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Hong Kong’s security chief has warned he will take down anyone who endangers national security, while also slamming an embattled press group for lacking credibility ahead of an already delayed leadership election. Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung said on Friday that the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) was “not a statutory organisation” and that candidates for its executive com...
Nurul Izzah Anwar, the daughter of Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, has stepped back from the deputy presidency of his ruling People’s Justice Party (PKR), raising questions over his ability to hold together the political movement he built after a bruising run of electoral setbacks and defections by former allies. PKR’s leadership has sought to frame the move by Nurul Izzah, one of the part...
Nominations for Hong Kong’s powerful Election Committee will take place in October, with the vote for 982 seats of the 1,500-member body – which picks the city’s chief executive and some of the legislative candidates – taking place a month later. A government spokesman said Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu had specified November 22 as the polling date for the committee’s subsector ordinary electio...
Hong Kong is “actively considering” creating a dedicated offence to target persistent sexual abuse of children, after more than 90 per cent of suggestions from a month-long public consultation backed a proposed overhaul of laws tackling sex crimes. Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung said on Friday that more than 6,000 suggestions were received throughout the consultation period, which be...
The Hong Kong dollar’s four-decade-old peg to the US dollar is facing fresh calls for review, after a local financial industry body urged greater use of the yuan and floated the idea of shifting to a basket of major currencies and gold – though financial analysts argue the current system is likely to remain in place. The proposal to revisit the pegged exchange rate system was submitted this week b...
China’s top open-weight AI model Kimi K3 broke out of its isolated test environment during a cybersecurity evaluation, according to US security researchers, following similar high-profile incidents involving closed frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic that highlight the growing challenge of constraining AI behaviour. Kimi K3, released last month by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, escaped from a su...
South Korea’s football governing body is facing further pressure after allegations emerged that it arranged sexual services for foreign referees in 2011 and 2012 in an apparent effort to influence officiating. The allegations centre on confidential audit documents prepared by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2016, according to a report by South Korean broadcaster JTBC. The report quo...
The Philippine National Police and their counterparts in a coastal Chinese province have agreed to deepen intelligence sharing and crack down on international crimes, in a rare display of cooperation between the nations as they clash in the South China Sea. Police chief Jose Melencio Nartatez Jnr hosted Wang Xizhang, the executive director general of Fujian’s Public Security Department, on Tuesday...
The Philippine National Police and their counterparts in a coastal Chinese province have agreed to deepen intelligence sharing and crack down on international crimes, in a rare display of cooperation between the nations as they butt heads in the South China Sea. Chief Jose Melencio Nartatez Jnr hosted Wang Xizhang, the executive director general of Fujian’s Public Security Department, on Tuesday, ...
After winning China’s prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize, grass roots delivery rider and poet Wang Jibing expressed his intention to continue delivering food, describing himself as “a river that quietly flows.” Wang, 57, widely known as the “delivery rider poet”, won the elite literature prize in the poetry category for his third collection, Low Flight. The Lu Xun Literary Prize, named after one of...
A Hong Kong woman has been conned out of nearly HK$69 million (US8.8 million) in a month-long scam involving fraudsters posing as mainland Chinese officials. Police said on Friday that the 43-year-old woman received calls from people claiming to be mainland law enforcement officers, who accused her of committing a crime and demanded money to prove her innocence. The victim transferred about HK$68....
Ferry routes have been suspended, construction halted, fishermen evacuated and drones deployed to patrol over the sea as China’s coastal provinces prepare for the landfall of Typhoon Dolphin, the fourth typhoon to reach the country this summer. By Friday morning, the typhoon was about 820km from China’s east coast and was expected to land from Sunday afternoon to Monday morning somewhere between Z...
Ferry routes have been suspended, construction halted, fishermen evacuated and drones deployed to patrol over the sea as China’s coastal provinces prepare for the landfall of Typhoon Dolphin, the fourth typhoon to reach the country this summer. By Friday morning, the typhoon was about 820km from China’s east coast and was expected to land from Sunday afternoon to Monday morning somewhere between Z...
Malaysia Aviation Group (MAG) said on Friday it has ordered mandatory drug testing and will conduct stricter screening for all pilots across its airlines, following the arrest of a Malaysia Airlines pilot for alleged trafficking in Indonesia last month. The unidentified pilot, 39, was detained on July 28 after authorities found 26kg (57lbs) of the mind-altering drug MDMA in his luggage upon hi...
The student union of Hong Kong’s Lingnan University has announced it will dissolve after nearly six decades in operation, citing the “changes in the situation both on and off campus”, marking the latest in a spate of closures among such organisations in recent years. In a social media post on Thursday, the student union said it had passed a resolution to dissolve after holding a recent joint meeti...
Hong Kong’s tourism industry has called for more experiential events and closer cross-border cooperation to draw visitors, after tourist spending fell to HK$197.5 billion last year, 44 per cent below its 2018 level. Lawmaker Perry Yiu Pak-leung, chairman of China Travel Service (Hong Kong) Limited, said on Friday that the fall reflected changing travel patterns, with tourists placing greater value...
The long-awaited initial public offering of Unitree Robotics, which values the Hangzhou-based firm at 60.99 billion yuan (US$9 billion), is set to serve as a valuation benchmark for China’s booming embodied-AI sector, buoyed by retail investor excitement and high-profile AI backers like DeepSeek. Widely billed as “mainland China’s first humanoid stock”, Unitree has priced its IPO on Shanghai’s Sta...
We have selected seven stories from this week’s news across Hong Kong, mainland China, the wider Asia region and beyond that resonated with our readers and shed light on topical issues. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. China hits back at US with barrage of sanctions, drone industry curbs China has hit back against a round of US sanctions with a barrag...
A Malaysian court on Friday deferred charges against former prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob, who could not attend his hearing in a multimillion-dollar corruption investigation after being admitted to hospital for a heart condition. Ismail Sabri, 66, has faced corruption accusations following the arrests of a senior aide and several others last February over alleged abuse of power and money laun...
China is expanding its role in the fight against HIV/Aids in Africa by funding new projects and backing local medicine manufacturing as part of its signature health initiative, the Health Silk Road. Beijing’s larger presence comes as traditional Western aid wanes following the closure of the US Agency for International Development and sweeping cuts to the World Health Organization and the Presiden...
At least five people were killed at a school near Thailand’s capital Bangkok on Friday morning after a student went on a gun rampage, with the tragedy shocking the nation and reopening questions over access to firearms. The 14-year-old suspect had killed his grandparents before opening fire at the Debsirin Nonthaburi School, about an hour outside the capital, and then took his own life, officials ...
Seven people were killed at a Thai school near Bangkok on Friday morning after a student gunman went on a rampage, police said. The suspect also killed his grandparents before opening fire at the Debsirin Nonthaburi School, around an hour outside the kingdom’s capital, in a mass shooting that has stunned the country and reopened questions over access to guns. “There are reports of seven deaths – t...
Seven people, both teachers and pupils, were killed at a Thai school near Bangkok on Friday morning after a student gunman went on a rampage, police said, in the country’s latest mass shooting. The attack occurred at the Debsirin Nonthaburi School, around an hour outside the Thai capital. “There are reports of seven deaths – three teachers, three students, and one perpetrator – while 15 wounded ha...
Four people, including teachers and students, were killed in a school shooting in Thailand on Friday, Education Minister Prasert Jantararuangtong said. The minister did not specify whether the four dead included the gunman, who police said had killed himself. The incident took place at Debsirin Nonthaburi School in the Bang Kruai district of Nonthaburi province north of Bangkok. Pol...
At least one teacher was killed and four other people injured by a student who opened fire at a school in Thailand on Friday before killing himself, authorities said. Lt. Col. Dechrapee Kongdee Nonthaburi Provincial Police Commander confirmed the casualties and said the suspected gunman had committed suicide. Among those injured were one teacher and three students, he said. The incident took pla...
At least 10 students were wounded in a school shooting in a province just north of the Thai capital Bangkok on Friday, local media reported. “A shooting has occurred at a well-known high school in Bang Kruai district, Nonthaburi province. Initial reports indicate 10-15 people have been injured,” local broadcaster Thai PBS said. Police identified the perpetrator as a student. There were no further...
Temperatures in some parts of Hong Kong could hit 37 degrees Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) or above over the coming weekend under the influence of Tropical Cyclone Dolphin, according to the city’s forecaster, which warned residents to take precautions against heatstroke. The Hong Kong Observatory said weak winds would linger over the city on Friday, with hot weather persisting over the next few days and...
Temperatures in some parts of Hong Kong could hit 36 degrees Celsius (97 Fahrenheit) or above over the coming weekend under the influence of Tropical Cyclone Dolphin, according to the city’s forecaster, which warned residents to take precautions against heatstroke. The Hong Kong Observatory said weak winds would linger over the city on Friday, with hot weather persisting over the next few days and...
China’s central state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are consolidating scattered overseas accounts into unified treasury hubs, with Hong Kong emerging as the preferred base amid a broader crackdown on outflows of state cash. Decades of overseas expansion had seen many SOEs build up assets in multiple jurisdictions, leaving cash management fragmented and making it harder for regulators and company headqu...
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis killed at least 58 government troops in missile and drone attacks on Thursday, a military source said, in one of the deadliest days of the country’s civil war in four years. The attacks come as Yemen is increasingly drawn into the US-Israeli war with Iran, with the rebels stepping up attacks against both government forces and neighbouring Saudi Arabia, a key US ally and...
