six years. Within hours, Pakistan had summoned the top American diplomat in Islamabad, Natalie Baker, to delive...
Several ride-hailing firms have expressed interest in operating the long-awaited online platforms in Hong Kong, just one day after the government opened licence applications setting out nine requirements, the transport chief has revealed. Secretary for Transport and Logistics Mable Chan said on Saturday that two to three firms had expressed interest in operating ride-hailing service platforms, emp...
China is being urged to use human translators to refine AI renderings of its political messaging, amid concern that literal translations can make Beijing’s language sound more threatening abroad. An article in a state-affiliated academic newspaper said the country should strengthen its translation capacity and guard against AI-generated distortions to improve how its policies and intentions were u...
Chinese artificial intelligence companies are carving out a distinct lead over their US rivals in video generation, leveraging vast short-video ecosystems, looser copyright rules and aggressive pricing to dominate an arena where compute alone does not dictate success, analysts say. While US tech giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic continue to lead in frontier closed-source large language models (L...
More than 1,000 luxury items and 80 real estate properties forfeited in Singapore’s S$3 billion (US$2.4 billion) money laundering case would go under the hammer from September 7, audit firm Deloitte said on Saturday. The properties will be auctioned by SRI, Edmund Tie & Company and Knight Frank, while auction house Hotlotz will handle the luxury goods, comprising jewellery, watches and handbags. S...
Mukti Patel has huddled with family and friends at her parents’ Richmond, Virginia, home since her dad, sister and two other relatives went missing in the catastrophic flash floods along the Nepal-China border. She knows the hotel they were staying in was swept away. But as she shared memories of them on Friday, she caught herself. “I shouldn’t talk in past tense yet,” she said. “We don’t know any...
Hong Kong’s legal community has hailed a move by mainland China to make permanent a pilot scheme allowing lawyers to practise in Greater Bay Area cities, predicting the demand for such cross-border legal services will continue to grow. Secretary for Justice Paul Lam Ting-kwok said on Saturday that amendments passed by the country’s top legislative body the previous day would further accelerate the...
Hong Kong and Macau lawyers will be able to practise in nine Guangdong cities from next week after passing an examination and obtaining the required qualifications under legal amendments passed by mainland China’s top legislative body. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed amendments on Friday to China’s Lawyers Law, which will take effect on September 1. To qualify, Hong...
China has sent nine specialist tunnel rescuers to Nepal to help with emergency operations following a direct request from Kathmandu, as search teams race against time to find survivors from Wednesday’s devastating floods. Seven people have been confirmed dead on the Chinese side, with 544 still missing as the rescue operation passes a critical 72-hour window. In Nepal, at least 675 have died and n...
Chinese rescuers continued searching for survivors from this week’s devastating floods along the border with Nepal as the operation passed a critical 72-hour window. On Saturday morning, engineers and workers started clearing away mud and debris using excavators and heavy earth-moving machinery in an effort to reopen the route to a border checkpoint in Gyirong, Tibet. Many of the frontline workers...
Chinese rescuers continued searching for survivors from this week’s devastating floods along the border with Nepal as the operation passed a critical 72-hour window. Two villagers near the Gyirong border checkpoint were rescued from the rubble at around 1am on Saturday, according to Tibet’s emergency bureau. But at the border crossing itself, there was no sign of any survivors. Liu Maolin, the res...
Seven Yemeni men were arrested in Malaysia after they allegedly performed dangerous stunts while travelling in two vehicles along Jalan Sungai Besi early on Friday. Kuala Lumpur Traffic Investigation and Enforcement Department chief Mohd Zamzuri Mohd Isa said the incident, which occurred at about 12.30am, came to light after a video of the incident went viral on social media. He said preliminary i...
As the deadline approaches for homeowners to accept the Hong Kong government’s deal to buy back their flats at fire-ravaged Wang Fuk Court, some who refuse to sell have said the offer cannot make up for the loss of their property and communal bonds. With the clock ticking to the August 31 cut-off date, the South China Morning Post spoke to six residents determined not to sell their homes at the de...
China’s GJ-21 large stealth attack drone has been spotted on flight tests this month, as the country’s first Type 076 amphibious assault ship – the vessel that will launch the drone – enters its final sea trials. The GJ-21, the naval variant of the GJ-11 stealth attack drone, first appeared at China’s Victory Day parade in September last year and has made rare public appearances since then. Comput...
Iranian leaders are acknowledging the economic toll of war with the United States, with the supreme leader calling on the government to address the hardship while the president reported foreign trade has shrunk 35 per cent due to the American sanctions and blockade. The warnings came even as other leaders threaten the US with military retaliation and declarations that the Iranian navy maintains co...
The Philippines spent years dismantling Chinese-linked gambling compounds in dramatic, headline-grabbing raids. But all the while, and with far less scrutiny, South Korean syndicates were building a parallel industry worth billions of US dollars – one that a spate of recent arrests suggests is still very much intact. The most recent involved a 29-year-old Korean woman named Kim Young-sun, who auth...
A former White House teleprompter operator accused of using inside knowledge to make bets on the prediction market Kalshi has been ordered to turn over more than US$100,000 in profits and pay a US$65,000 fine as part of a settlement with federal authorities. The settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, announced on Friday, also dealt Gabriel Perez a three-year trading ban. Perez w...
Following temples and nightclubs, a Chinese bank and a hospital have recently begun offering marriage registration services, igniting discussions on the Chinese government’s commitment to promoting nuptials. In August, a branch of the Postal Savings Bank of China, located in the northern municipality of Tianjin, became the country’s first bank to provide marriage registration services. While onlin...
Beijing’s recent curbs on cross-border investment and a tax shift targeting overseas insurance gains may create short-term uncertainty, but they will not undermine Hong Kong’s long-term competitiveness as a major wealth management hub, according to a senior executive at JPMorgan Chase. Kwang Kam-shing, Hong Kong CEO and chairwoman of North Asia at the biggest bank by assets in the United States, s...
When Kripa Vaidyanathan’s 27-year-old niece died in an Alaska car crash in 2024, her family in Chennai, India, felt shell-shocked. They questioned why this tragedy would befall them when they had such “immense faith in God”. Vaidyanathan, a yoga instructor, helped her grieving sister get face time with a high-profile guru whom she hoped would help. “But he told her this was the work of karma and s...
