Live headlines from trusted global sources. Click any story to open it on the original website.
As China enters the peak of summer heat, an increasing number of youth believe they have found a solution to fatigue, oily skin, and low energy: qushi, or eliminating dampness from the body. Rooted in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the centuries-old concept of “dampness” dates back about 2,000 years to the Huangdi Neijing, one of the earliest foundational texts of Chinese medicine. Recently, ...
An adult man wearing a pink women’s one-piece swimsuit at a South Korean swimming pool has sparked debate online. The photo of the man circulated on social media Sunday with a caption describing a visitor as a public nuisance at the Han River pool in Seoul. The image shows the man from behind wearing a pink swimsuit and a matching swim cap as visitors cool off during a summer heatwave. The origina...
Shenzhen’s health authorities have issued a warning to private medical service providers, urging them to halt unauthorised operations and marketing activities in Hong Kong after local officials alerted their mainland Chinese counterparts to an unlicensed dental practice in the city. The warning from the Public Hygiene and Health Commission of Shenzhen Municipality came a week after Hong Kong polic...
Shenzhen’s health authorities have issued a warning to private medical service providers, urging them to halt unauthorised operations and marketing activities in Hong Kong after local officials alerted their mainland Chinese counterparts to an unlicensed dental practice in the city. The warning from the Public Hygiene and Health Commission of Shenzhen Municipality came a week after Hong Kong polic...
Bangladesh has asked India to clarify its stance on exiled former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s planned virtual address from New Delhi, warning that allowing political activities by a fugitive could hurt improving bilateral relations. The remarks were Bangladesh’s first official response to Hasina’s planned appearance at Wednesday’s event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia ...
A China-led team has detected the highest-energy light particle ever recorded, showing that the universe can accelerate matter to 30 times the previously predicted limit. The particle was born in a violent binary system – known as Cygnus X-3 – in the constellation Cygnus. That process involves a dead star stripping material from a massive companion and shooting powerful jets into space. After trav...
Hong Kong authorities have been urged to speed up pipe replacement and monitoring after three bursts in the same area in less than a week raised fresh concerns over ageing water infrastructure. The latest burst in Tuen Mun came amid a series of leaks in recent months, including similar incidents in Kwai Chung and Shau Kei Wan, with the latter affecting more than 10,000 households. The Water Suppli...
We have selected seven stories from the SCMP’s coverage of Asia over the past week 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. What Negeri Sembilan loss means for Malaysian PM Anwar’s political strategy The crushing defeat of Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition ...
A 65-year-old repeat sex offender in Hong Kong has been jailed after he was seen groping a secondary school student on a bus two months ago in a widely circulated online video. West Kowloon Court on Tuesday sentenced former household hardware salesman William Wu Yiu-shing to four months in prison for the offence, which garnered widespread attention after a pedestrian outside the bus filmed the att...
Russia said on Monday that seven people, including three children, had been killed and 40 injured at its Black Sea holiday resort of Gelendzhik in what it said was a deliberate Ukrainian drone attack on civilians. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, which like Russia, says it does not deliberately target civilians in the full-scale war which Moscow launched in 2022. Social media videos, ...
India’s tech titan Nandan Nilekani faces an uphill battle overhauling the country’s education system amid exam scandals, student protests and rising youth unemployment. Nilekani, co-founder of technology behemoth Infosys, was appointed head of a national task force for exam reforms following widespread anger and controversies over alleged paper leaks involving the competitive exam for aspiring doc...
Opposition parties in Taiwan have accused the government of failing to defend the island’s long-standing claims in the South China Sea, following its muted response to Philippine attempts to delimit a disputed shoal. “The government speaks loudly when confronting mainland China, but falls silent when Japan or the Philippines challenges Taiwan’s claims,” Kuomintang culture and communications commit...
North Korea’s state media has recommended dog meat soup as protection against summer heat, reviving Pyongyang’s long-running effort to promote the controversial dish as record high temperatures grip both sides of the Korean peninsula. Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Workers’ Party newspaper, published health advice on Sunday offering tips for coping with the heatwave and first aid guidance for heat-rela...
In countries like France and Norway, the government census strictly avoids asking about race and ethnicity. Governed by a desire for national unity, these states operate on a firm premise: categorising citizens by skin colour risks creating divisions and reinforcing prejudice. Across the Atlantic and in the Commonwealth, you find a different philosophy. The United States, United Kingdom and Canada...
A 20-year-old woman in eastern China miraculously survived after jumping from the balcony of her 18th-floor flat following a heated argument with her boyfriend. The woman, known by the alias Xiaoyi, had been quarrelling with her boyfriend for hours in their rented flat in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, before she impulsively jumped from the balcony at 4am on July 12. Miraculously, she survived the fa...
US President Donald Trump sharply criticised US Attorney Jeanine Pirro on Monday for dropping a case of alleged vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, saying she had “choked” under pressure from a judge and “folded like an umbrella”. “Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked. I don’t ...
Democratic Action Party (DAP) secretary general Anthony Loke has announced his resignation as the party’s Negeri Sembilan chairman following its performance in the recent Malaysian state election. Loke announced his decision after a DAP central executive committee (CEC) meeting on Monday night, saying it was the right time for new leadership to take over the state chapter. “In the Negeri Sembilan ...
Hong Kong delivery rider Raj Bhattarai* felt the pain – both physically and financially – after a vehicle rear-ended his motorcycle on the job about a year ago. Bhattarai, who is in his forties, spent a month on sick leave with a back injury and waited 10 months before he received compensation for the accident. The payout was a paltry HK$3,000 (US$382). “It is not enough at all,” said the father o...
South Korea’s financial authorities are weighing tighter curbs on high-risk leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as part of broader efforts to stabilise the country’s notoriously volatile stock market, which has left many investors with heavy losses and mounting debt. The proposals could include giving regulators the power to reduce the leverage ratio of single-stock ETFs and raising the minimum...
The US State Department has notified Congress that it plans to close five foreign missions in a rare downsizing of America’s global diplomatic footprint, according to people familiar with the notice. In the notice sent to some congressional committees late last week, the State Department said it planned to close its posts in St George’s, Grenada; Nagoya, Japan; Medan, Indonesia; Douala, Cameroon;...
Leading Chinese brokerages have expressed optimism for domestic tech shares traded in August, distinguishing them from the sharp sell-off that has rattled South Korean financial markets. Citic Securities said it believed mainland-traded shares – also known as A shares – had only undergone a correction after investors piled into artificial intelligence-related sectors, rather than suffering the del...
Technology giants Meta and Anthropic will be among the companies invited to the White House on Tuesday to discuss a voluntary framework under which America’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) developers could give the government early access to their most advanced models for testing their hacking capabilities. Reuters reported on Monday that the Trump administration has finalised the details of...
Bank accounts held by US President Donald Trump were closed by Capital One in 2021 after it flagged financial activity that had characteristics of money laundering, the bank disclosed in a court filing over the weekend. The court filing is tied to a lawsuit filed against Capital One by one of Trump’s financial holding companies soon after he was sworn into office a second time. Trump alleges that ...
Bank accounts held by US President Donald Trump were closed by Capital One in 2021 after it flagged financial activity that had characteristics of money laundering, the bank disclosed in a court filing over the weekend. The court filing is tied to a lawsuit filed against Capital One by one of Trump’s financial holding companies soon after he was sworn into office a second time. Trump alleges that ...
Lyle Goldstein is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and director of Asia engagement at the Washington think tank Defence Priorities. How do you assess the progress of the People’s Liberation Army’s modernisation drive in the past 10 years and its significance in modern military history? How do you forecast the PLA’s position in 2027, ...
United Nations rights experts have urged Canada to take all feasible measures to protect the Sikh activist Moninder Singh, who has been repeatedly warned by the Canadian authorities of credible threats to his life. In a letter to the Canadian government dated June 3, and made public two months later, as per regular procedure, the five UN experts raised “concerning allegations of foreign intimidati...
Five United Nations rights experts have urged Canada to take all feasible measures to protect the Sikh activist Moninder Singh, who has been repeatedly warned by the Canadian authorities of credible threats to his life. In a letter to the Canadian government dated June 3, and made public two months later, as per regular procedure, the UN experts raised “concerning allegations of foreign intimidati...
India’s property market has gone from strength to strength. All the main sectors continue to perform extremely well. Last year, take-up of shopping centre and warehouse space reached record highs. In the first half of this year, office leasing volumes rose to their second-highest level for the period on record, while new flat sales in the eight largest cities delivered one of the strongest half-ye...
US President Donald Trump on Monday said Iran was facing its “last chance” to reach an agreement with Washington to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the five-month-long war. “This is a last chance for them to sign a good document,” Trump said at the Oval Office in the White House. “I want to give them every last chance before decapitation.” He also claimed that negotiations with Tehran are “goi...
A group of 25 Democratic-led US states sued US President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday, arguing that the president’s latest round of tariffs on goods from 60 trading partners, like most of his earlier sweeping tariffs, exceeds his legal authority to tax imports. The states’ lawsuit filed in the US Court of International Trade in New York follows previous challenges by small US businesse...
