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Hong Kong has widened its lead over Singapore as Asia’s most international city, buoyed by gains in innovation and ideas, but still trails in attracting technology investment, a leading business chamber study has found. The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce’s annual Asian Cities Internationality Index, released on Thursday, ranked Hong Kong first among 11 Asian cities with 74.6 out of 100 poin...
Billions of yen from a higher departure tax that Japan plans to use to support tourism are being channelled into projects that critics say offer limited direct benefit to travellers, including measures to prevent bear attacks and eradicate an invasive beetle. The Japanese government expects to raise 130 billion yen (US$817.7 million) in the 2026 financial year from the International Tourist Tax, a...
In 1984, Ha Tae-jun, then 24, spotted a notice recruiting for a special unit at the Military Manpower Administration office in central Seoul’s Yongsan district. The notice was scrawled on the wall in marker, with little explanation. Ha applied, and his life was changed forever – training as a South Korean operative for covert missions into North Korea. “About a month after submitting background ch...
On a Saturday evening, Causeway Bay crackles with its famous retail energy, yet by 9 o’clock the streets begin their nightly death. There is nowhere magnetic to spill into – no late-night jazz den, immersive dinner theatre or playhouse humming with an experimental musical. Nearby, the 40,000-seat Hong Kong Stadium squats in silence while the catering rooms of the Happy Valley racecourse sit largel...
A man in Taiwan who used a robot vacuum cleaner to gather evidence of his wife’s affair won a civil lawsuit but was subsequently sentenced to prison for invading her privacy. A recently released court ruling, reported by local media, disclosed that the man, whose identity remains confidential, got married in 2021. The couple lived with his parents and only visited their holiday home during holiday...
Hong Kong’s weather forecaster cancelled its rainstorm warnings on Thursday, following spells of heavy rain that led to the suspension of morning and whole-day schools, with afternoon classes allowed to proceed. The Observatory issued the red signal – the middle level in a three-tier system – at 5.05am, and soon after also sent out a special landslip advisory for Po Toi Island due to heavy rain. T...
Hong Kong’s weather forecaster cancelled all rainstorm warnings on Thursday, following spells of heavy rain that led to the suspension of morning and whole-day schools, with afternoon classes allowed to proceed. The Observatory earlier issued the red signal – the middle level in a three-tier system – at 5.05am, and soon after also sent out a special landslip advisory warning for Po Toi Island due ...
Hong Kong’s weather forecaster cancelled all rainstorm warnings on Thursday, following a morning of heavy rain that led to the suspension of morning and whole-day schools, with afternoon classes allowed to proceed. The Observatory earlier issued the red signal – the middle level in a three-tier system – at 5.05am, and soon after also issued a Special Landslip Advisory warning of potential landslid...
Hong Kong’s weather forecaster has downgraded the red rainstorm warning to amber, while education authorities announced that all morning and whole-day schools were suspended. The Observatory earlier issued the red signal – the middle level in a three-tier system – at 5.05am, and soon after also issued a Special Landslip Advisory warning of potential landslides in Po Toi Island due to heavy rain. T...
Hong Kong’s weather forecaster issued a red rainstorm warning on Thursday morning, while education authorities announced that all morning and whole-day schools were suspended. The Observatory issued the red signal – the middle level in a three-tier system – at 5.05am, and soon after also issued a Special Landslip Advisory warning of potential landslides in Po Toi Island due to heavy rain. The Educ...
China has launched the world’s first 100-kilowatt (kW) floating solar farm built with bamboo frames, offering a more environmentally friendly approach to offshore energy. The floating solar platform, named Jilin-2, is made of composite bamboo tubes and pipes. It has been deployed at a demonstration base off the coast of Yantai in the eastern province of Shandong. It will supply power to an integra...
Yung, an elderly Hong Kong resident, has spent hours hanging out at a neighbourhood shopping centre in Kwai Chung all summer. But he has not been going there to shop, instead taking refuge from the sweltering heat in the mall’s soothing air-conditioned arcade. The retiree, who lives in a 100 sq ft subdivided flat with his wife, is reluctant to use the air conditioner for long periods to avoid a he...
British insurer Prudential announced a US$300 million share buy-back, to be completed by December, as it reported an 8 per cent increase in new business profit for the first half of the year. The buy-back and slower profit growth came amid market concerns over a potential pullback in mainland Chinese visitors to Hong Kong that could test the performance of insurers in one of their largest markets....
On a farm up in the hills of South Korea’s Jeju Island, investigators this week uncovered what a mother had spent three months fearing they would not find: the body of her daughter. Jang Mi-ran, 37, vanished without a trace in May. Police records would later show her case had been quietly closed without anyone ever verifying if she was alive. It was the second such discovery in a matter of days. T...
Colombia’s new hard-right government wants to use prison ships adrift at sea to lock up people it considers highly dangerous criminals, a defence ministry source said on Wednesday. President Abelardo de la Espriella took office earlier this month, vowing to come down hard on armed groups in Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer. The US-backed millionaire campaigned on a pledge to bomb gue...
Another two Chinese robotics start-ups have confirmed plans to launch initial public offerings in Hong Kong as early as next year, boosting the city’s role as a prime fundraising hub for China’s fast-growing technology sector. The two Hangzhou-based firms – both founded by former executives at Alibaba Group Holding – are part of a wave of Chinese embodied artificial intelligence start-ups looking ...
Cooperation between the United States and China is required to manage the unprecedented societal impacts of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Bill Gates wrote in a new essay published on Wednesday. The call to action comes as the billionaire philanthropist and tech titan warns that AI is ushering in “one of the most turbulent times in human history”, which could either bec...
The South China Morning Post has launched a major data project diving into President Xi Jinping’s signature anti-graft campaign. In the third part of a series accompanying the data project, William Zheng looks at the relationship between rich regional resources and corruption. Beneath the desolate Gobi Desert and sparsely populated mountains of China’s less developed regions lie abundant mineral r...
The Justice Department and the FBI said on Wednesday that they seized two Chinese state-sponsored online platforms that targeted US critical infrastructure and other critical networks, including Nasa, the Federal Reserve and the US Senate. According to court documents, the seizures involved a group known as “QTFY”, operated by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Co, which created and ...
International relations has long measured power through familiar instruments: military capability, territory, energy, capital and control of trade. The digital revolution added information to that equation. Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the transformation further by turning information into a strategic capability that can shape economies, governments and societies. For the Association of ...
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iran even as the unpopular and costly war drags on with no end in sight and no sign that the United States is close to achieving any of the lofty goals he set for the conflict. Trump posted an image of himself along with Iran’s slain former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei against a stylised landscape background of punishing US a...
Two workers at Frankfurt Airport have died from malaria after being infected by mosquitoes believed to have arrived in Germany on aircraft from malaria-endemic regions, airport operator Fraport and city health authorities said on Wednesday. The first death occurred in early July, the Frankfurt city health authority said, adding that the cause was established only after the patient died. The second...
Tim Curry, the baritone-voiced British actor who pranced to movie fame as a singing, lingerie-clad “sweet transvestite” in the 1975 cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, has died at the age of 80, his manager said on Wednesday. A cause of death was not immediately given, but Curry had been in ill health for some time. He died peacefully on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles, his manager s...
Brazil has not answered two American proposals to formalise cooperation on critical minerals, a senior US diplomat said at Latin America’s largest mining fair, leaving Washington without a bilateral deal as it races to build rare earth supply chains outside China. Matthew Lowe, economic counsellor at the US embassy in Brasilia, said Washington invited Brazil years ago to join the Minerals Security...
Hong Kong police have arrested two women on suspicion of assault at a shopping centre in Kwun Tong, with a viral clip showing a fight breaking out after a five-year-old girl was shoved and then knocked to the ground. The fight took place at the atrium of the APM shopping centre at around 4.45pm on Wednesday as a crowd of parents and young children gathered around a play area. A source said one of ...
Hong Kong police have arrested two women on suspicion of assault at a shopping centre in Kwun Tong, with a viral clip showing a fight breaking out after a five-year-old girl was shoved and then knocked to the ground. The fight took place at the atrium of the APM shopping centre at around 4.45pm on Wednesday as a crowd of parents and young children gathered around a summer sports-themed exhibition....
The front page of the Danville Register & Bee, a local newspaper in southern Virginia with a circulation of fewer than 4,000, carried an unusual headline. “LEADER: CHINA BEHIND THE MISCONCEPTIONS”, it read, above a photograph of two homes dwarfed by a data centre behind. The leader in question was Vic Ingram, chair of the Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facility Authority (RIFA), a local...
Hong Kong companies should accelerate their expansion into the Middle East, the Asean bloc and Central Asia to reduce their exposure to geopolitical risks, a lawmaker has said, as the United States moved to disrupt immigrant-visa appointments worldwide. Jonathan Lamport, the representative for the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce (HKGCC) at Legislative Council, said the visa uncertainty reinf...
Hong Kong companies should accelerate their expansion into the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Central Asia to reduce their exposure to geopolitical risks, the city’s commercial-sector lawmaker has said, as the United States moved to disrupt immigrant-visa appointments worldwide. Jonathan Lamport, the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce’s (HKGCC) representative in the Legislative Council, said t...
Meta agreed to pay a coalition of US states as much as US$16.7 billion and to impose sweeping new limits on how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram, according to a court filing on Wednesday that ends a landmark trial in California. The settlement, which a federal judge quickly approved, resolves claims by 29 states that Meta deliberately engineered its platforms to hook young users, misled the pu...
