A Chinese couple who left their young children at a hotel following a fight have ignited a heated discussion over how to punish irresponsible parents. The Beijing Chaoyang district police posted on January 22 that they received a phone call from a ma...

Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt reopened on Monday for limited traffic, a key step in the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire but a mostly symbolic development on the ground as few people will be allowed to travel in either direction and no goods will ...

Some 500 guests are expected to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) finance ministers’ meeting in Hong Kong in October, the first to be held in the city, with authorities set to appoint a team led by two senior officials to oversee ...

President Xi Jinping has called for China’s yuan to become a global reserve currency, underscoring ambitions to carve out a greater role for it in world finance. The country needed a “powerful currency” that could be “widely used in internati...

China secured the most new shipbuilding orders globally in 2025 despite a slight dip in market share, showing enduring market dominance amid industry turbulence sparked by US threats targeting the Chinese maritime sector, official data showed. Chines...

South Korean actor Kim Seon-ho’s agency, Fantagio, has issued a statement defending the star of Netflix’s Can This Love Be Translated? after he was accused of setting up a shell company to evade taxes. The claims are similar to those levelled aga...

US President Donald Trump threatened legal action on Monday against the host of the 68th Grammy Awards over the comedian’s comment on the US president and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. After congratulating Billie Eilish for winning the Gr...

Alibaba Group Holding has joined rivals including Tencent Holdings and Baidu in rolling out Spring Festival red-packet giveaways to drive mass-market adoption of its artificial intelligence, committing 3 billion yuan (US$432 million) to spur spending...

Mainland investors faced difficult decisions as gold and silver prices extended their rout on Monday in domestic trading, with some rushing to buy the dip ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday and others retreating to the sidelines. Shanghai silver fut...

Hong Kong has its mojo back. The city’s economy grew 3.5 per cent last year, the fastest pace since 2021, according to an advanced estimate published by the Census and Statistics Department on January 30. A sharp increase in exports, the unexpected...

The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) is revving up the design and testing phase of its widebody C929 airliner, marshalling its resources and mobilising its stakeholders to roll out the indigenous jet on schedule – or, potentially, a...

A new task force led by Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu will formulate Hong Kong’s first five-year blueprint to align with the nation’s 15th five-year plan, with a political analyst saying the move signals greater government involvement in shapi...

Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez won Costa Rica’s presidential election on Sunday by a landslide, after promising to crack down hard on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, centre-right economist A...

The People’s Liberation Army’s anti-corruption investigations into top general Zhang Youxia and others will eliminate a watered down combat capability and give new momentum to the military’s development, according to a commentary by its mouthpi...

Major Chinese electric vehicle (EV) makers got off to a bumpy start in 2026 as they reported falling deliveries in January due to softening government support. Shares of Hong Kong-listed BYD, Xpeng, Li Auto and Nio plummeted on Monday, battered by a ...

A mainland Chinese student has been jailed for three months for paying an impostor to take an English proficiency test in Cambodia on her behalf and submitting the results to a university in Hong Kong to meet graduation requirements. Tuen Mun Court o...

China’s years-long property downturn has carried into 2026, with new-home sales sliding sharply and, by some measures, deteriorating at their fastest pace in recent years. The country’s top 100 developers reported combined contracted sales of 165...

Norway’s crown princess, whose son goes on trial on Tuesday on rape charges, has found herself embroiled in another scandal after newly unsealed files revealed her unexpected friendship with late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The latest scandal ...

Interpol issued a red notice for the arrest of one of Indonesia’s biggest oil tycoons over a US$285 million corruption scandal, police said late on Sunday. Mohammad Riza Chalid, 66, nicknamed the “gasoline godfather”, is wanted in Indonesia for...

China’s frontier artificial intelligence labs are ending the lunar year on a high note, racing to release a series of new AI models in the last few weeks of the Year of the Snake as the country gears up to celebrate the start of the Year of the Hor...

Concerns about Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking have emerged in Japan after a pregnant woman was allegedly tracked down and murdered by her ex-boyfriend using a GPS device hidden in a toy. The death of Haruka Komatsumoto, a 31-year-old manicu...

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has sought to douse public speculation after his name appeared in a newly released email exchange involving Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted US sex offender whose web of connections to the rich and powerful rem...

Hong Kong’s construction watchdog should help small firms procure approved scaffolding nets at a lower cost, a leading contractor has said, after inspectors found two sites using plastic meshes that failed safety tests. Lawrence Ng San-wa, permanen...

Aviation leaders tackled barriers to growth and the impact of geopolitical tensions on the eve of the Singapore Airshow on Monday, while reaffirming pledges to reduce emissions. Supply chain problems were hurting global airlines and would remain for ...

US President Donald Trump said ‍on Sunday he planned to close the John F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for the Performing Arts for two years for reconstruction starting in July. The national arts and entertainment centre in Washington has been marked by...

We have put together stories from our coverage last weekend to help you stay informed about news across Asia and beyond. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. China’s visa-free waivers spark Korean travel b...

A woman in Indonesia’s Aceh province collapsed after being caned 140 times last week for extramarital sex and drinking alcohol in one of the harshest sharia punishments on record. The woman and her partner were struck with a rattan cane in a public...

Hong Kong police have arrested a man after discovering the bodies of 20 cats and a hamster, as well as other animals in poor condition, in his flat. The force said it received a report at about 7pm on Sunday from a resident of Chau Tau Tsuen in Lok M...

Chinese scientists have developed a hydrogel cooling coating for solar panels to boost power output by 13 per cent compared to conventional photovoltaic systems. The transparent layer can reduce the temperature of “hotspots” – overheated areas ...

Sediment containing rare earth was retrieved from ocean depths of 6,000 metres (20,000 feet) on a Japanese test mission, the government said on Monday, as it seeks to curb dependence on China for the valuable minerals. “Details will be analysed, in...

Twenty years ago, technologies developed by Liang Jie at Microsoft were incorporated into products like the Windows Media Video Player and Blu-ray discs used by millions worldwide. A decade on, while a professor in Canada, Liang ventured into entrepr...

Pakistan’s government says the national cricket team will be allowed to take part in the coming T20 World Cup but must boycott its group game against arch-rival India. India and Sri Lanka are co-hosts for the 20-team tournament, which starts on Sat...

People generally don’t like change. But if you have ever had to take the worst seat on a bus – lower deck, last row, middle seat – then you would have probably put on the seat belt to avoid being catapulted down the aisle should the driver slam...

A seven-year-old girl in northeastern China who single-handedly took care of her sick father in hospital has melted the hearts of millions of internet users. San Mengru attracted considerable attention online after a man, surnamed Pei, who was caring...

Voters are less likely to support female politicians when they are wearing face masks, while there was no such effect for their male counterparts, according to a study by a Japanese university research team. The findings, published last month ahead o...

University graduates in Hong Kong are facing the gloomiest employment market since 2021, with the number of available jobs plunging by 55 per cent in 2025 and the average salary of new hires increasing by only 0.5 per cent year on year. A veteran hum...

Interest in de-dollarisation has spiked in Chinese academic and policy circles, as Beijing grows increasingly wary of the United States’ potential to weaponise its currency. The surge has been most visible in the volume of research. A search by the...

The Republican National Committee has vastly outpaced Democrats in the crush for cash ahead of the midterm elections, holding a nearly US$100 million advantage at the close of 2025, according to year-end filings to the Federal Election Commission (FE...

The 68th annual Grammy Awards are taking place on Sunday at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, and spirits were high from the jump after a few back-to-back, history-making moments. “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters won best song written for visu...

Lawrence J. Lau is a Hong Kong economist specialising in economic development and East Asian economies. He was a professor of economics at Stanford University before serving as vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong unti...

As global trade fragments and tariffs return, economic power is increasingly defined not by financial scale alone, but by productive strength. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, leaders spoke openly about a harsher world order. Chinese ...

Iguanas stunned by cold temperatures dropped from trees in usually balmy Florida on Sunday as icy conditions blasted southern US states, dumping nearly a half metre of snow in some areas and whipping up high winds that caused traffic chaos. The heavi...

US President Donald Trump on Sunday said he was hopeful of agreeing a deal with Iran after the country’s supreme leader warned that any US attack on the Islamic republic would trigger a regional war. Following the Iranian authorities’ deadly resp...

One of the Oscar-nominated screenwriters of the Iranian drama It Was Just an Accident has been arrested in Tehran just weeks before the Academy Awards. Representatives for the film on Sunday said Mehdi Mahmoudian was arrested on Saturday. No details ...

A Russian drone strike on a bus carrying miners ‌killed at least 12 people, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday, hours after President Volodymyr Zelensky announced new peace talks amid uncertainty over a Russian suspension ‍of attacks on energy in...

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father have returned to their home in a Minneapolis suburb after ‍being detained by US immigration officers and held at a detention facility in Texas, a lawmaker said on Sunday. A federal judge on Saturday or...

US House ‍Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday he believes he has the Republican votes to end a partial government shutdown within days and that the chamber will debate Immigration and Customs Enforcement reforms for two weeks after that. “I’m c...

Former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson quit the Labour Party Sunday, seeking to avoid causing it “further embarrassment” after newly released US documents revived scrutiny of his connection to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. M...

The Nigerian army said on Sunday it killed a top commander of Boko Haram and 10 members of the Islamic extremist group in a night raid in the northeastern part of the country. Abu Khalid, a commander of Boko Haram in the Sambisa Forest in Borno state...

More than 60 per cent of Hong Kong Zoomers fear they cannot compete with rapidly advancing AI in the workplace, a survey has found. The survey by the Chinese YMCA of Hong Kong also showed about 30 per cent of respondents did not know how to use artif...