The waste woes of tourism hotspot Bali have come under intense scrutiny after Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto shamed island authorities for what he said were improper steps to tackle the problem. But even as Balinese officials scramble to clean...

An Indian teacher and activist known for creating hundreds of learning centres and painting educational murals across the walls of slums won the US$1 million Global Teacher Prize on Thursday. Rouble Nagi accepted the award at the World Governments Su...

EU industry chief Stephane Sejourne was in Washington on Wednesday, with a mandate from the bloc’s 27 member states to work towards a memorandum on critical minerals with the United States. With the sides keen to reduce their reliance on China, dra...

A 10-year-old Chinese boy has died after a lengthy and brave battle with leukaemia, breaking millions of hearts online. The boy, known by his nickname Haohao, from southwestern China’s Guizhou province, died in Beijing on January 27, his parents an...

Thai police have helped Hong Kong authorities in arresting two fugitives, including a murder suspect who had been on the run for more than three decades, the city’s police chief has said. Speaking upon his return from Thailand on Thursday, Commissi...

Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed Iran in wide-ranging calls with both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, as the US president steps up pressure on the Islamic Republic following the bloody quashing of anti-government protests. The US ...

Clean energy technologies – led by solar power and electric vehicles – drove more than one-third of China’s economic growth last year and over 90 per cent of the rise in investment, according to a new study. China’s clean energy industries ge...

The new reciprocal trade agreement between Malaysia and the United States contains no provisions granting Washington exclusive access to Malaysia’s rare earth elements (REE), according to Arthur Joseph Kurup. The Natural Resources and Environmental...

Former actor Ian Fang has been stripped of his Singaporean permanent resident status and will be deported when he finishes serving a 40-month jail term for having sex with a minor. Shanghai-born Fang’s permanent residency was revoked on Thursday, S...

A government proposal to study whether Kuala Lumpur’s mayor should be elected rather than appointed has triggered what observers describe as a familiar “cultural war” over race, power and who gets to govern Malaysia’s capital. The feasibility...

A Hong Kong man has been jailed for nearly four years after admitting to laundering millions of dollars in criminal proceeds through bank accounts linked to investment and romance scams. The 38-year-old defendant was sentenced on Wednesday to 44 mont...

China’s top medical watchdog has ordered a nationwide review of the country’s psychiatric institutes following media reports that multiple hospitals in central China had locked up patients – including people who were not suffering from mental i...

Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) has deployed the world’s first sodium-ion batteries in passenger cars, as it aims to stay ahead in China’s fiercely competitive electric vehicle (EV) market amid price volatility in traditional lithium-ion b...

As the bodies of two dozen Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes arrived at hospitals in Gaza on Wednesday, the director of one asked a question that has echoed across the war-ravaged territory for months. “Where is the ceasefire? Where are the me...

Hong Kong public school teachers withdrew HK$8.4 billion (US$1.1 billion) from two retirement fund schemes in 2024-25, down by 3.4 per cent from the year before, marking the third consecutive annual decline amid subsiding emigration. Resignation, rat...

Hong Kong and mainland Chinese authorities have arrested 119 people linked to a HK$20 million (US$2.6 million) racket that sold fake identity cards and arranged accommodation for cross-border workers to obtain jobs illegally in the city – the large...

More than two decades ago, he was among China’s first generation of online celebrities. A photograph of his large head went viral and his pudgy face was superimposed on a raft of well-known figures. However, Qian Zhijun, who is better known as Xiao...

Malaysia has announced an immediate and full ban on the importation of electronic waste, as the government vowed the country would not be a “dumping ground” for the world’s waste. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) said in a statem...

A South Korean governor has sparked outrage after he proposed “importing Sri Lankan and Vietnamese virgins” to help stem the population decline in provincial areas. Jindo county Governor Kim Hee-soo made the suggestion during a town hall meeting ...

Call it divine intervention, or maybe just a hasty fix-it job to put an end to days of speculation and scandal. But the end result is that the Angel Meloni is no more. A painting of a cherub with a face bearing a remarkable resemblance to Italian Pri...

Indonesia’s stock market needed just two days of chaos to highlight what investors have long lamented: parts of the market are not trading freely. Last week’s worst tumble in nearly three decades drew attention to a major problem at the heart of ...

Luuk van Middelaar is the director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, a think tank he co-founded in 2022. A political theorist and historian by trade, he has written several books and was in the cabinet of the first European Council president...

Nearly 200 people have been ‍killed by armed men in separate attacks in remote villages in central and northern Nigeria, a local lawmaker, residents and police said on Wednesday, as security forces searched for survivors and chased the attackers. I...

Beijing’s new hybrid-powered unmanned transport aircraft has completed its maiden flight, a development one analyst said could be a military “game changer” in the Taiwan Strait by helping supply elite frontline troops. On Tuesday, state broadca...

Fears are mounting of worsening violence across Pakistan’s mineral-rich Balochistan province following a string of armed attacks in recent days that have left hundreds dead, as Islamabad’s security forces struggle to deal with insurgents who cont...

Brazil has ended a temporary tariff exemption that allowed electric and hybrid vehicles assembled using imported parts from China to enter the country at sharply reduced costs, closing a measure that fuelled months of confrontation between the govern...

Hong Kong commercial real estate is the Asia-Pacific region’s fifth most favoured investment destination for cross-border capital this year, underscoring an improved outlook for the city’s battered property market, according to a CBRE report. Hon...

Nude photos. The names and faces of sexual abuse victims. Bank account and Social Security numbers in full view. All of these things appeared in the mountain of documents released Friday by the US Justice Department as part of its effort to comply wi...

An independent committee investigating Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades has found “key clues” pointing to systemic loopholes that it called “unacceptable”. At the committee’s first meeting, which lasted 1½ hours on Thursday, senior ...

NBC Today show host Savannah Guthrie sent a public message to her 84-year-old mother’s kidnapper on Wednesday saying that her family was ready to talk but wants proof that she is alive. Guthrie said in a recorded video posted on social media that h...

China has criticised the European Commission’s anti-subsidy probe into Chinese wind turbine maker Goldwind Science & Technology as “targeted” and “discriminatory”, warning that such measures would undermine Chinese companies’ confidence i...

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has come under fire for deciding to hold Sunday’s general election during the peak university entrance exam season, with critics saying it has placed an additional burden on students. Takaichi’s abrupt annou...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. Temperatures in Hong Kong are expected to drop on Sunday as a cold front sweeps across the south of the count...

It was a blisteringly hot afternoon at the tail end of my pupillage in ’00. I was staring into space and imagining my glorious debut in court – when the phone rang. On the other end was a clerk from a small local solicitors’ firm, who asked, wi...

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s call for middle powers to band together amid a fragmenting world order is a vision analysts say appeals to many Asian nations, but lacks a blueprint to bring them all together. Speaking in Switzerland last mont...

Former governor Chris Patten once said nobody ever profited from betting against Hong Kong. Anybody wagering against its “one country, two systems” policy will undoubtedly be out of pocket. Since 1997, the policy has been the city’s lodestar. W...

A new insurance scheme will be created for Malaysians working in Singapore to ensure they remain covered even during their daily cross-border commute, says Human Resources Minister R. Ramanan. The new scheme will ensure that the nearly 400,000 Malays...

Turkey remains committed to becoming a full member of the Brics bloc, positioning itself as a bridge between Asia and Europe despite widening transatlantic rifts, according to the new Turkish ambassador to China. Ankara, meanwhile, would continue to ...

More than a decade ago, Chinese wildlife artist Li Weiyi rescued a dying wolf cub in the grasslands of southwestern China. Recently, the 2017 documentary Return to the Wolves, which chronicles her time with her wolf son, regained attention thanks to ...

Senior civil servants are among scores of witnesses to be cross-examined by an independent committee set up to probe the cause of Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades in a string of open hearings expected to take around two months, the South China...

Countries having cautious reliance on China while maintaining constructive engagement is essential to the future of globalisation in a world where trade is increasingly used as a weapon, according to Canada’s former deputy prime minister. “In a w...

As Japan heads into a snap election, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is rumoured to be weighing a trip to North Korea aimed at securing the return of her country’s citizens who were abducted decades ago. The suggestion of a breakthrough came from Tsu...

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed California to use a new voter-approved congressional map that is favourable to Democrats in this year’s elections, rejecting a last-ditch plea from state Republicans and the Trump administration. No justice...

Cathy Zhang, head of Asia-Pacific equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley, sounded hoarse after a day of back-to-back meetings with companies keen to go public in Hong Kong. “It’s very possible that the value and number may exceed last year’s ...

Leading chipmaking engineer Xu Zhenpeng said the United States no longer offered the freedom that researchers once expected – a key reason for his decision to continue his work in China. Xu, who joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) as a tenu...

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced major job cuts Wednesday, saying that “painful” restructuring was needed at the storied newspaper. The newspaper, which gained legendary status when its reporting help...

China’s discounted crude purchases are coming under strain as the United States tightens its stance on Iran and Venezuela, with analysts warning that more refineries may have to turn to higher-priced barrels from Canada, Brazil and the Middle East....

In a direct challenge to Beijing’s decades-long grip on the hi-tech economy, the United States on Wednesday sought to rally more than 50 countries and the European Union around a landmark framework to loosen China’s control over the global critic...

President Donald Trump sent a fresh warning to Iran’s leaders as US military forces amassed in the region, even as diplomatic talks between Washington and Tehran were set for later this week. “I would say he should be very worried, yeah. He shoul...

Four people, including two Chinese nationals, have been arrested in France on suspicion of spying ‌for China and were brought before an investigative judge, the Paris public prosecutor’s office ‍said on Wednesday. The cybercrime division of the...