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Members of a delegation from the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa paid tribute to their ancestors at the historic Ryukyu Kingdom cemetery in Beijing, highlighting a legacy of ties that China is increasingly leveraging as a counterweight in its frictions with Tokyo. During the visit in June – first made public by the Global Times on Sunday – about a dozen delegates travelled to the site southeast of ...
A French teenager who posted a video of himself licking a straw and returning it to an iJooz vending machine in Singapore was fined S$600 (US$465) for public nuisance on Thursday. The clip had gone viral after someone in his Instagram circle recorded it and forwarded the footage to a media outlet, the defence said. Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien, 19, pleaded guilty to one count of public nuisance,...
The US carried out fresh strikes in Iran on Wednesday, the US military said, further intensifying a five-month-old war that was already expanding beyond its main fronts to embroil additional countries in the region. “US forces began launching strikes against Iran at 8pm ET today,” US Central Command said in a statement. “The strikes are a powerful response to yesterday’s attempted Iranian attacks ...
An anime convention in southern China recently evicted several cosplayers after they put their bare feet in water and sold the so-called “feet juice,” which attracted large crowds of onlookers eager to buy. This activity mirrored a similar stunt at a US anime event in May, where a number of participants sold their feet juice for US$10-30 per cup, generating widespread controversy and heated discus...
A new law allowing patients in Hong Kong to reject life-sustaining treatments when they are terminally ill will take effect on Friday. The South China Morning Post looks into how the law will affect patients and healthcare professionals. 1. What is the new law about? The Advance Decision on Life-sustaining Treatment Ordinance will come into effect on July 31, following its passage by the Legislati...
Zhongji Innolight suffered a rocky start in its highly anticipated Hong Kong stock market debut on Thursday, as the Chinese firm felt the impact of a global downturn in investor sentiment towards the artificial intelligence sector. Shares closed two per cent lower at HK$960 after dropping as much as 10 per cent. The company’s Shenzhen-listed shares slipped 9.15 per cent to 864 yuan, narrowing thei...
Zhongji Innolight saw its share price drop as much as 3 per cent after its hotly anticipated debut on the Hong Kong stock market on Thursday, as the Chinese firm felt the impact of a global downturn in investor sentiment towards the artificial intelligence sector. By 9.33am, it dropped by 2.86 per cent to HK$953. The Chinese firm – a leading producer of optical transceivers used in AI data centres...
If you witnessed someone committing a crime, how confident would you be that you could correctly identify that person later on? As it turns out, studies consistently reveal that we tend to overestimate our ability to recall past events accurately and recognise people we think we have seen before. A 2011 United States study showed that a majority of participants (63 per cent) believe that human mem...
Malaysia is stepping up scrutiny of foreign-run businesses amid concerns from local operators over competition from China. The government wants to retain Chinese investment, technology and affordable consumer goods, while assuring local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that foreign competitors are not subject to different rules. Former trade and investment minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz, now chair...
Three years ago, I warned in these pages that the greatest existential threat to humanity might not emerge from a stray asteroid or a cosmic cataclysm but from uncontrolled artificial intelligence (AI). Today, the trajectory towards an AI Armageddon has not merely accelerated, it has violently careered off the rails of human oversight. The academic debates of previous years regarding a voluntary s...
Singtel, Singapore’s largest telecommunications company, confirmed on Thursday that it was in discussions with multiple parties over a potential stake sale in its Australian telecoms unit Optus, but said there was no certainty the talks would result in a deal. Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecommunications provider, has been owned by Singtel since 2001. In May, Singtel said it was open t...
For the first time, veteran sailor Thomas Wong Kam-chuen and his partners set sail from Hong Kong on their 46-foot yacht on a two-day trip earlier this month to a holiday island in Zhuhai, testing the waters for more leisure travel to mainland China. After a five-hour voyage from the Causeway Bay typhoon shelter on a sunny weekend, they anchored their Danish-built yacht, DBX2, at Guishan Island, w...
Asean’s optimism in concluding a long-awaited code of conduct (COC) in the South China Sea by the end of the year is not shared by observers who highlight that significant gaps remain in perspectives between the bloc and China, particularly between Beijing and the Philippines. Any consensus on the code is likely to be broad and symbolic, and while “negotiation fatigue” could set in, it is still im...
Five people have died after powerful gusts of wind in Brazil brought chaos to Rio de Janeiro and parts of Sao Paulo state, cutting power and bringing public transport to a standstill. Residents of Rio de Janeiro were taken by surprise when winds of up to 100km/h hit just before rush hour, felling dozens of trees and leaving thousands stranded as the city’s three subway queues ground to a halt. The...
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has maintained its base rate following the US Federal Reserve’s decision to keep its key rate unchanged, but US traders are already betting on a rate rise in September. The city’s base rate was kept at 4 per cent by the HKMA on Thursday. Hours earlier, the US Federal Reserve also retained its target rate in the range of 3.5 to 3.75 per cent, concluding its f...
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has maintained its base rate following the US Federal Reserve’s decision to keep its key rate unchanged, but US traders are already betting on a rate rise in September. The city’s base rate was kept at 4 per cent by the HKMA on Thursday. Hours earlier, the US Federal Reserve also retained its target rate in the range of 3.5 to 3.75 per cent, concluding its f...
Hong Kong’s monetary authority has maintained its base rate following the US Federal Reserve’s decision to keep its key rate unchanged. The city’s base rate was kept at 4 per cent by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) on Thursday. Hours earlier, the US Federal Reserve also retained its target rate in the range of 3.5 per cent to 3.75 per cent, concluding its fifth Federal Open Market Committe...
Hong Kong’s monetary authority has maintained its base rate following the US Federal Reserve’s decision to keep its key rate unchanged. The city’s base rate was kept at 4 per cent by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) on Thursday. Hours earlier, the US Federal Reserve also retained its target rate in the range of 3.5 per cent to 3.75 per cent, concluding its fifth Federal Open Market Committe...
Lindsay Clancy sobbed in court on Wednesday as jurors listened to the anguished emergency call her then-husband made after returning from an errand to find she had strangled their three children in their Massachusetts home. On the roughly seven-minute recording, Patrick Clancy can be heard speaking with his wife upon finding her badly injured and bleeding in their yard, after she jumped from the h...
Donald Trump’s demands that American allies in the Asia-Pacific region share more of the defensive burden have renewed questions about how far they can rely on the United States to help deter the likes of China and North Korea. Such concerns have led to an increasing focus on developing their own defence industries – but analysts have said that may eventually weaken American dominance in the globa...
US President Donald Trump unveiled a US$22 billion plan on Wednesday to rebuild Washington Dulles airport by replacing concourses and adding a large parking garage while preserving the landmark main terminal. The announcement is the latest in a series of major projects he has announced in and around the US capital. “It’s considered one of the worst airports anywhere in the world, we’re going to m...
Brazil overtook Russia and Belgium in the first five months of this year to become the world’s largest importer of Chinese cars, buying US$5.2 billion worth of vehicles as brands raced to land shipments before a tariff increase took effect in July. The figure, drawn from Chinese customs data, is up 146.9 per cent from the US$2.1 billion recorded a year earlier, when Brazil ranked sixth among buyer...
The man who stabbed and partially blinded author Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in 2022 was found guilty on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges for the attack, which prosecutors said was incited by death threats over Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Hadi Matar, 28, already serving a 25-year prison term on state charges of attempted murder for the knife assault, now faces a maximum ...
A man was convicted on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges in the 2022 stabbing of Salman Rushdie, the author who has faced a decades-old death threat over his novel The Satanic Verses. A jury found Hadi Matar guilty of all the charges against him, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism. A message seeking comment was sent to Matar’s lawyers. Matar, 28, is already serving a 25-y...
Hwaseong, South Korea, past midnight. An engineer watches a defect pattern surface on her screen – the kind that, caught now, saves a week of wafers. She is locked in, fully absorbed, the way engineers get when a breakthrough is close. But she has to go home. The law says so. Yet something is disrupting the clock she races against. Artificial intelligence is quietly rewriting what her hours are wo...
China may increasingly seek to use its dominance in the global electric vehicle industry as geopolitical leverage, giving Beijing greater influence over countries dependent on its technology and supply chains, according to analysts. “With China, the strategy is different. It’s to overwhelm the industry, capture it, and use it ultimately as leverage,” said Michael Dunne, CEO of Dunne Insights, an a...
Global K-pop sensation BTS said on Wednesday they will not submit their music for next year’s Grammy Awards, following the Recording Academy’s introduction of new categories that include the Best Asian Pop Music Performance. The South Korean megastars had been widely tipped to be in the running for several of the Grammys’ top honours, including Album of the Year, after their comeback album, Ariran...
Four women have accused Jared Leto of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers, to which the actor and musician responded Wednesday that he has “never sexually assaulted anyone”. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false,” Leto, 54, said in a statement. The BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, released on Wednes...
Four women have accused Jared Leto of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers, to which the actor and musician responded Wednesday that he has “never sexually assaulted anyone”. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false,” Leto, 54, said in a statement. The BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, released on Wednes...
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday, a choice that may intensify questions about how US central bank chief Kevin Warsh will deliver on his commitment to bring inflation back down to the 2 per cent target. The widely expected decision to leave the benchmark interest rate in the 3.50 per cent to 3.75 per cent range drew dissents from three of the 12 members of the policy-set...
