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China must fundamentally overhaul its innovation ecosystem or risk losing its technological sovereignty and national security in an existential AI “knockout game” with the US, an academic based in Chinese tech hub Shenzhen has warned. Huang Ping, assistant dean of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)’s school of public policy, said the country must strongly back open-source artificial in...
A Singaporean man, hired by his aunt to tutor primary school pupils, instead beat them with a clothes hanger, forced them to hold push-up positions for long periods, punched and starved them. One of the children, a six-year-old Chinese national, was abused for 18 hours and forced to drink his own urine. On Thursday, the 31-year-old pleaded guilty to two counts of child abuse, one count of voluntar...
A German court on Thursday handed down a 10-year prison sentence to a 26-year-old man who fatally assaulted a train conductor during a ticket inspection in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate five months ago. The court sitting in Zweibrücken found that the man had attacked the conductor after being found without a ticket, hitting the conductor so hard that he later died of a brain haemorrhag...
Chinese tech industry experts say the rapidly increasing use of AI tokens is giving rise to a token-based economy, with the tiny units underpinning artificial intelligence services evolving beyond a technical metric and into the basis for delivering and pricing AI services. “The [Chinese] digital economy has gone through the stages of the data economy and the computing economy. Today, the token ec...
Chinese tech industry experts say the rapidly increasing use of AI tokens is giving rise to a token-based economy, with the tiny units underpinning artificial intelligence services evolving beyond a technical metric and into the basis for delivering and pricing AI services. “The [Chinese] digital economy has gone through the stages of the data economy and the computing economy. Today, the token ec...
A four-year-old girl has died after being bitten by her family’s pet dog while playing, police and prosecutors in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt reported on Thursday. The dog was described as an American Stafford, a breed commonly known as the Pit Bull Terrier or American Staffordshire terrier. The report said people at the scene had attempted to pull the dog off the girl, but failed to...
Reports of sweeping lay-offs at Tokopedia, the Indonesian e-commerce giant majority-owned by China’s ByteDance, have renewed concerns about Southeast Asia’s largest digital economy as analysts warn the country’s tech winter shows few signs of easing. The cuts have also raised questions over the future of one of Indonesia’s best-known home-grown digital champions, with analysts saying Tokopedia’s d...
A Chinese paratrooper rescued an unconscious colleague after their parachutes became entangled in mid-air, the military’s official newspaper reported on Thursday. The PLA Daily said the incident happened during a scheduled parachute refresher training exercise conducted by a People’s Liberation Army Air Force brigade on May 28. First Lieutenant Wang Rui, a team leader in the unspecified brigade, w...
Eight teenagers have been arrested after allegedly being recruited via social media by a crime syndicate to splash paint on the doors of flats and businesses across Hong Kong to intimidate debtors. The four boys and four girls were apprehended alongside a 24-year-old man on suspicion of criminal damage and conspiracy to commit criminal damage as part of a citywide police operation on Tuesday and W...
A three-year-old girl is fed extensively by her parents leading her to weigh as much as 35kg from eating hearty meals in front of a camera as a live-streamer. A young boy and a girl of his age are presented as a couple and perform intimate exchanges onscreen. Another young boy is filmed eating live worms and snails. These unsettling scenes are from viral videos featuring so-called online celebrity...
Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983 and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75. Tyler died “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said on Thursday in a...
Xiaomi, the smartphone vendor that has become one of Tesla’s biggest challengers in mainland China after entering the electric vehicle (EV) market, has doubled down on research and development to combat a slowdown in domestic sales. The Beijing-based tech giant announced on Thursday it would assemble and sell models under a new sport-utility vehicle (SUV) line known as Sky Nomad, a product range a...
North Korean Premier Pak Thae-song will arrive in China on Friday for a three-day trip to mark the anniversary of a friendship treaty between the two countries, in another sign of improving ties between the two traditional allies. This year is the 65th anniversary of the signing of the China-North Korea Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, Beijing’s only formal defence pact, a...
China called on the United States and Iran to stick with peace plans after a resumption of missile strikes in the Middle East spurred a jump in oil prices. “Reigniting the conflict does not serve any party’s interests,” a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday. “We call on the US and Iran to follow through on their memorandum of understanding, resolve disputes through ...
Indonesia’s attempt to keep children aged under 16 off social media platforms deemed high risk has quickly become one of the world’s biggest tests of online safety regulation, with more than 4.8 million suspected underage accounts removed or deactivated in the first three months of enforcement. For President Prabowo Subianto’s government, the figures are an early sign that major platforms are fall...
Hong Kong authorities have recorded 176 reports of suspected child abuse involving 188 minors in just over five months since the city’s mandatory reporting regime came into effect, with nearly half of the children possibly victims of sexual abuse. Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han on Thursday revealed the number of reports logged by the end of last month since the requirement for ...
Hong Kong authorities have recorded 176 reports of suspected child abuse involving 188 children in just over five months of the city’s new mandatory reporting regime, with sexual abuse accounting for the largest share of total victims. Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han revealed on Thursday the number of reports logged by the end of last month since the requirement for 25 professio...
Hong Kong authorities have recorded 176 reports of suspected child abuse involving 188 children in just over five months of the city’s new mandatory reporting regime, with sexual abuse accounting for the largest share of total victims. Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han revealed on Thursday the number of reports logged by the end of last month since the requirement for 25 professio...
Dozens of outbound flights from Hong Kong to Taiwan, mainland China and Japan originally scheduled for later this week have been cancelled due to Super Typhoon Bavi, with some local carriers offering special arrangements for affected passengers. A South China Morning Post check found that more than 40 flights – operated by Cathay Pacific Airways, HK Express, Hong Kong Airlines and Greater Bay Airl...
Why are global investors so bearish on the yen? There are good reasons Japan’s currency should be gaining in value. Last month, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) raised interest rates to a 31-year high of 1 per cent and signalled it would continue increasing borrowing costs. Bond markets are currently pricing in a nearly 90 per cent probability of another increase by December. Nominal wages in Japan have ri...
The leaders of Malaysia and Thailand said on Thursday they would work on developing a special border economic zone, and had resolved an issue that had disrupted trade in seafood between the neighbours. In May, Thailand restricted the import of Malaysian-caught sea bass due to concerns over chemical residues, prompting Kuala Lumpur to temporarily ban some varieties of Thai shrimp over food safe...
Fewer Hong Kong university entrance exam candidates reported high stress levels compared with last year, but nearly 40 per cent cited artificial intelligence (AI) and the economic outlook as their top sources of stress, a survey has found. Releasing the findings of its “Further Education Planning Survey” on Thursday, the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups attributed the pressure to concerns that...
Chinese AI labs are increasingly pursuing proprietary chips, mirroring a global trend towards software-hardware integration, but industry insiders and analysts warn that the strategy carries risk due to the massive upfront investments required. “The core motivation for choosing in-house chips lies in pursuing [greater] hardware-software synergy and lowering long-term operating costs,” said Arisa L...
Hong Kong’s anti-corruption watchdog has charged three people, including two private care home operators, over an alleged HK$1.3 million fraud involving an elderly care voucher scheme. The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) said on Thursday that the trio allegedly inflated service records under the Social Welfare Department’s Community Care Service Voucher Scheme for the Elderly, ove...
A Hong Kong man has pleaded guilty to inciting subversion under the national security law for promoting a pro-Taiwan party and disseminating anti-Communist messages in 2024 and last year. The District Court heard on Thursday that Chan Ho-hin, a 23-year-old waiter, had proclaimed that the Taiwanese government was the only legitimate regime in the country, and called on Hongkongers to support and jo...
More than 900 restaurants and eateries in Hong Kong opened their doors to customers with dogs on the first day of a scheme allowing canines into restaurants, marking the end of a 30-year ban enacted to protect against rabies. Chinese restaurants, fast food chains and coffee shops on Thursday welcomed their first groups of customers with dogs, although some owners were left disappointed after being...
More than 900 restaurants and eateries in Hong Kong opened their doors to customers with dogs on the first day of a scheme allowing canines into restaurants, marking the end of a 30-year ban enacted to protect against rabies. Chinese restaurants, fast food chains and coffee shops on Thursday welcomed their first groups of customers with dogs, who flocked to eateries across the city to dine with th...
More than 900 restaurants and eateries in Hong Kong opened their doors to customers with dogs on the first day of a scheme allowing canines into restaurants, marking the end of a 30-year ban enacted to protect against rabies. Chinese restaurants, fast food chains and coffee shops on Thursday welcomed their first groups of customers with dogs, who flocked to eateries across the city to dine with th...
The United States is turning to South Korea’s world-leading shipbuilding industry as it seeks to refresh its ageing naval fleet, a move set to expand the bilateral alliance beyond security into defence manufacturing, technology and industrial production. According to analysts, the bid reflects Washington’s efforts to address long-standing problems in its own industry – such as chronic construction...
The tourism authority of Tibet has announced a 500,000-yuan (US$73,500) award for an online influencer whose viral road trip video promoted local tourism and garnered millions of likes The blogger, who goes by the handle @Liyaode, released the video on July 4 showing he had hailed a taxi to go from Chongqing, in southwestern China, where he lives, to Lhasa, capital of the Tibetan autonomous region...
