Live headlines from trusted global sources. Click any story to open it on the original website.
Setting up a new regional chamber of commerce will “fulfil a long-felt need” to bridge the gap between the Greater Bay Area and Asean, with Hong Kong acting as a “natural connector”, the business group’s inaugural chairman has said. But given existing agreements and bilateral relations between the city and individual member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, analysts said the ec...
Iraqi oil stranded by the Middle East conflict has escaped the Persian Gulf over the past ten days as transit via the Strait of Hormuz eased during an uneasy US-Iran ceasefire. Vessels carrying about 14 million barrels of Iraqi oil exited the Gulf in the latter part of June and are now carrying crude to buyers in Asia, Europe and the US, according to tanker tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. Tha...
Beijing has issued a preliminary verdict finding that pea-starch products imported from Canada were dumped in China, following Ottawa’s anti-dumping investigation into Chinese-made steel racks. “Relevant authorities have made a preliminary determination that imported pea-starch products originating in Canada have been dumped,” the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Tuesday. “The dumping a...
The Communist Party’s membership grew at a slower pace and its average age continued to climb last year, according to official data on the world’s second-biggest political party. In line with tradition, the data was released on the day before July 1, the date of the party’s founding in 1921. The party had 101 million members at the end of 2025, an increase of 1 per cent from the previous year, acc...
The AI-driven price surge in the semiconductor supply chain is spreading beyond graphics processing units (GPUs) and memory chips to upstream materials and manufacturing inputs, creating new bottlenecks that could slow the buildout of global artificial intelligence infrastructure. Suppliers of once less-visible parts are gaining leverage as customers compete for limited capacity. These range from ...
Thousands of people joined anti-migrant protests in South Africa on Tuesday, watched over by a massive police contingent that was deployed to prevent violence and intimidation. The demonstrations in Johannesburg, Pretoria, the port cities of Durban and Cape Town and other towns were called by an organisation known as March and March to demand that all undocumented foreigners leave the country. The...
This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. Hong Kong’s weather forecaster has warned of record high temperatures this year and next, with a developing El Nino potentially becoming the strongest on record. The Observatory said on Monday that sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial ...
A Shanghai family’s decades-long devotion to a vulnerable neighbour has led to the city’s first legal guardianship case involving people unrelated by blood. Ren, 71, inherited a quiet act of compassion from his parents, caring for his neighbour Xu, 56, for four decades, the Shanghai Law Journal reported. Xu was born with a mental disability. Originally from Xinjiang in northwestern China, he never...
It has been nearly five years since then Workers’ Party (WP) MP Raeesah Khan uttered her first lie in Singapore’s parliament but its aftershocks continue to reverberate, as some political observers argue that public fatigue has set in. They say it would be in the interest of both the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) and the WP to avoid further drawing out the issue when there are more pressing...
Self-flying fighter jets, uncrewed submarines and drones will be at the centre of Britain’s future military under a defence plan being announced on Tuesday that reflects a world of conflicts transformed by technology. The Defence Investment Plan has been repeatedly delayed as military leaders and Treasury officials wrangled over the cost of equipping the nation’s military for an increasingly dange...
Hong Kong authorities have put forward a sweeping overhaul of the city’s sexual offences laws, such as broadening the definition of rape, introducing new offences covering non-consensual acts involving children and persons with mental impairment, setting a uniform age of consent at 16, and removing gender-specific provisions. The proposals, which follow the Law Reform Commission’s reviews of sexua...
The European Union set an October deadline for “tangible results” in tackling its growing trade deficit with China, after the two sides held talks in Brussels in an attempt to avoid a trade war. “Not everything will be solved, not everything will be fixed, but we think that between now and October, our teams have sufficient time to deliver the tangible results,” EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic told ...
Retaining existing customers and a potential resurgence of Russian competition may be among the biggest challenges for sales of Chinese weapons systems, according to a report from an Indian think tank. The study, published this month by the Bengaluru-based Takshashila Institution, questioned whether weapons made in China were “foolproof or in muddy waters” and cautioned against the “reductive assu...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] Kellett, the British International School in Hong Kong, turns 50 this year and they have much to celebrate. Half a century from their humble beginnings as two primary classes in Wan Chai, they are now a through school across three campuses, with over 1600 students and a global reputation for excellence. This growth in itse...
Mainland Chinese immigration authorities are standardising their assessment regime for approving residents to settle in Hong Kong and Macau by replacing the previous points-based system with unified criteria, offering applicants more certainty. The National Immigration Administration announced the new criteria on Tuesday and said it would take effect the following day. The current system calculate...
For most of his adult life, Siranudh “Psi” Scott kept a dark secret. Allegedly abused by his older brother as a teenager, he buried the trauma, chose to remain silent and – outwardly at least – carried on as a scion of one of Thailand’s most powerful families. Then, last month, he shared a raw, emotionally exposed confession with his hundreds of thousands of social media followers. Psi, 29, public...
Chinese artificial intelligence unicorn DeepSeek is introducing peak-hour surcharges for its API services, bucking a fierce domestic price war it helped start, in which rivals have been aggressively undercutting each other to capture market share. The Chinese AI champion will double the price for access to its V4 AI models through its application programming interface (API) during peak hours – 9am...
More Singapore residents aged below 40 had never married in 2025 than in 2020, government data released on Tuesday showed, with the sharpest increases among those aged 25 to 34. The findings come from the Department of Statistics’ General Household Survey, Singapore’s mid-decade national household survey conducted between the once-a-decade Population Census. The survey also found that women who ha...
East Timor is seeking to turn closer ties between Asean and China’s Greater Bay Area into investment and technology opportunities, even as the bloc’s newest member faces a major challenge of building capacity to benefit from regional integration. While collaboration between the two regions could become a powerful engine of growth, policies had to ensure inclusive and sustainable advancement, East ...
A former senior Hong Kong prosecutor has lost a judicial challenge against his dismissal over remarks made in two emails questioning the integrity of police and inviting colleagues to attend the June 4 Tiananmen Square vigil. In a judgment delivered on Tuesday, the High Court ruled that the civil service had sufficient basis to sack William Wong Wa-fun and strip him of 26 years’ worth of pension e...
Malaysia will deploy military veterans as full-time hostel wardens at a group of elite boarding schools from Wednesday, in a new push to curb bullying after a series of abuse cases stirred public anger over student safety. In a move reminiscent of Netflix’s trending K-drama Teach You a Lesson, where a Special Ops veteran takes on school bullies, the first 16 former Malaysian Armed Forces personnel...
India has stepped up engagement with Chinese media as Beijing presses New Delhi to issue visas to its journalists ahead of a possible visit by President Xi Jinping later this year, though any breakthrough on the issue is likely to take time, according to people familiar with the matter. The outreach includes a meeting between officials from the Indian embassy in Beijing and representatives of Chin...
This article was first published on July 1, 2011 Plane beats train, but winning isn’t everything by Will Clem, Shi Jiangtao Two South China Morning Post reporters yesterday pitted the new high-speed Shanghai–to–Beijing train against an airliner and discovered that although taking to the skies had the edge for speed, rail won out for comfort and convenience. They set off from the SCMP’s Shanghai bu...
China and the European Union released a joint statement on Monday following talks between China’s Minister of Commerce, Wang Wentao, and the EU’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, in Brussels. During the meeting, the two sides agreed to establish a joint platform to monitor trade flows and to set up working groups to ease bilateral economic tensions. EU-China Joint Statement by scmp
WhatsApp, one of Hong Kong’s most popular messaging apps, will soon no longer require users to share their phone numbers before they start texting. Starting this week, users can reserve a unique username, which allows them to text without swapping numbers, for use later this year when the Meta-owned service launches the feature. Users will need to know a person’s exact username before they can tex...
WhatsApp, one of Hong Kong’s most popular messaging apps, will soon no longer require users to share their phone numbers before they start texting. Starting this week, users can reserve a unique username, which allows them to text without swapping numbers, for use later this year when the Meta-owned service launches the feature. Users will need to know a person’s exact username before they can tex...
When late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez built this coastal housing development bearing his name as part of his socialist revolution, residents found a fresh start after deadly floods had decimated the area more than a decade earlier. But after two back-to-back earthquakes flattened parts of the 1,100-unit complex last Wednesday, engineers have urged the Venezuelan government to swiftly audit sim...
The Philippines is uniquely positioned to serve as a gateway for Greater Bay Area businesses into Southeast Asia, the country’s trade secretary said on Tuesday, as she outlined Manila’s push to promote a pro-investment environment. Speaking at the South China Morning Post’s GBA-Asean Summit 2026, Cristina Aldeguer-Roque urged investors to view the Philippines as a springboard into the region and t...
The dragon’s serpentine forms have adorned Chinese pottery for millennia, and this mythical creature has come to symbolise power, strength, and good fortune. Dragon motifs on pottery date back nearly as far as Chinese written history itself, with the earliest example discovered on a vessel from the Yangshao culture (5000 BC–3000 BC). The association between dragons and ceramics persisted for centu...
Singapore authorities have caught a rider seen in a viral video striking a “Superman” pose while riding an e-bike in the latest of a series of crackdowns. In the video, taken in the early hours of May 23 outside Keppel MRT station, the rider is caught on camera going faster than cars on his vehicle. At one point, he even lies on his stomach with his legs extended as if he is flying. Based on the 1...
