Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will head to Sri Lanka this weekend as the island nation searches for funds to rebuild foreign exchange reserves and repay debt amid ballooning import bills.Wang’s visit comes as Beijing seeks to balance US and Indi...

Coal traders in China, the world’s top consumer and importer of the fuel, are shrugging off a ban on coal exports imposed by Indonesia, saying utilities already hold hefty stockpiles with power demand set to weaken for the Lunar New Year holiday.Co...

When 33-year-old LuckyKaptain started a non-fungible token (NFT) project with four friends in Hong Kong last November, it had been a few months since he quit his job in the city’s high-flying finance industry – but the green entrepreneur felt he ...

The Omicron variant is fuelling a Covid-19 surge in India, with new cases climbing nearly 30 per cent to 117,000 on Friday, the most since June last year at the tail-end of the deadly second wave of infections driven by the Delta variant.Cases have r...

A gas blast in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing killed at least two people and injured nine others on Friday, The Beijing News reported.The casualties are among more than 20 people believed trapped in the rubble of a canteen after an explos...

Two confirmed community cases of Covid-19 in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen have further dampened hopes of a long-awaited border reopening between Hong Kong and mainland China.The Shenzhen Health Commission said on Friday that the cases were d...

China’s auditing regulator said officials should “keep their eyes open” when conducting audits, after recovering more than 300 billion yuan (US$47 billion) in government funds, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.The task of auditing this...

Thirty-seven pedigree kittens and puppies were confiscated on Friday along with HK$4.1 million (US$525,600) worth of bull and deer penis in a Hong Kong anti-smuggling operation, the year’s first major contraband seizure.The 30 cats and seven dogs w...

Police in Nigeria said gunmen abducted three Chinese nationals working in the country’s north central region, the latest incident in a cycle of violence in Africa’s most populous nation.The gunmen also killed two Nigerians who were working with t...

Security forces appeared to be in control of the streets of Kazakhstan’s main city Almaty on Friday and the president said constitutional order had mostly been restored, a day after Russia sent troops to put down a countrywide uprising.However, fre...

A Chinese national admitted in United States federal court on Thursday that he stole a trade secret while working for Monsanto and one of its subsidiaries in Missouri, federal prosecutors said.Haitao Xiang, 44, formerly of Chesterfield, Missouri, ple...

Philippine novelist Francisco Sionil Jose, whose widely translated works delved into the Southeast Asian country’s painful colonial past and social injustices, died on Thursday, according to a literary guild he had founded. He was 97.In a prolific ...

Chinese Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan said she felt deeply ashamed that a woman in the northwestern city of Xian lost her unborn baby after a hospital refused to admit her because of an expired Covid-19 test result.Sun said on Thursday that despite the pa...

Midday queues snake out to the street in an upmarket Shanghai neighbourhood, but it’s not lunch at the city’s hottest restaurant that people are lining up for – it’s cosmetic “micro-procedures”, which are surging in popularity in China.Th...

Hong Kong’s insurance regulator has seized control of an insurer that is unable to continue its coverage of the majority of the city’s taxis, in the first enforcement of its seizure authority.All the assets and businesses of Target Insurance Comp...

It certainly would be a tough sell for most people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bottle of liquor, but that is the value of a 1959 bottle of baijiu currently on auction at Christie’s.The bottle, which is part of an online auction w...

Europe’s sky is filling up with near-empty polluting planes that serve little other purpose than safeguarding airlines’ valuable time slots at some of the world’s most important airports.The highly contagious Omicron variant of Covid-19 has put...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing.All 170 guests of a now-notorious Hong Kong birthday party attended by senior officials and lawmakers have bee...

Investigators are looking into whether a five-year-old who was playing with a lighter set a Christmas tree on fire, sparking a conflagration that killed 12 family members in a three-storey Philadelphia residential building.That disclosure was include...

Home prices in Hong Kong are likely to increase this year, extending a multi-year uptrend as the city’s economic rebound brightens the employment market and offset the dampening effect of emigration, according to JPMorgan Chase.Residential prices c...

The United States and Japan have agreed to deepen scientific cooperation on military technologies including defence against hypersonic weapons, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday.The announcement came as the two countries acknowled...

Asahi Group Holdings Ltd. will tweak the recipe of its flagship Super Dry beer for the first time ever, betting that an overhaul of Japan’s bestselling brew will resonate with drinkers.The new formula, which will go on sale next month, claims to im...

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo says he has been hitting the gym and laying off the junk food since leaving the Trump administration. The healthy change helped him lose about 40kg (about 90 pounds) in six months, he told the New York Post.Fo...

Thailand indefinitely suspended a quarantine-free visa programme for vaccinated visitors and ordered a ban on the sale of alcohol at restaurants in areas deemed at high risk of Covid-19 infections to curb the spread of the Omicron variant.The nation�...

Hong Kong restaurants are poised to take a major hit from strict new social-distancing curbs on dine-in services, but food delivery platforms and shopping centres have sensed an opportunity, dangling discounts and perks to entice customers to opt for...

A poor university student whose education was financed by a pilot for the last seven years has had all ties with his benefactor cut after the pilot sent a final message saying he did not need to repay him and requested no further contact.Xie Yang, no...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s trip to Myanmar begins Friday amid criticism that his visit will undo efforts by Asean to defuse the deepening political and security crisis that has been worsened by the pandemic.Indonesia’s President Joko Wido...

Good morning and welcome to 2022!I’m Echo Xie, a China desk reporter focusing on climate, energy and environment. You can reach me on Twitter @EchoooXie.This week, a lot of Chinese people have been concerned about Covid-19 in Xian, the northwestern...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing.Hong Kong has brought back some of the world’s most stringent measures to tackle an emerging fifth wave of t...

A juror in the Ghislaine Maxwell case whose actions prompted the British socialite’s lawyer to seek a new sexual abuse trial has turned to a criminal lawyer who defended an NBA player, an Alec Baldwin stalker and a scammer who posed as a wealthy he...

China seeks a bigger role in brokering peace in the Horn of Africa, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Thursday, announcing that Beijing would appoint a special envoy for the region.Travelling in Kenya – the middle of a three-country tour – Wang sa...

North Korea blamed “hostile forces” and the worldwide pandemic for not being able to attend the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing and accused the United States and its allies of trying to prevent the Games’ success, state media said on Friday...

China’s zero-tolerance approach to the coronavirus pandemic has become the subject of renewed debate by economists, who say the cost to the economy is becoming increasingly unbearable.While the strict disease prevention strategy proved a success ea...

A “very rare” case of bird flu was diagnosed in a person in southwest England, the UK Health Security Agency said Thursday.The person had been in close contact with infected birds, and human-to-human transmission was neither suspected nor expecte...

Passengers who filmed themselves partying without masks aboard a chartered flight from Montreal to Mexico face being stranded after three airlines refused to fly them home to Canada.Sunwing Airlines cancelled the return charter flight from Cancun tha...

Peter Bogdanovich, the ascot-wearing cinephile and director of 1970s black-and-white classics like The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, has died. He was 82.Bogdanovich died early Thursday morning at this home in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Anton...

A team of scientists is sailing to “the place in the world that’s the hardest to get to” so they can better figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice.Thirty-two scientists on Thu...

One year after violent loyalists to president Donald Trump assaulted the US Capitol and tried to stop the formal certification of his election loss, US President Joe Biden warned that Beijing was watching to see if America’s democratic system would...

The more infectious Omicron variant of Covid-19 appears to produce less severe disease than the globally dominant Delta strain, but should not be categorised as “mild”, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Thursday.Janet Diaz, WHO le...

A “landmark” defence deal between Japan and Australia could further fuel competition between China and US-led allies and deepen worries that countries in the region may be forced to take sides, Chinese observers warned.The prime ministers of Japa...

A Chinese lab said it has made a breakthrough in next generation mobile communications technology, as the global power struggle over standards-setting in the telecoms industry continues to heat up.A government-backed institute called Purple Mountain ...

China approved requests to astronomers from 14 countries to use the world’s biggest radio telescope for observations last year, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.The country’s top scientific institute also said that it was considering ...

A closer look at the line up of lawmakers who met a top Beijing official overseeing Hong Kong affairs this week reveals a new organisational structure within the pro-establishment bloc that insiders and analysts say is aimed at bolstering efficiency ...

The Indian government has demanded Xiaomi pay import taxes it allegedly owes, in the Chinese smartphone maker’s latest run-in with authorities in the South Asian nation.Xiaomi confirmed on Thursday that its local unit has been asked by India’s fi...

Malaysia’s Securities Commission on Thursday said it would seek an explanation from the country’s anti-corruption chief over a mounting controversy surrounding the official’s claim that his sibling had “borrowed” his trading account to purc...

Among the messaging from China’s propaganda machine in 2022, expect to hear a lot more of the ruling Communist Party’s latest slogan – “the two establishments” consolidating Xi Jinping’s powerful leadership status.That was the call from t...

A decoration worker who took part in the assaults of two passers-by after an unlawful assembly at a shopping centre in 2019 was influenced by mental illness, his lawyer said, after he pleaded guilty to three charges at a Hong Kong court on Thursday.L...

A series of new fines on Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, and Bilibili over business deal disclosures signals that China’s antitrust regulator is continuing to take a hard line on Big Tech in the new year after a rocky 2021, according to an...

The Chinese space station has successfully grabbed and moved a cargo spaceship with its giant robotic arm.The 47-minute manoeuvre on Thursday morning was the first test for Tiangong’s 10-metre (33-foot) robotic arm, whose technology the United Stat...

A salesman has gone on trial for manslaughter over the death of a man he allegedly pushed during a fight over queue-jumping at a ferry pier after a march during Hong Kong’s social unrest in 2019.Prosecutors on Thursday opened their case against 28-...