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A court on the Indonesian resort island of Bali sentenced a Swiss tourist on Thursday to one year in prison for insulting a sacred Balinese Hindu observance. Luzian Andrin Zgraggen, 26, was found guilty of violating Indonesia’s new criminal code by posting social media messages about the Day of Silence, when people are required to stay home and are urged to remain silent and meditate. The Denpasar...
Chinese AI companies are optimising software to cope with surging demand for inference, as part of that workload still relies on computing power from a limited pool of high-end chips amid restricted access to Nvidia processors. Compared with training an artificial intelligence model, which relies on high-end chips, inference – a later phase in which the trained model applies its knowledge to proce...
Every summer, China’s gaokao, the national higher education entrance examination, provides an unusually revealing snapshot of household expectations. The critical metrics are not average scores or admission volumes. They are the choices families make about how their children will spend four years of their lives. The 2026 examination attracted 12.9 million registered candidates. This is a decline f...
A rare Hong Kong government incentive for developers will help revive old neighbourhoods such as Sham Shui Po, where more redevelopment projects have stalled amid a sluggish property market, analysts have said. They said on Thursday that the bonus plot ratio pilot scheme, due to launch next month, would provide private developers with a financial incentive to redevelop the city’s older neighbourho...
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is planning a visit to China next month – his first in over a year – as the Southeast Asian country looks to deepen trade ties with Beijing. According to people familiar with the planning, Anwar is slated to make a three-day visit to China in late September at the invitation of Premier Li Qiang, with stops in Shanghai and Hangzhou. The trip does not include a...
Henderson Land Development, one of Hong Kong’s largest developers, reported a 66 per cent rise in its interim profit for the first half of the year following a strong run of property sales, according to its filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange on Thursday. The developer, controlled by the family of its late founder Lee Shau-kee, said its unaudited underlying profit attributable to equity share...
From arrests linked to the Hong Kong operations of beauty chain Opatra London to a surge in online complaints against other skincare brands, high-pressure sales tactics remain widespread and continue to take a toll on consumers. Why do such malpractices remain widespread despite the city’s Trade Descriptions Ordinance, which criminalises aggressive commercial practices that significantly impair a ...
China has spent 80 years building formidable marine science capabilities. The harder test now is whether it can build rules for ocean data that its neighbours trust – and share. When China’s first department of oceanography was established in 1946, the country had only a modest capacity to study the seas around it. China now commands one of the world’s most extensive marine science enterprises, wi...
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s emphatic backing of Beijing’s position on Taiwan has won praise and diplomatic goodwill from mainland China, even as Kuala Lumpur may face greater friction over its courting of Taiwanese semiconductor investments. Analysts said the remarks did not change Malaysia’s long-standing one-China policy, but their unusually categorical tone went beyond the usual fo...
Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company (Haeco) has signed a memorandum of understanding with the country’s largest independent aircraft lessor to set up a maintenance centre in the city, forging what authorities described as a “powerful alliance” between industry giants. The Transport and Logistics Bureau on Thursday revealed that Haeco, a sister company of flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways, had...
The “glory days” of the world’s longest-serving aircraft carrier are over, reflecting fatigue in the broader US fleet amid a decline in the country’s shipbuilding capacity, according to official Chinese military analysts. In a report on Wednesday, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said the US Navy’s reliance on extended carrier deployments was a cause for concern, particularly in the case of the USS ...
Chinese parents are sending their children to “hardship summer camps” to engage in farm work, often to the point of tears, in an effort to teach them the realities of life and foster appreciation for their families. This summer, a programme known as “hardship camp” is gaining popularity across China. Many parents are investing thousands of yuan (hundreds of US dollars) to send their children to th...
North Korea has fired several short-range ballistic missiles, Seoul’s military said on Thursday, hours after US President Donald Trump said he would meet Pyongyang’s Kim Jong-un this year. The latest launches from the nuclear-armed North come as South Korea and the United States hold a shorter edition of their annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises, following an order from Trump to scale t...
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi called on South Korea on Thursday to exercise “genuine strategic autonomy”, and urged Seoul to develop ties with Beijing and Washington in parallel, rather than taking sides in major-power rivalries. According to a statement by the Chinese foreign ministry, Wang told South Korean national security adviser Wi Sung-lac that Beijing hoped Seoul would “achieve strategi...
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung told visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Thursday he would use the coming Apec leaders’ meeting in southern China to elevate bilateral ties, as Seoul and Beijing step up diplomatic rapprochement. “I look forward to travelling to Shenzhen in November to attend the Apec summit, using it as a major opportunity to work with China to elevate the South Korea...
At least one top executive of the Hong Kong operator of UK-based beauty chain Opatra London has resigned, it emerged on Thursday, after customs officers arrested two of the company’s managers over alleged coercive and misleading sales practices. Meanwhile, the Lux Boutique outlet at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui, which is operated by the same company, was boarded up and locked on Thursday. A check...
At least one top executive of the Hong Kong operator of UK-based beauty chain Opatra London has resigned, it emerged on Thursday, after customs officers arrested two of the company’s managers over alleged coercive and misleading sales practices. Meanwhile, the Lux Boutique outlet at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui, which is operated by the same company, was boarded up and locked on Thursday. A check...
At least one top executive of the Hong Kong operator of UK-based beauty chain Opatra London has resigned, it emerged on Thursday, after customs officers arrested two of the company’s managers over alleged coercive and misleading sales practices. Meanwhile, the Lux Boutique outlet at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui, which is operated by the same company, was boarded up and locked on Thursday. A check...
Top executives of the Hong Kong operator of UK-based beauty chain Opatra London have tendered their resignations, it emerged on Thursday, after customs officers arrested two of the company’s managers over alleged coercive and misleading sales practices. Meanwhile, the Lux Boutique outlet at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui, which is operated by the same company, was boarded up and locked on Thursday....
Hong Kong’s jobless rate has remained unchanged since the start of the year, new figures show, although the labour chief has warned of rising pressure on unemployment as fresh graduates enter the workforce. The Census and Statistics Department said on Thursday that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 3.7 per cent for the May-to-July period, remaining at that level on a rolling three...
Hong Kong’s jobless rate has remained unchanged since the start of the year, new figures show, although the labour chief has warned of rising pressure on unemployment as fresh graduates enter the workforce. The Census and Statistics Department said on Thursday that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 3.7 per cent for the May-to-July period, a level that has remained the same on a ro...
Four workers died on Thursday after being hit by an express train at a station in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, police said. The four men were on the tracks to remove weeds when the accident took place at around 10.45am local time at Shin-Kanuma Station on the Tobu Nikko Line, according to the police and the train operator. No crew or passengers were injured. A total of seven workers were en...
A domestic helper has been arrested in Hong Kong on suspicion of child neglect after a 23-month-old girl in her care suffered second-degree burns to her hands, according to the child’s mother. Police said on Thursday that a foreign woman, 30, had been arrested the previous day after a man reported that his daughter had been scalded by hot water and suspected that she had been ill-treated. The girl...
A domestic helper has been arrested in Hong Kong on suspicion of child neglect after a one-year-old girl in her care suffered second-degree burns to her hands, according to the child’s mother. A police source on Thursday confirmed that the Indonesian helper, 30, was arrested in Yuen Long the previous day after the girl’s father filed a report. The incident occurred while the helper was caring for ...
Chinese commercial banks have begun pricing corporate loans against a short-term interbank repo rate rather than the benchmark loan prime rate (LPR), a shift drawing sharp scrutiny from investors worried about the sector’s already thin profitability. The industry’s average net interest margin – the spread between what banks earn on loans and pay out on deposits – slid to a record low of nearly 1.4...
Hong Kong drivers will be able to renew their vehicle licences within one day by year-end, down from the current processing time of up to 10 working days, under new artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives aimed at streamlining transport services and traffic management. The “Easy Licence Application Approval” system, announced by the Transport Department on Thursday, will be launched by the end of...
More than 153,000 students and staff from four tertiary institutions in Hong Kong have been affected by a data breach on the online learning management platform Canvas, an investigation by the city’s privacy watchdog has found. Nearly four months after the data breach was discovered, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) said on Thursday that the incident stemmed from “vu...
A deadly school attack in the southern Philippines is drawing scrutiny as part of an apparent regional pattern of youth violence that echoes the staging, symbolism and online spectacle of mass shootings overseas. Authorities are investigating whether the incident in Zamboanga, in which a student reportedly broadcast parts of the attack online, was influenced by exposure to digital media, while ana...
Mainland Chinese tourist arrivals in Japan fell for an eighth consecutive month in July, as group tours slumped and visa costs rose amid deteriorating ties between Beijing and Tokyo. Mainland China has traditionally been a major source of visitors for Japan, but tourist arrivals plunged 56.1 per cent year on year in July, extending a downward trend that began in December 2025, according to data re...
Chinese carmakers’ reinforced push to produce more smart vehicles could sustain growth for hi-tech component suppliers, even as the broader automotive market remains lacklustre, according to Hesai Group chief financial officer Andrew Fan. “Orders for our lidar sensors [this year] were higher than in the same period last year,” Fan told the South China Morning Post on Wednesday. “An increasing perc...
