US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the West had to be very careful about the exact nature of Chinese investment in Western economies and think very carefully about investments in strategic assets.China’s spectacular economic and military ris...

The top US general for Africa is warning that a growing threat from China may come not just from the waters of the Pacific but from the Atlantic as well.General Stephen Townsend said Beijing was looking to establish a large navy port capable of hosti...

A young Japanese woman being questioned on suspicion of killing her wealthy and elderly husband three years ago is declining to cooperate with investigators, although the evidence against her appears to be mounting.The entire case surrounding Saki Su...

Daisy Gong was raised in a poor family in the small, remote mountainous village of Aganzhen, in Gansu province, northwest China. The eldest of three children, she grew up planting lily bulbs with her mother. She started school aged five, walking an ...

He Xin, the son-in-law of Phoenix Media Investment Holdings Limited’s founder Liu Changle, has been detained by Chinese police in Hainan province for his role in a collapsed peer-to-peer lending platform.He, the controlling shareholder of Phoenix Z...

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike on Thursday said an extended state of emergency was needed to contain Covid-19 infections that are straining the medical system in the capital, a move that could raise further questions about its ability to host the Olympi...

Health experts have urged Hong Kong authorities to investigate any attempts by people with Covid-19 to deliberately conceal their movements, after at least two of those carrying mutated strains of the coronavirus were accused of hampering contact tra...

Hong Kong national security police have arrested three members of a local student group over social media comments which allegedly constitute acts of secession or subversion, according to sources, while others are under investigation for the same cri...

TikTok retained its crown as the world’s most downloaded non-game app in April with 59 million installs, around half of the 107 million downloads it registered a year ago, according to mobile market analytics firm Sensor Tower.The figures include t...

Chinese President Xi Jinping told Communist Party officials at the start of the year the world was in “turmoil” and would be for some time, but regardless of the challenges it faced, Beijing was “invincible”.His comments came in a speech made...

Free beer, free doughnuts, free baseball tickets and savings bonds – US government officials and businesses are teaming up to encourage Americans to get vaccinated against Covid-19.President Joe Biden wants 70 per cent of adults to have received at...

With a knowing wink to Singles’ Day, the commercial shopping event created by Alibaba, the city of Shanghai is starting its own Double Five shopping festival, which will run through June. While the name may be a reference to 11.11, the name used f...

President Jair Bolsonaro said the novel coronavirus may have been made in a laboratory to wage “biological warfare”, in the latest comments likely to strain Brazil’s relations with China.“It’s a new virus. Nobody knows whether it was born i...

More than 200 global organisations have urged the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Myanmar, saying the time for statements has passed and immediate action is needed to help protect peaceful protesters against military rule and other o...

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Cristiano Lima on politico.com on May 5, 2021.Facebook may have hoped that life in Washington would get easier after its appointed oversight board ruled on ...

The good news is that the vaccines work against a new virus strain circulating in India that’s spread to several other countries.The bad news is it won’t be only the new version of the pathogen to emerge from an outbreak of this scale, underscori...

Imprisoned Hong Kong opposition activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung on Thursday was sentenced to 10 months’ jail for taking part in an unauthorised vigil last year commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.Three district councillors – Lester Sh...

China’s top economic planner said on Thursday that it had “indefinitely suspended” its high-level economic dialogue with Australia, amid escalating tensions between the two nations.A short statement by the National Development and Reform Commis...

The largest real-world study yet of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Thursday confirmed that the jab provided more than 95 per cent protection against Covid-19, but found that the level dropped significantly when people received just one of the two pre...

US President Joe Biden’s proposal to set a minimum global corporation tax at 21 per cent is gaining momentum, with the official running international talks on the matter saying that an agreement could settle near that rate.The Biden administration�...

Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s grip on the No 3 House Republican job all but vanished as former US president Donald Trump endorsed replacing her with New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who also has the backing of the chamber’s second-ranking Repu...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing.The recent emergence of local cases with coronavirus variants has set Hong Kong on edge, amid fears the city c...

With flight attendants dressed in khaki-coloured tracksuits and a catchy name, Indonesia’s new low cost carrier Super Air Jet is betting on demand from tech-savvy millennials in the world’s sixth largest aviation market when travel can resume aft...

China is stepping up efforts to control the spread of African swine fever, restricting the movement of live pigs within designated regions.While the country aims for a full recovery from the pork crisis by midyear, experts warn that this goal could b...

Singapore on Tuesday announced it would extend its quarantine period from 14 to 21 days for most inbound travellers – except those from seven jurisdictions including Hong Kong – as it battles a flare-up in Covid-19 infections linked to a large pu...

This is the first in a two-part series on the potential impacts of presidential elections in the region on relations with China and the United States. Here, Laura Zhou and Eduardo Baptista examine the challenges a swing in the electoral pendulum coul...

SpaceX managed to land its prototype Starship rocket at its Texas base without blowing it up on Wednesday, the first time it has succeeded in doing so in five attempts.The test flight represents a major win for the hard-charging company, which eventu...

Carole Baskin has a purr-fect idea to continue cashing in on the Tiger King craze.The animal rights activist and zoo owner, who gained notoriety as a sensational subject of Netflix’s wildly popular 2020 documentary Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Ma...

Former Hong Kong chief justice Geoffrey Ma Tao-li has defended the role of foreign judges in the city, arguing they should continue to sit on the bench and help enforce the mini-constitution which he described as the basis of judicial independence.In...

An Italian court convicted two young Americans on Wednesday for the murder of a police officer while they were on a summer holiday in Rome, with both handed life sentences.Finnegan Lee Elder, 21, had admitted to stabbing Mario Cerciello Rega during a...

Travel agencies in Thailand are selling coronavirus “vaccine tours” to the United States, as some wealthy Thais grow impatient awaiting mass inoculations that are still a month away amid the country’s biggest outbreak so far.The tours reflect g...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday sent two Navy patrol vessels to Jersey over concerns that French fishermen could blockade its main port in an escalating post-Brexit row.France warned Tuesday it was weighing its response after Britai...

South Australian farmer Corey Blacksell said the biggest eye-opener for him last year was not so much the deteriorating relations between Australia and its biggest trading partner, but how Australia had become so complacent in its reliance on that on...

The US will back a proposal to waive intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines, with the Biden administration’s top trade official citing the “extraordinary circumstances” of a pandemic that has yet to be brought under control.The...

The Group of Seven scolded both China and Russia on Wednesday, casting Beijing as a bully and the Kremlin as malicious, but beyond words there were few concrete steps aside from expressing support for Taiwan and Ukraine.Founded in 1975 as a forum for...

Blue Origin, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, said on Wednesday it is targeting July 20 for its first suborbital sightseeing trip on its New Shepard spacecraft, a landmark moment in a competition to usher in a new era of private commercial s...

Hong Kong’s Dairy Farm International Holdings, which runs the Wellcome chain of supermarkets and 7-Eleven convenience stores, has said it will install a solar power system atop its fresh food facility in Tseung Kwan O by 2022.The project, to be und...

Jeff Bezos may soon be sailing the high seas in his very own mega-yacht.The Amazon CEO has commissioned a 416-foot (127-metre) custom yacht from the Dutch shipbuilder Oceanco, according to an excerpt from Brad Stone’s forthcoming book, Amazon Unbou...

In a move seen as targeting China, the European Union has proposed new rules to prevent subsidised firms from hoovering up strategic European assets.The plan was announced on Wednesday alongside an updated industrial policy that was also partly aimed...

For the second successive month, the European Union has been forced to drop plans for measures and statements related to Beijing’s tightening of control in Hong Kong, after failing to gain the endorsement of 27 member states.A source familiar with ...

Canada’s health regulator has authorised Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for ages 12 and older.Dr Supriya Sharma, chief medical adviser at Health Canada, on Wednesday confirmed the decision for the ages to 12 to 15 and said it will help children return...

A Hong Kong lawmaker has expressed misgivings about whether landlords should benefit from a scheme to convert vacant properties into temporary homes for the poor, pressing for more clarity as officials asked to expand the programme to include additio...

Serbia’s president said on Wednesday his country would pay each citizen who gets a Covid-19 vaccine before the end of May, in what could be the world’s first cash-for-jabs scheme.The Balkans country bought millions of doses – from Western firms...

US tariffs on Chinese goods will remain in place for now, but the top US trade official said on Wednesday that she expected to meet her Chinese counterpart, Vice-Premier Liu He, “in the near term” for talks that will help determine whether they c...

Facebook‘s oversight board on Wednesday upheld the company’s suspension of former US president Donald Trump but said the company was wrong to make the suspension indefinite and gave it six months to determine a “proportionate response”.Trump ...

Beijing is expected to loosen capital controls further to give mainland investors a new outbound channel to buy bonds in Hong Kong, providing investment alternatives for Chinese households and companies while boosting liquidity in the city and cement...

This is the third in a series of reports on Chinese intellectual property as Beijing seeks to make IP protection a central part of its new development strategy.In US President Joe Biden’s first big speech to Congress last month, he cast US-China re...

A former journalist at Hong Kong’s public broadcaster is appealing against her conviction for improperly accessing public records during the making of a documentary critical of how police handled a 2019 mob attack, saying letting the case go now wo...

US defence contractor Honeywell has been fined US$13 million for harming national security after sharing technical information about American fighter jets and other military aircraft with China and other countries.The US State Department said on Mond...

Former opposition lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting, who is currently in jail awaiting trial on national security charges, has decided to drop a lawsuit against Hong Kong’s police chief seeking compensation for injuries sustained during a 2019 mob attack in ...