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Hong Kong police are investigating a suspected murder-suicide after an 80-year-old man jumped to his death from a residential building, shortly before officers found his 66-year-old wife dead inside their flat with severe head and body injuries. Preliminary investigations showed the couple, married for more than four decades, had planned to divorce due to relationship problems, although authoritie...
Hong Kong police are investigating a suspected murder-suicide after an 80-year-old man allegedly jumped to his death from a residential building, shortly before officers discovered his 66-year-old wife dead inside their flat. The force said on Monday that a security guard from Kwai Chung Estate, a public housing estate in Kwai Tsing, reported that the man had fallen from a height at Chun Kwai Hous...
Australia’s shortage of air traffic controllers is showing signs of nearing a breaking point after the country’s busiest airport recorded at least four near misses in the past month. Since late July, incidents at Sydney Airport included a passenger jet aborting its take-off because there was a plane in its path. In a separate close call, an aircraft that was taxiing had to slam on the brakes to av...
Australia’s shortage of air traffic controllers is showing signs of nearing a breaking point after the country’s busiest airport recorded at least four near misses in the past month. Since late July, incidents at Sydney Airport included a passenger jet aborting its take-off because there was a plane in its path. In a separate close call, an aircraft that was taxiing had to slam on the brakes to av...
Wealthy investors should be ready for higher volatility “for years” as uncertainties around artificial intelligence development and geopolitical risks are set to persist, according to a major private bank. In the past few years, asset prices underwent several roller coaster rides, from US Liberation Day last year to the sell-off of semiconductor shares and US Treasury in recent months. But volatil...
Wealthy investors should be ready for higher volatility “for years” as uncertainties around artificial intelligence (AI) development and geopolitical risks are set to persist, according to a major private bank. In the past few years, asset prices underwent several roller coaster rides, from US Liberation Day last year to the sell-off of semiconductor shares and US Treasury in recent months. But vo...
Three boys from southeastern China offered 10.5 yuan (US$1.5) to a convenience store owner on the brink of closing, igniting a wave of public support. Five years after borrowing money to establish his convenience store in Guangzhou, Chen decided to shut down the shop as business continued to decline. On August 12, three primary school boys visited the store, as they often did, to buy drinks. Durin...
Londoners are facing historic levels of subsidence risk after five successive heatwaves dried out the clay soil on which much of the British capital is built. Insurance claims tied to subsidence – a phenomenon associated with bouts of hot, dry weather that shrink the soil and destabilise the foundations on which buildings stand – hit a record last quarter, according to data provided by the Associa...
Half of Hong Kong’s government departments and public bodies have not disclosed their greenhouse gas emissions data and some calculations have been based on outdated information, a green group has found. The findings from The Green Earth have prompted calls for stronger carbon reporting and the setting of reduction targets across the public sector to align with the city’s goal of achieving carbon ...
The top two executives at Alibaba Group Holding bought a combined HK$120 million (US$15.3 million) worth of the company’s ordinary shares on Monday in a vote of confidence after the tech giant unveiled one of China’s biggest fundraising rounds dedicated to AI. The share placement, the first since Alibaba’s listing in Hong Kong in 2019, was oversubscribed three times amid strong investor sentiment,...
Alibaba Group Holding has sold 710 million new shares at HK$112.70 each to raise HK$80 billion (US$10.2 billion) in one of the largest artificial intelligence-dedicated fundraising efforts by a Chinese technology firm. The offer price represented an 8.4 per cent discount to the stock’s closing price in Hong Kong on Friday and a 3.6 per cent discount to the Friday closing price of its New York-list...
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” This famous quote, widely attributed to Mark Twain, keeps playing in my mind as China mourns the death of former premier Zhu Rongji and reflects on his legacy. It was early afternoon on August 12 when I received a message from a friend on the mainland that made my heart sink: “Our much-respected Premier Zhu left us this morning!” As we anxiously...
Residents of Malaysian villages near the Thailand border were left shaken this weekend after hearing loud booms and seeing flashes of light across the frontier, as Thai authorities confirmed more than 50 coordinated attacks on Saturday night. The blasts, heard in Kampung Lubok Gong and Kampung Tersang in Malaysia’s Kelantan state, coincided with a wave of near-simultaneous attacks across 21 distri...
A party led by allies of Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev won a landslide in parliamentary elections on Sunday, hours after he hinted that he may stay in power beyond his current term. The Adilet party won 71.2 per cent of votes in the election to a new single-chamber parliament, Kazakhstan’s central election commission said on Monday. The Auyl party representing agrarian interests was s...
A party led by allies of Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev won a landslide in parliamentary elections on Sunday, hours after he hinted that he may stay in power beyond his current term. The Adilet party won 71.8 per cent of votes in the election to a new single-chamber parliament, according to an exit poll released on state television. The Auyl party representing agrarian interests was se...
Hong Kong public universities have admitted a record number of students applying outside the local exam system, with the intake surging by 63 per cent over seven years to account for nearly 30 per cent of the 15,000 government-funded places, the South China Morning Post has found. Meanwhile, the intake of home-grown students taking the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exam has dropped by 7 per...
Indonesia produces and exports more palm oil than any other country, but when it comes to setting the price, it still plays second fiddle to Malaysia. President Prabowo Subianto wants to change that. On August 14, he announced a new exchange for commodities including palm oil, nickel and coal, targeted to begin operations on January 1. But analysts say dominance in physical supply does not automat...
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham will visit Kyiv on Monday on his first international visit since taking office last month, his office said, as Ukraine marks its 35th independence anniversary. Burnham has vowed to give strong support to Ukraine as it battles Russia’s invasion. The Labour Party leader’s visit comes as he announced that Britain had “agreed that defence firm MBDA can release class...
Syria said it held talks with Israel in Jordan on Sunday on de-escalation after recent Israeli strikes, and on keeping the country out of tensions between Israel and Turkey, an ally of Damascus. The high-level negotiations came after the sides in January agreed to establish an intelligence-sharing mechanism as they edge towards a security agreement. They also came after Israel bombed the disused A...
French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday welcomed Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman for a two-day visit, hosting him at the Esports World Cup before a second day focused on bilateral deals and the situation in the Middle East. A French presidential official said several agreements, on health, transport and energy, will be signed on Monday alongside talks likely to focus o...
Two years after the Audit Commission called out Hongkong Post for its lack of profitability and other failings, the postmaster finally moved to fix a structural expense: staff costs. But the audit report probably wasn’t the main catalyst for change. Rather, it was the fact the government had to ask the Legislative Council for a HK$4.6 billion (US$510 million) bailout to keep Hongkong Post operatin...
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated this weekend from the area of Reno, Nevada, and many others were under orders to leave on Sunday as a wildfire reached the outskirts of the state’s third-most-populous city. About 42,000 residents have been displaced or are under active evacuations with an additional 45,000 in “be prepared to evacuate” status as the Hawk Fire threatened northern ...
A group of 21 former international cricket captains, including India’s Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev, signed a letter to Pakistan’s government on Sunday regarding the healthcare of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. Khan has been in prison since 2023 and was sentenced late last year along with his wife to 17 years on corruption charges they both deny. The 73-year-old, who was also a former Pa...
The US special envoy to Syria and ambassador to Turkey on Sunday walked back his comments from two days ago that Israel “still” occupies the Golan Heights in violation of UN resolutions, remarks that went against US President Donald Trump’s position on the disputed territory. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in 1981. The United Nations and mos...
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believes actions taken by dismissed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, including his involvement in mass protests and calls for an election, were misguided, as he publicly detailed their dispute for the first time. Zelensky also alluded to problematic decisions over defence spending and said inaccurate information provided by the Defence Ministry cont...
A mountainous heap of refuse collapsed at Dar es Salam, the largest landfill in Guinea’s capital Conakry, early on Sunday killing at least 30 people, according to a provisional death toll from the country’s civil protection service. Heavy rains, which started at around 3am, washed over the refuse, triggering a landslide that buried nearby shacks. Lancine Sylla, the head of the suburb where the inc...
A mountainous heap of refuse collapsed at Dar es Salam, the largest landfill in Guinea’s capital Conakry, early on Sunday killing at least 22 people, according to a provisional death toll from the country’s civil protection service. Heavy rains, which started at around 3am, washed over the refuse, triggering a landslide that buried nearby shacks. Lancine Sylla, the head of the suburb where the inc...
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country played no role in the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia to Europe, following the arrest in Croatia of a second Ukrainian suspect sought by Germany. “Ukraine has never even been involved in even the idea of this operation,” Zelensky told reporters during the Ukraine Nordic-Baltic summit in Kyiv on Sunday. “I hope there w...
The Trump administration on Sunday warned that Canada would be “foolish” to think it could win a trade war with the United States, predicting a “devastating” impact on its northern neighbour. Negotiations between Washington and Ottawa broke down late Friday, putting into force new 50 per cent US tariffs impacting about US$20 billion worth of Canadian goods, or 5.5 per cent of Canadian exports to t...
Chinese archaeologists will carry out their first joint field project in South America by exploring sites dating back thousands of years in Peru as Beijing steps up its efforts to deepen cultural ties with the region. The Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said it had signed a cooperation agreement with the Caral Archaeological Zone of the Peruvian Ministry of Cultu...
