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China and Cuba held talks on expanding agricultural cooperation in Beijing on Tuesday, the latest in a series of moves by Beijing to shore up support for the Caribbean island as Washington intensifies a campaign of sanctions, criminal indictments and military posturing against Havana. Chinese Vice-Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Zhang Zhili met Cuban Deputy Agriculture Minister Telce Gon...
A Cambodian court sentenced six Chinese men, reportedly from a scam-linked crime ring, to life in prison on Wednesday for the murder of a South Korean student last year. The torture and killing of the college student in Cambodia sparked a public outcry in South Korea, which dispatched a task force to the Southeast Asian nation in an effort to jointly tackle transnational cyberscam networks. The mu...
A buffalo in Bangladesh nicknamed “Donald Trump” for its flowing blond hair has been spared from sacrifice after shooting to fame, and will instead be cared for at the national zoo. Muslim-majority Bangladesh, a South Asian nation of 170 million people, celebrates Eid al-Adha, the “feast of the sacrifice”, on Thursday. The 700kg (1,500-pound) bull, a rare albino buffalo with a flowing helmet of li...
Former Democratic US president Joe Biden sued the US Department of Justice on Tuesday, seeking to bar the release of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations with his biographer in 2016 and 2017. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, DC, comes ahead of the department’s planned June 15 release of the materials to the US House Judiciary Committee and the conservative ...
Former Democratic US president Joe Biden sued the US Department of Justice on Tuesday, seeking to bar the release of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations with his biographer in 2016 and 2017. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, DC, comes ahead of the department’s planned June 15 release of the materials to the US House Judiciary Committee and the conservative ...
Three life scientists from mainland China and France have won Hong Kong’s Shaw Prize this year for developing a therapy that has turned a rare form of leukaemia from deadly to widely curable. Professor Emerita Anne Dejean, Professor Hugues de The and Professor Chen Zhu have won in equal shares the life sciences and medicine prize of the Shaw Prize, which has been dubbed “Nobel Prize of the East”. ...
Uganda on Wednesday ordered the closure of its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, where suspected cases of a rare type of Ebola were surging, and as cases have been confirmed at home after Ugandan health workers were exposed to the disease from Congolese patients. The measure, which goes against the guidance by the World Health Organization, underscores growing fears of contagion in Eas...
Ugandan authorities on Wednesday ordered the closure of the border with Congo “with immediate effect” as suspected cases surge near 1,000 in its neighbour of a rare type of Ebola and as others emerge at home. The measure, which goes against World Health Organization guidance, underscored growing fears of contagion in this East African country that, like Congo, has experience responding to Ebola ou...
Hong Kong authorities are seeking to inject HK$4.6 billion (US$587 million) into the government-owned postal service provider to sustain its operations for the next three years, following eight years of operating losses and declining mail volumes. A document submitted to Legislative Council on Wednesday by the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau showed a bruising fiscal trajectory for the Pos...
Researchers at Peking University have claimed a breakthrough in microchip design software, purportedly offering critical support to Huawei Technologies as the tech giant attempts to build cutting-edge semiconductors despite US-led trade restrictions. The innovation, unveiled on Tuesday, comes in the form of a prototype tool for electronic design automation (EDA), according to an announcement by th...
China has unveiled an artificial intelligence platform for drug discovery that can screen a vast library of chemical compounds, cutting the initial drug screening phase from months or years down to tens of seconds. Developers said they expected the system to provide a novel method for identifying lead molecules to treat tumours, neurodegenerative conditions, rare diseases and emerging infectious d...
Hong Kong police are investigating after a blade was discovered between two seats on a Citybus double-decker, the second such incident to be reported in recent days. A male passenger alerted the driver of the route 37A bus, which travels from Pok Fu Lam’s Chi Fu Fa Yuen to Central, at about 5.20pm that the box cutter had been found on the upper deck. Police officers boarded the bus when it stopped...
China is seeking to expand its influence over the future of the global auto industry through a sweeping regulatory blueprint covering core technologies ranging from vehicle chips, AI and batteries to autonomous driving and low-carbon development. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Tuesday released its 2026 work plan on automotive standardisation, outlining measures to tighten t...
Despite recent signs that US-China ties are stabilising, veteran China watcher Li Cheng argues that the two superpowers should not rush to sign a new joint communique, suggesting this would add little value as Washington is not upholding its previous commitments. The recent summit between President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump produced a “dramatic change” in the countries’ relati...
Home-grown innovative drugs make up most of the medicines China’s drug regulator has approved for sale so far this year, underscoring the country’s biotech boom. Of the 19 innovative drugs cleared by the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA), 15 came from domestic companies, according to the regulator’s website as of May 21. These include sonrotoclax, developed by global biopharmaceutica...
Former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte will face a crimes against humanity trial at the International Criminal Court from November 30, the presiding judge said on Wednesday. Duterte faces three counts of crimes against humanity, with prosecutors alleging his involvement in at least 76 murders between 2013 and 2018 during his so-called “war on drugs”. The 81-year-old will be the first Asian f...
The results of the Xi-Trump summit and their implications for regional security will take centre stage this week during Asia’s largest defence forum, the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, according to analysts. Zhu Feng, dean of Nanjing University’s School of International Studies, said US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech at the forum would serve as an important gauge of how much the talks ...
Beijing hosted the presidents of the United States and Russia within days of each other recently. China’s rising diplomatic standing is no accident. It is grounded in a tradition of relational diplomacy stretching back centuries and reflected in the growing recognition across capitals that Beijing is a reliable partner. The clearest articulation of China’s foreign policy ethos comes from academic ...
A convicted paedophile has been jailed for 4½ years for committing obscene acts against a seven-year-old boy while working as a private tutor in Hong Kong more than two years ago. Ng Tin-yu, 24, was sentenced on Wednesday for repeatedly molesting the boy at the latter’s home in Kowloon City until a surveillance camera on the premises captured one of the incidents, leading to the defendant’s arrest...
A wave of AI-generated deepfakes and fake endorsements has pushed Indian celebrities, from cricket stars to Bollywood actors, towards the courts seeking stronger protection for their name, image, voice and likeness. Lawyers say the litigation has exposed a widening gap in Indian law, with courts increasingly recognising personality rights even though the country lacks a dedicated statute to enforc...
Five of the seven villagers trapped deep in a flooded cave in Laos for a week were found alive cramped on a rocky ledge on Wednesday afternoon, rescuers said, in a mission that included some of the same expert cave divers who saved a Thai youth football team in 2018. Around 4.30pm, a Thai-led rescue team finally broke through to an area where they found five of the missing villagers perched on the...
Five of the seven villagers trapped deep in a flooded cave in Laos were found alive on Wednesday afternoon, Thai divers said, in a mission that included some of the same expert cave divers who saved a Thai youth football team in 2018. Around 4.30pm, a Thai-led rescue team broke through to an area where they found five of the missing villagers perched on a muddy ledge, after diving for four days th...
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday said Beijing was ready to deepen cooperation with Panama City and that third countries should not influence their bilateral ties. “China has always maintained that China-Panama relations are not directed against any third party and should not be interfered with by any third party,” Wang said, according to a foreign ministry read-out on Wednesday. Wang ma...
At least six newborn babies died in the same hospital ward in Bangladesh within hours of each other on Wednesday, said health officials, who launched an investigation. The newborns, aged between one and three days, were in the post-delivery ward of Ad-Din Hospital, a private facility in the capital Dhaka. “An investigation is under way, and we need some time to determine the cause of the deaths of...
One of the two Samoan men arrested by Vietnamese police over the killing of an Australian with reported links to Sydney's criminal underworld outside a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City has admitted that he was hired to carry out a hit on a rival. Lorenzo Lemalu, 24, was gunned down outside the restaurant last Thursday, in a rare gangland murder involving foreigners using Vietnam as a base for their ...
Hong Kong has overtaken Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth hub, driven by an initial public offering (IPO) bonanza and capital inflows from mainland China, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Cross-border wealth booked in Hong Kong climbed 10.7 per cent in 2025 to US$2.95 trillion, narrowly beating Switzerland’s US$2.94 trillion after rising 7.6 per cent last year, 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 recorded the hottest day of the year so far as the mercury hit 33.7 degrees Celsius (92.66 Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, with the Observatory warning that temperatures in parts of the city will reach a scorching 37 degrees on Friday. The highest temperatu...
Hong Kong authorities have evicted more residents from a village in the New Territories to make way for the Northern Metropolis megaproject, with one family complaining they only received the notice to move out last month. Dozens of police officers, Lands Department staff members, security guards and workers from the contractors gathered at Yik Yuen Tsuen in Tuen Mun’s Lam Tei on Wednesday morning...
A Dutch minister who was previously sanctioned by Beijing will lead a business delegation to China in early July, according to a source familiar with the planning, as the two nations navigate thorny bilateral issues such as newly proposed US export curbs on ASML chipmaking tools and the Nexperia ownership debacle. Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, who was recently removed from Beijing’s sanction list, will lead a...
Beijing has hailed the inclusion of Hong Kong’s first astronaut in the Shenzhou-23 mission as the “fruitful result” of the “one country, two systems” framework, while expressing hope that more young people from the city will be inspired to contribute to the country’s technological development. At a press briefing on Wednesday, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning described the ...
