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An independent inquiry into Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades has released further details about the final moments of fallen firefighter Ho Wai-ho, who died in the line of duty while responding to the blaze at Wang Fuk Court last November. An interim report from an interdepartmental fire investigation task force was released by the government-appointed independent committee on Thursday. The di...
China plans to expand production capacity of a mine in Bayan Obo in its Inner Mongolia region with an investment of over half a billion yuan (US$74 million). The expansion will raise the mine’s annual output by 50 per cent from 10 million to 15 million tonnes at the world’s largest rare earth deposit. Bayan Obo is a complex polymetallic deposit containing iron, rare earths, fluorite, niobium, scan...
A University of Hong Kong (HKU) virologist has been spared a criminal conviction for assaulting a man and damaging his mobile phone at a railway station last year. Eastern Court on Friday placed Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran on a two-year bind-over order and instructed him to pay HK$800 (US$102) in damages, after he admitted attacking a stranger at Hong Kong MTR station on August 17, 2025. The 48-year...
Rina left Myanmar shortly after the 2021 coup as military violence escalated against pro-democracy protesters like herself and the economy of her country, once a Southeast Asian frontier that had flickered with promise, ground to a virtual halt. Now in Bangkok, the 21-year-old has found work in a cafe, a regular, albeit low-salaried income, the minimum required by the millions of her age group for...
Chinese chip-tool developers continue to make technical progress, with the latest breakthrough in wafer polishing – a critical manufacturing step that flattens and smooths silicon discs – even as the industry remains heavily dependent on foreign suppliers for more complex manufacturing procedures. Hwatsing Technology, China’s leading producer of chemical mechanical polishing equipment, announced a...
A 38-year-old man in China, who was admitted to the prestigious Tsinghua University 18 years ago, recently sat for the national university entrance exam and achieved a remarkable score, allowing him to realise his dream of studying medicine at Peking University. Tsinghua and Peking Universities are two of the most elite institutions in mainland China, admitting students with the highest scores fro...
The release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day in the Philippines was supposed to be a shared cinematic moment for fans who had waited months for the latest instalment in the superhero franchise. But for some deaf viewers, the experience was defined less by the action on screen than by what was missing: subtitles or captions that would allow them to follow the dialogue. That frustration, captured in a v...
Japan’s latest defence white paper’s emphasis on adaptivity and scale of drones signals its intention to seek asymmetric capabilities against China in the event of a conflict, while drawing lessons from Ukraine, according to experts. The 610-page document released on Tuesday highlights the need to integrate unmanned systems, artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies across the J...
Hong Kong police have found the body of a missing 58-year-old man in Ma On Shan, with his cause of death to be confirmed following an autopsy. Officers received a report at around 12.50am on Friday from a passer-by who had spotted a man lying on the ground near a slope on Nui Po Shan in Ma On Shan. Upon arrival at the scene, officers confirmed the death of the man, who was believed to be the missi...
The Philippines is seeking to move its South China Sea row with Beijing into classrooms, a push that analysts say could shape how young Filipinos understand the country’s maritime claims while raising questions over potentially blurred lines between education and state narrative-building. Congressmen in the House of Representatives introduced legislation on Thursday requiring the Department of Edu...
Since the mid‑2000s, China has established itself as Africa’s principal bilateral financier for large infrastructure projects, including railways, bridges, dams and ports. But as the loans involved reach maturity, Beijing has transitioned from a net provider of funds to a net collector. Drawing on data from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Centre and its own calculations, Oxford Econo...
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...
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...
