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Thailand said on Friday it will join a UN arbitration process chosen by Cambodia to resolve a festering maritime boundary dispute, but put on hold for now other two-way efforts to settle their contested borders. This week Cambodia launched a compulsory conciliation process under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), after Bangkok decided last month to unilaterally end a 20...
A Hong Kong private tutor found guilty of orchestrating a failed plot to murder his business partner eight years ago has secured a three-year reduction to his 27-year jail sentence, but lost an appeal against his conviction. In a written judgment on Friday, the Court of Appeal found that the sentence imposed on Stephen So Hon-to was too high, despite the egregious nature of the offence and the nee...
China-Canada relations are undergoing a thaw after years of estrangement and recrimination. China and India are seeking a rapprochement despite deep-seated distrust and sometimes violent border disputes. Both cases share a common element: Donald Trump. Meanwhile, following the US president’s visit to Beijing, his defence secretary Pete Hegseth avoided mentioning Taiwan at the Shangri-La Dialogue i...
Asia’s governments have spent years promising to protect the seas that feed their people, shelter their coasts and support some of the world’s richest marine life. World Ocean Day on Monday will put those promises back in the public spotlight, but the more consequential test will come days later in Mombasa, Kenya, where governments, donors, companies and conservation groups will gather for the 11t...
International marques have failed to sustain the market share they regained in China early this year after consumers fell back in love with electric vehicles (EVs), a sector where domestic brands continue to enjoy an overwhelming advantage. Foreign carmakers from Volkswagen to Toyota held a combined 30.3 per cent share of the Chinese automotive market in April, with about 418,140 vehicles handed t...
A research team that includes Huawei Technologies says it has successfully used the firm’s Ascend 910C chips to complete post-training for the DeepSeek-V4-Pro model, marking a major step forward as China’s semiconductor industry tries to leap from supporting basic AI inference to more complex model training amid tightening US sanctions. While Chinese chipmakers have found success in supporting AI ...
A physicist who was awarded a fellowship reserved for the “brightest young scientists” in the US and Canada for his work hunting for black holes has returned to China. Dai Liang, who received a Sloan Research Fellowship for physics in 2021, recently took up a professorship at Fudan University in Shanghai and joined the Fudan Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics. The fellowships were established i...
The US Senate handed President Donald Trump a victory early on Friday morning, passing a bill that would provide the Department of Homeland Security with an additional US$70 billion for immigration enforcement and sending it to the House of Representatives for final consideration. The Senate voted 52-47 to approve the legislation, with no support from Democrats and no provision to ban a US$1.8 bi...
The Philippines’ landslide defeat to Kyrgyzstan for a UN Security Council seat has dealt a blow to Manila’s long-running campaign to raise its international diplomatic profile through the prestigious body, prompting questions about President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s foreign policy legacy. Analysts said the loss reflected the appeal of having under-represented Central Asia play a role in the council,...
A Hong Kong tour guide accused of threatening visitors into making shopping purchases has been struck off for damaging the sector’s reputation and breaching professional conduct, in the second disciplinary action of its kind in less than two months. The Travel Industry Authority said on Friday it revoked Siu Man-chung’s tour guide licence after investigating complaints that Siu made “inappropriate...
Hong Kong’s de facto central bank has formed a group of industry experts to help remove legal and regulatory hurdles to tokenized bonds, as authorities seek to move beyond pilot projects and encourage wider adoption from private issuers. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said on Friday it had established a Tokenised Bond Expert Group comprising 21 institutions spanning banks, law firms, mark...
An Australian man who falsely claimed to be a lawyer has been fined HK$2,000 (US$255) and given a suspended sentence by a Hong Kong court for repeatedly leaving restaurants without paying. Samuel Anthony Monkivitch, 50, was also ordered to pay HK$2,039 in compensation to two Shangri-La hotels in Admiralty and Tsim Sha Tsui, as well as a Japanese restaurant, after skipping bills on four occasions b...
In the first of a two-part series focusing on China’s hugely important national college entrance examination, or gaokao, the SCMP examines and explains the origins of the test and how it influenced not only the nation’s modern education system but those elsewhere in the world. Each June, China’s gaokao turns the country’s classrooms into arenas of aspiration as millions of students sit an exam see...
Pig farmers in the central state of Selangor have spent years trying to keep their business out of Malaysia’s culture wars. A royal decree has dragged them straight into one. The state’s decision to shut down pig farms, prompted by Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, Selangor’s hereditary ruler, has transformed a long-standing local dispute over pollution and odour into a flashpoint touching on royal i...
A PLA inspection team visited several facilities in Russia’s Eastern Military District this week, including an air defence missile unit in the far-eastern Jewish Autonomous Region, Russian media reported. The visit, conducted under a decades-old confidence-building mechanism, came as President Vladimir Putin described China and Russia as “natural allies and partners”, while emphasising that their ...
Hong Kong authorities will not cap the monthly number of subsidised trips that eligible elderly and disabled people can take under a revamped transport fare scheme, largely because implementation costs would exceed the savings. Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han revealed the decision on Friday, as data showed that an average of only about 450 people took more than 240 trips a month...
Hong Kong police have arrested a 50-year-old man on suspicion of repeatedly throwing glass bottles from the windows of his Ma On Shan flat over more than two years, injuring two pedestrians. Officers from the Sha Tin district crime unit arrested the man on Friday at his home on Sai Sha Road following an investigation into multiple reports of glass bottles falling from height at the estate. The sus...
China and South Korea will allow 70 more flights per week between the two countries in view of fast-growing, two-way tourism and a drop in Chinese group travel to Japan. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in Seoul said in a statement Thursday that passenger flight capacity would grow from 608 to 664 per week and that maximum air freight flights would expand from 54 to 68 per week. ...
Yao Shunyu, the former OpenAI researcher now leading Tencent Holdings’ artificial intelligence model development, pushed back against concerns that the tech giant is slow in AI, arguing that the race is just beginning with massive untapped opportunities in coding agents and embodied intelligence. “AI is a long-term game, with the second half of the race just starting,” said Yao, chief AI scientist...
Chinese President Xi Jinping will make a state visit to North Korea next week, his first overseas trip this year and his first to the hermit nation since 2019. The trip will take place on Monday and Tuesday, Xinhua said without elaboration. Xi’s last official overseas excursion was to South Korea in October, when he met US President Donald Trump and attended a regional summit. Xi’s visit underscor...
A proposal by Quad to build a port in Fiji, seen by analysts as a move to counter China’s rising economic clout in the Pacific region, has fuelled doubts about whether the four-member security bloc is committed to completing the project amid different policy priorities. At a meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, in New Delhi last week, the foreign ministers of Australia, India, ...
French billionaire Pierre-Edouard Sterin, who has stirred controversy over his right-wing politics, is pleading with lawmakers to modify rules so he can disinherit his five children, saying he prefers to give his fortune to charity. “I would like to give my entire estate to philanthropic causes,” the businessman told senators on Thursday during a public hearing, noting that under French law three ...
Hong Kong sweltered through its hottest day of the year so far on Friday as temperatures hit 34.6 degrees Celsius (94.3 Fahrenheit) in the afternoon, with the city’s weather forecaster warning of hail. The Hong Kong Observatory said that this marked the highest temperature recorded on Grain in Ear, the Chinese summer solar term, since records began. By 4.20pm, temperatures had reached 34.4 degrees...
Hong Kong sweltered through its hottest day of the year so far on Friday as temperatures hit 34.6 degrees Celsius (94.3 Fahrenheit) in the afternoon, according to the city’s weather forecaster. The Hong Kong Observatory said that this marked the highest temperature recorded on Grain in Ear, the summer solar term, since records began. By 4.20pm, temperatures had reached 34.4 degrees in Yuen Long Pa...
Europe’s political and business leaderships appear to have concluded that China’s economic dominance represents an existential threat – not from intrinsic competitiveness but from subsidies, technology theft, state-owned enterprises and a pervasive industrial policy. Cecilia Malmstrom, former European Commission member and a member of the European Parliament, wrote this week about “an ever more ag...
A job market mismatch, shrinking demand for junior roles, and relatively comfortable family living conditions have driven up Hong Kong’s share of young people who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET) compared to regional peers, observers have warned. Their comments on Friday followed government figures released in response to lawmaker Elvin Lee Ka-kui, showing the city’s NEET rate ...
A mismatch in the job market, declining demand for junior roles and relatively comfortable living conditions among Hong Kong’s youth have contributed to a higher share of young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs) compared with other Asian economies, observers have said. Their comments on Friday followed government figures released in response to lawmaker Elvin Lee Ka-kui, showi...
A mismatch in the job market, declining demand for junior roles and relatively comfortable living conditions among Hong Kong’s youth have contributed to a higher share of young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs) compared with other Asian economies, observers have said. Their comments on Friday followed government figures released in response to lawmaker Elvin Lee Ka-kui, showi...
A race to dig rare earths and metals in the mineral-rich mountains of eastern Myanmar is polluting waterways that millions of people living downstream depend on after a new tungsten mine reportedly began operations near the Thai border, according to environmental groups. Myanmar is among the top three producing nations of rare earths and other critical minerals used to make magnets and other compo...
Malaysia is heading into a run of state elections, including two triggered by early assembly dissolutions, after Negeri Sembilan became the latest state to call a snap poll amid fraying ties inside Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s ruling alliance. While the polls will not directly affect Anwar’s parliamentary majority, they will test whether his federal partners can keep their coalition functioning ...
