Beijing’s Liaoning aircraft carrier on Wednesday started its second training in the western Pacific this year, with the drill likely to coincide with an expanded US-Japan military exercise that may have implications for a Taiwan contingency. The Pe...

Two leaders of India’s youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) were remanded in custody for five days on Wednesday, as police ratcheted up efforts to clamp down on anti-election commission protests. CJP activists and opposition parties have defied a ...

Hong Kong should make better use of its public gyms by allowing online safety briefings and penalising no-shows, an industry leader and a lawmaker have urged after the ombudsman identified management loopholes. The Office of the Ombudsman launched th...

China’s integrated circuit (IC) exports surged 136 per cent year on year in September to US$45 billion, exceeding the 108 per cent growth rate in the first nine months of the year in a sign of the country’s rising influence in the global semicond...

When news broke last week that three newly completed housing blocks were to be demolished without ever having been occupied, I suffered an immediate attack of deja vu. In early 1974, I was in the first wave of recruits to the Operations Department of...

A Malaysian court on Wednesday rejected Najib Razak’s bid to suspend his 15-year jail sentence in the 1MDB scandal pending the jailed former prime minister’s appeals, ruling that his health and other grounds did not justify a stay. The decision m...

China’s electric vehicle (EV) makers have been hit with a double blow as both Beijing and Brussels introduce measures that will affect their exports, leading analysts to revise down their earnings forecasts for the industry. The twin measures – c...

A business delegation from northeastern China has visited a Russian-controlled, Japanese-claimed island off Hokkaido to explore joint economic projects, a move that has prompted protests from Tokyo. Officials and business leaders from Heilongjiang pr...

Rescuers dragged 13 dead children out of India’s Ganges River after an overloaded boat capsized en route to a Hindu festival, officials said on Wednesday, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing grief over the “deeply painful” tragedy. The...

We have put together stories from our coverage on electric and new energy vehicles from the past two weeks to help you stay informed. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. China carmakers eye record 12 millio...

Complaints about noisy and inconsiderate passengers on Hong Kong’s public transport have more than doubled over three years, with authorities recording a surge in reports of people playing loud music and putting their feet on seats. The Transport D...

Japan’s prime minister said on Wednesday she probably spent “three or four more hours” than her male predecessors tackling household duties on top of her already packed daily schedule. “In the morning, I bathe, fix breakfast and then wash dis...

A long-awaited code of conduct (COC) for the South China Sea risks becoming a toothless agreement, analysts have warned, as Beijing and Southeast Asian nations scramble to hammer out a deal by the end of 2026. More than three decades since it was moo...

An Indonesian domestic helper in Hong Kong has been remanded in custody after being charged with killing her 93-year-old employer at the weekend. Kharsina, 52, was brought to the Kwun Tong Court on Wednesday to face a count of murder. Police arrested...

The operator of Hong Kong’s flagship San Tin Technopole has pledged to offer affordable land to attract tenants, while revealing plans to reclaim and redevelop fish ponds near the Shenzhen border to accommodate a client requiring substantial premis...

Africa’s resources should not be used as a tool for geopolitical rivalry, Chinese President Xi Jinping has warned, as the US challenges Chinese dominance of critical minerals on the continent. “Africa’s resources belong to Africa,” Xi told Bo...

A bridge between China and North Korea that was completed 12 years ago will finally open on Thursday. The two countries will hold an opening ceremony to mark the official opening of the New Yalu River Bridge, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported...

The former mother-in-law of slain Hong Kong socialite Abby Choi Tin-fung tried to prevent her family from reporting her disappearance to police by suggesting that they wait for her “kidnappers” to issue their demands, a court has heard. Choi’s ...

China’s chief civilian aircraft builder will command 5 per cent of the world’s fleet allocation by 2045 as global demand for narrowbody jets and the domestic order book look strong, an aviation analytics firm has forecast. Airbus would have 47 pe...

Four Hong Kong franchised bus operators have applied to raise fares by up to 17.7 per cent, citing “significant financial pressure” from soaring fuel prices driven by the Middle East conflict. Citybus has sought the steepest increase, at 17.7 per...

About 300 Hong Kong students applied this year for roughly 30 places on an overseas programme to help children in need, up from about 50 applicants last year. Dream Compassioneers co-founder Chan Yik-yeung said the response also showed what students ...

Heavy overnight Russian strikes killed at least six people in Ukraine and cut power to large parts of the capital Kyiv, authorities said on Wednesday. The attacks on multiple regions came after President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had received n...

Chinese researchers have built a self-propelled crawler robot that harvests iron from sand and have tested the device in the dunes of the vast Taklamakan Desert – an area the size of Germany – in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous r...

Participants in Hong Kong’s stock market may need to wait longer for shorter transaction settlement times, as market participants want more time to prepare for the change, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Bourse operator Hong Kong...

Asian countries must remind themselves about what happened during the region’s financial crisis in the late 1990s and guard against a recurrence of such shocks, the head of the Philippine central bank said ‌on Wednesday. Before the Asian financia...

Deforestation slowed worldwide last year, but the improvement is unlikely to last as the situation deteriorates in Central Africa and an exceptionally strong El Nino weather pattern intensifies, a new study said on Wednesday. Seven million hectares o...

A Hong Kong court has sentenced a former assistant warden at a care home for people with intellectual disabilities to 13 years in prison for raping a female resident five times, with the judge condemning the assaults as “extremely despicable”. Hi...

Stilt houses in villages north of Bangkok are no longer high enough to stay dry as Thai authorities deliberately flood riverside communities to spare the capital. Inside the home of Kamonchanok Sathaphonamonwut, raised more than three metres (10 feet...

Malaysians aged 30 and below bought some 5.4 billion ringgit (US$1.32 billion) worth of goods and services on short-term credit in the first half of this year, the country’s Finance Ministry has revealed. The ministry said it had recorded 65.9 mill...

Hearing loss made it difficult for Ivan Fung Wing-hong to find work in Hong Kong’s construction industry after graduation. Nearly three decades later, that early setback has led to a teaching career spanning young children, postgraduate students an...

Up to 6,000 metres (19,700 feet) beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, billions of potato-shaped metallic nodules are scattered across the seabed. The Clarion-Clipperton zone’s reserves of vital metals such as nickel, ...

Motorists have been left queuing for hours at petrol stations across Indonesia’s resort island of Bali in recent days amid reports of a crippling fuel shortage. Long queues have been spotted all around the island, including in the capital Denpasar,...

The arrest of a domestic helper over the suspected murder of an elderly woman has dominated Hong Kong headlines, with police investigations revealing that the 93-year-old had been assaulted repeatedly in the hours before her death on Sunday. Citing s...

German authorities opened an investigation into possible sexual harassment after a robot controlled by two young men touched the buttocks of a 16-year-old girl and made thrusting movements toward her, police said. Police in the western city of Cologn...

Hongkongers can be struggling with severe mental health problems but still not be considered urgent cases, according to mental health advocate Minal Mahtani, who wants community groups to play a bigger role before individual cases reach crisis point....

Across China, a new breed of freelance “robot trainers” are wearing motion-capture gear to turn everyday household chores – picking up cups, opening bottle caps and washing dishes – into data that will teach tomorrow’s machines. The data is...

Rising sovereign debt and borrowing costs have prompted a fresh warning from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) about risks to the fiscal health of member countries, with 24-year highs in US Treasury yields expected to become one of the focal topi...

Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation has been ordered to submit a report to the government within a month following two separate service disruptions at Lam Tin station within 15 hours, with the railway operator apologising to passengers for the inconvenienc...

An administrative building belonging to Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco in the eastern city of Dhahran was attacked, causing a limited fire, the Energy Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday as fighting between Yemen’s Iran...

China has lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, arguably the greatest achievement in poverty reduction in human history. Even so, no mainland Chinese economist has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Across the Pacific, the U...

Two Taiwanese executives have been arrested for allegedly using mainland Chinese-made components in drones supplied to the island’s military. It is the second time in two months that a Taiwanese drone supplier has been investigated by the island’...

The roar of plane engines and the hustle and bustle at Hong Kong International Airport’s Terminal 2 present a stark contrast to the pin-drop silence at the adjacent 11 Skies commercial complex. A South China Morning Post reporter who travelled betw...

A growing number of Japanese regard the United States as the greatest threat to world peace ahead of traditional rival China, according to a new survey. The annual poll, released by the Japan Press Research Institute on Saturday, found 26.8 per cent ...

The US Treasury Department said on Tuesday that it was imposing US$1.2 billion in fines on Bank of America for allegedly violating anti-money-laundering and sanctions laws. The fines on America’s second-biggest bank amount to the third-largest in t...

Kana Liu, a Chinese Canadian living in the US on a work visa, felt compelled to speak up. Faced with a Department of Homeland Security proposal to charge up to US$100,000 in fees for international students to work in the US after graduation under Opt...

Russia’s FSB security agency said on Tuesday it had detained a Japanese journalist for alleged espionage, and Moscow’s Foreign Ministry said it regretted that Tokyo was using correspondents to carry out spying. In a statement on its website, the ...

The White House’s bid for a US “golden age” of science should put China on alert, Chinese analysts have warned, but they remain sceptical as to whether President Donald Trump’s alliance with Silicon Valley billionaires can pull it off. This c...

Indonesia continues to battle some of its worst wildfires in years, spreading toxic haze to Malaysia and Singapore. Floods have devastated communities in Thailand, India and Nepal. Kathmandu is also seeking climate justice after a catastrophic collap...

Cornell University on Tuesday suspended fraternities’ parties and social events for the remaining academic year following outcry over an alleged gang rape at one of the elite college’s all-male clubs. The 2024 incident, as alleged in a graphic la...

Katie Zacharia, US President Donald Trump’s newly appointed White House press secretary, faces questions about her legal credentials after telling reporters on Tuesday that she passed a bar exam “when I moved to China”, without identifying the ...