US President Donald Trump said he will be “speaking Japan’s praises” when he makes a delayed trip to China, even with the two Asian nations engaged in a long-running dispute over Taiwan. The Beijing visit, including a summit with Chinese Presid...

US Senator Steve Daines, a close ally of President Donald Trump, will make the first visit to Hong Kong by a sitting US senator since 2019 at the end of this month, according to sources. Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were n...

Firefighters battled a blaze at a giant oil refinery in Kuwait on Friday after a fresh drone attack as Iran kept up a wave of strikes on its neighbours and vowed there was “no concern” about its missile production. Despite calls for an end to tar...

If there is a thread that provides coherence to Donald Trump’s mad emperorship, it is the frenetic invention of new, evermore dramatic diversions: no week can be allowed to pass without new melodrama that erases the chaotic melodramas of weeks past...

Chinese stocks have emerged as outperformers in the latest oil shock, reversing their reputation as laggards, as crude takes a back seat to renewable fuels in the world’s second-largest economy. The CSI 300 Index of stocks trading on the mainland�...

Eminent life scientist Shu Xiaokun has received numerous awards and significant funding from the US government over the past two decades. Earlier this year, he was appointed the prestigious Herfindahl Endowed Chair professor at the University of Cali...

Alibaba Group Holding unveiled the preview version of its most powerful artificial intelligence model to date, solidifying its position as China’s leader in the race to catch American giants like Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. Qwen3.5-Max-Preview, t...

Five people have been jailed and another 20 arrested as part of a Hong Kong Immigration Department crackdown on illegal employment this week. The department said on Friday that it had raided 23 locations, including restaurants, cleaning companies and...

Beneath the powder snow at internationally popular Japanese ski resort Niseko, anxiety is mounting among residents over soaring prices and a massive influx of overseas workers. At a time when Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is talking tough on immigrat...

AstraZeneca said it would establish drug manufacturing facilities in Guangzhou and Shanghai as well as a separate innovation centre in Shanghai, joining a group of foreign players building new plants in China amid geopolitical tensions. The moves are...

At least 16 US military aircraft have been lost since the start of the war with Iran, including 10 Reaper strike drones hit by enemy fire and a half-dozen other planes badly damaged in attacks or accidents. The most serious losses were because of acc...

An emerging form of therapy in China has stirred controversy over blurred boundaries by using sensory tools, touch and hugging to ease clients’ stress. Mainland media reports say workshops and services centred on “intimate touch” have spread ac...

Hong Kong should review its crane safety guidelines to include mandatory testing for metal fatigue, an industry expert has said after the city recorded another fatal case involving a collapse. An operator was killed on Thursday afternoon when a tower...

Xiaomi’s updated SU7 electric vehicle (EV) is expected to bite into the market share of Tesla and some domestic rivals in China, as demand weakens and regulators tighten oversight. Founder and CEO Lei Jun on Thursday announced official pricing for ...

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and a veteran of the Revolutionary Guards, has emerged as the highest-profile political figure in the Islamic Republic after the killing of its leaders. A pillar of the Iranian establishment for s...

As the US-Israel war on Iran strains global energy supplies, Japan is discussing reviving domestic production of liquefied natural gas carriers for the first time in more than half a decade to bolster its national security. The move would see Japanes...

Flights are cancelled, schedules are in chaos and scores of European tourists are still waiting to go home, three weeks after the United States and Israeli attack on Iran. Some of them, like retiree John Williams, 61, and his wife Gillian, 60, from t...

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 conside...

William Klein worked for more than two decades as a US diplomat, including in several senior roles at the United States’ embassy in Beijing from 2016 to 2021. He worked at the American Institute in Taiwan and on the US State Department’s China de...

Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino has accused a subsidiary of Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison Holdings of lying about the country’s response to an arbitration initiated by the company over the seizure of two strategic ports. Mulino’s rebu...

Anyone applying to become a minister in Madagascar’s new government will be subjected to lie detector tests to root out those who are corrupt, the country’s military leader said on Thursday. President Michael Randrianirina, who took power in a co...

As Tehran signalled that Beijing could serve as a diplomatic broker in its intensifying war with the United States and Israel, analysts cautioned that the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement of 2023 could prove “hard to replicate”. They also highlighted ...

A punishing heatwave has been gripping the western United States, with parts of the region logging record temperatures - even though it was still winter. A desert community in southwestern Arizona reached 43.3 degrees Celsius (110 Fahrenheit) on Thur...

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told US President Donald Trump on Thursday that she wants to hold talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Pyongyang’s past abductions of Japanese nationals. Takaichi told reporters that she notified Trum...

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko freed 250 prisoners on Thursday - the biggest batch to be released so far - in return for a further easing of US sanctions, the US embassy in neighbouring Lithuania said. The releases were part of a bargainin...

European Union leaders failed to convince Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Thursday to lift his blockade on a €90 billion (US$103 billion) EU loan to help Ukraine keep up its fight against Russia’s invasion. After a summit in Brussels, se...

A US intelligence assessment warning of a potential threat from Pakistan’s prospective intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) has been challenged by nuclear non-proliferation experts, who say Islamabad’s defence programme is focused on regio...

The United States’ rapidly mounting sovereign debt pile – which reached an unprecedented US$39 trillion on Wednesday – is becoming “alarmingly unsustainable” and a potential threat to the global economy, with spending likely to spiral even ...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. A public evidential hearing into a devastating fire that engulfed a residential complex in Hong Kong and kill...

By the time this column appears, the world will feel very different from when my previous column appeared earlier this month. In just days, a conflict that some in Washington seemed to believe would quickly topple Iran’s leadership has instead beco...

China has followed last year’s secretive high-orbit satellite-to-satellite refuelling test with another in-orbit servicing mission that is aimed at advancing docking and refuelling technologies, while also testing ways to speed up the disposal of s...

A Chinese woman who was abandoned in a toilet as a newborn by her grandfather has reunited with her biological parents 28 years after being adopted by a Dutch couple. Hong Yangli, 28, was born into a rural family in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, centra...

Prime office vacancy rates in Hong Kong’s main business district dropped to single digits for the first time in 26 months, lifting overall rents in the city’s struggling office property market, according to JLL. The vacancy rate in Central for pr...

Hong Kong’s Baptist University placed a big bet when it told the government in 2023 that it was interested in moving its campus from the upmarket Kowloon Tong residential area to a proposed new academic town near the mainland Chinese border. The 70...

South Korea finds itself boxed in as Tehran moves to turn the Strait of Hormuz into a bargaining chip amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, leaving Seoul caught between its dependence on Middle East oil and its unwillingness to antagonise Washington. Econ...

Iran’s missile and drone stockpiles will last another two or three months as US-Israeli strikes continue, while the US military is also depleting its interceptors, Chinese analysts have noted. However, how long the war lasts would depend less on st...

My grandmother kept her banknotes under the mattress. Even after savings accounts became common and the money my siblings and I gave her began to accumulate, she still preferred to hide cash away at home. She loved saving and hated spending. I though...

A federal arts panel comprised of members appointed by Donald Trump on Thursday unanimously approved a commemorative gold coin featuring his image, part of a series of coins the US Mint is planning to produce to celebrate America’s 250th birthday t...

Allies of exiled Iranian royal Reza Pahlavi are signalling a potential reset in Tehran’s ties with China and Russia, even as the 65-year-old increasingly positions himself as a central figure in Iran’s political future – a claim that contrasts ...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel and the United States were “winning” the war against Iran, with the Islamic Republic “decimated” and unable to enrich uranium or manufacture ballistic missiles. In an English-languag...

The Chinese founder of the massive router maker facing national security probes by the Trump administration has applied for an expedited visa under the Trump Gold Card programme, according to people familiar with the matter. California-based TP-Link ...

US crypto advocates have increasingly pointed to competition with China’s new interest-bearing e-CNY to demand legislative clarity on stablecoin yields, but China is charting a completely different course for the future of digital money, experts sa...

A high-stakes summit between US President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Thursday appeared to get off to a good start as the two touted the bilateral relationship and pledged to work cooperatively on trade, stabilising the...

A US F-35 fighter aircraft was hit by suspected Iranian fire and had to make an emergency landing on Thursday. This would be the first time Iran has hit one of the US$100 million planes since the US and Israel launched their attack on the country on ...

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday there was no “time frame” for ending the US-Israeli war against Iran, which was launched three weeks ago. “We wouldn’t want to set a definitive time frame,” Hegseth told a news conference, add...

Contractors for a renovation project at the site of Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades got away with covering up the use of substandard material because of systemic defects in government supervision, a public inquiry into the blaze that claimed ...

About two out of every five professionals in China expect no pay rise this year after more than half missed out on one last year, with both figures higher than the Asian average, according to survey data gathered by a recruiting firm – a trend sugg...

A pro-Kremlin figure who unexpectedly denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine in a social media post this week that went viral has been placed in a psychiatric facility, Russian media reported on Thursday. Ilya Remeslo made ...

Hong Kong is ready to discuss land, tax incentives and financial support for businesses setting up in the Northern Metropolis, the finance chief has told a trade seminar in Beijing, stressing a “flexible and innovative” approach will be taken wit...