After selling a HK$319 million (US$41 million) luxury home in Hong Kong’s affluent Southern district, a former finance executive has rented a 4,715 sq ft house at The Peak, the city’s most exclusive neighbourhood, for HK$525,000 a month, official...

French football legend Zinedine Zidane has delighted Chinese internet users by joining local residents in Shanghai to play shuttlecock in the street. Videos of Zidane, 53, a newcomer to the sport, played the game skilfully with some middle-aged Shang...

French President Emmanuel Macron has started a three-day visit to China, where he is expected to confront thorny issues including Europe’s trade with Beijing and the Ukraine war. On Wednesday evening, Macron landed in Beijing at the start of his fo...

China and Russia had reached a “high degree” of strategic consensus on issues related to Japan and jointly opposed the revival of “Japanese militarism”, a readout from Beijing said after Foreign Minister Wang Yi met chief Kremlin security aid...

More than 1,400 people have been killed across South and Southeast Asia in a week of catastrophic floods, exposing how rising global temperatures are amplifying extreme weather, even as international negotiations to phase out fossil fuels stall. Succ...

HSBC Holdings, the biggest lender in Hong Kong and Europe, has appointed veteran accountant Brendan Nelson as group chairman, according to its filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Wednesday. Nelson, 75, has been serving as interim chairman since...

Alibaba Group Holding’s new flagship artificial intelligence app Qwen was the fastest growing AI app in the world in November, according to third-party data released on Wednesday. Qwen recorded the highest growth in monthly active users (MAU) among...

Firefighters rescued two workers who were trapped mid-air for over an hour after a gondola suspended from the top of a Hong Kong high-rise luxury tower malfunctioned and tilted sideways. Police said they received a report at 2.50pm from a security gu...

China’s latest credit figures have raised eyebrows, but they need not raise alarm. New bank lending, aggregate social financing and total credit growth all came in weaker than expected for October, marking their softest readings in more than a year...

An independent review committee tasked with probing the deadly fire in Hong Kong that has so far claimed 159 lives has no legal power to compel and protect witnesses, but may yield faster results of comparable quality to a statutory commission, exper...

Thailand and Cambodia took their renewed border dispute to a United Nations forum on landmine prohibition in Geneva this week, each vying for international support as their ties continued to unravel. Both governments used the meeting of the Anti-Pers...

One week after its worst fire in decades, Hong Kong is searching for answers to the inferno that ripped through seven towers at Wang Fuk Court housing complex in Tai Po, killing at least 156 people, injuring dozens and leaving around 30 unaccounted f...

French President Emmanuel Macron arrives in Beijing for his three-day visit to China on Wednesday – and he is not coming alone. Alongside his wife Brigitte, the French leader is bringing a delegation of more than 80 people, including multiple minis...

Police in New Zealand are waiting for nature to take its course after a man allegedly tried to smuggle a NZ$33,000 ($19,000) pendant out of a jewellery store by swallowing it. The 32-year-old man, who has not been publicly named, is accused of eating...

Hong Kong’s Housing Department has dispelled rumours that survivors of the deadly Tai Po blaze are staying in interim housing with unfinished floors, after a social media user claimed residents were moving into flats in poor condition. A department...

Two candidates for the education sector seat in the upcoming Legislative Council election have highlighted Hong Kong’s shrinking student population as a key concern, with one pledging to advocate for the gradual reopening of public institutions to ...

We have put together stories from our coverage on science 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’s new tech war warriors: PhD graduates without a thes...

Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory reported a significant rebound in shipments last month as Chinese consumers took advantage of soon-expiring government incentives to snap up cars. The US carmaker’s Shanghai plant, its largest production facility glob...

Thailand on Wednesday relaxed decades-old alcohol sales restrictions, allowing consumers to buy wine, beer and spirits during previously prohibited during certain afternoon hours in a six-month trial. The predominantly Buddhist country still maintain...

Indonesia is facing renewed calls to curb deforestation and tighten oversight of forest concessions after a rare tropical cyclone tore across Sumatra, unleashing floods and landslides that have killed more than 700 people and left hundreds missing. T...

Opium poppy cultivation in war-torn Myanmar has surged to its highest level in a decade, rising 17 per cent in the past year as conflict and economic hardship push more farmers into the illicit trade, the United Nations said on Wednesday. Poppy culti...

A Hong Kong travel agency has allegedly broken the law by announcing its plan to fold only a day before its closure, affecting 1,500 customers and involving about HK$1.7 million (US$218,400), according to a watchdog. The Travel Industry Authority on ...

Records of minor offences will be sealed under a new regulation rather than linked to a person’s identity information – a move that is proving unpopular among the public though it has been welcomed by legal experts. The new rule is part of the am...

A gay man in northern China who married his boyfriend’s sister to secure relocation compensation died in a traffic accident, sparking a bitter dispute over his estate between his wife, his lover and his parents. Xu Tian, a 48-year-old Beijing nativ...

A 13-year-old boy executed a man found guilty of killing his family in front of a cheering crowd in Afghanistan, in a chilling detail revealed after the event. The public execution, echoing the worst days of Taliban rule, was of a man who the Supreme...

China’s first reusable rocket, the Zhuque-3, launched for the first time on Wednesday and successfully reached orbit, but efforts to recover the first stage failed after it crashed near the planned recovery site. The United States is still the only...

With their domestic profits narrowing and production capacity expanding, China’s firms are continuing to widen their overseas footprints in search of new, more lucrative markets. In this series, we examine China Inc.’s next phase of “going glob...

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on Wednesday praised the citizens who confronted martial law troops a year ago, saying their collective defence of democracy made them worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Speaking at a ceremony marking the first anni...

The search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 will resume on December 30, Malaysia’s transport ministry said on Wednesday, more than a decade after the China-bound flight disappeared in one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries. Flight...

The Chinese military has laid out new rules to strengthen political discipline and party loyalty, vowing to eradicate “erroneous political views and inappropriate remarks” and “fake combat capabilities”. The revisions to the supplementary rul...

Thousands of Filipinos returned to the streets over the weekend to protest against the country’s flood control corruption scandal, but the smaller turnouts compared with earlier demonstrations have stirred concern that the movement may be losing st...

Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit on Tuesday said it will adopt key Nvidia technology in future generations of its artificial intelligence computing chips as the firm ramps up efforts to attract major AI customers to use its services. AWS, or Amazo...

The whereabouts of a six-year-old boy from China remain unknown after he was allegedly separated from his father while both were held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New York last week. The city’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on Tu...

India sought to address concerns that its mandate to have a cybersecurity app be factory-loaded on mobile phones could invade privacy or enable surveillance, saying individuals can remove the software from devices. In a directive on Friday, the Minis...

The Trump administration on Tuesday said it paused all immigration applications, including green card and US citizenship processing, filed by immigrants from 19 non-European countries, citing concerns over national security and public safety. The pau...

Masato Watabe made no effort to hide the killing. A little over an hour after he held his hand over his victim’s mouth until she was no longer breathing, he called the emergency services. Taken into custody, 79-year-old Watabe admitted to police th...

Across the strategic waterway of the South China Sea, claimant countries are increasingly relying on long-endurance aerial drones to carry out continuous patrols – overcoming the geographic and logistical limitations of traditional aircraft and shi...

Once, when pop diva Faye Wong was seen reading on a plane, the book reportedly on her lap was the perennial local bestseller Art of Thinking by Lee Tien-ming. Food critic, columnist and media personality Benny Li Shun-Yan reportedly said that after l...

Google’s YouTube said it would obey Australia’s world-leading ban on social media accounts for children under 16, a capitulation which means all the most popular platforms with young users have agreed to comply after campaigning against the law. ...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. Get faster notifications on the latest updates by downloading our app. What we know so far: 159 people, incl...

[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] HONG KONG – 3 December 2025 – In a significant milestone in its founding, YK Pao School Hong Kong today announces the appointment of Mrs. Cathy Braithwaite as its Foundin...

A Chinese man has caused amusement online after he hid two gold bars inside a jar of chilli sauce and mailed them to another province as part of a scam to fund his stock trading account. The incident recently unfolded in the Jinnan District of Tianji...

Beijing is extending an olive branch to overseas companies as it seeks to build a more integrated global supply chain for the shipbuilding industry, in its latest push to project goodwill and support free trade. Gao Dongsheng, chief economist at the ...

An elderly Hong Kong man with dementia who had been missing for nine days has been found dead in the countryside by volunteer search teams. The body of Leung Woon-yew, 87, a resident of Tai Hing Estate in Tuen Mun, was discovered in a bushy area near...

A year after former president Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law, South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) is pushing ahead with a bill to create a separate court dedicated to handling cases linked to the decree, in response to widespre...

US President Donald Trump and his administration on Tuesday seized on China’s recent ban on select Brazilian soybean shipments, touting it as proof they had won Beijing back over to US suppliers even though official data shows China has only resume...

Hong Kong’s booming fundraising market is set for another busy week, with four companies scheduled to debut this week and a string of billion-dollar listings – including Chinese luxury electric vehicle maker Avatr Technology – lining up behind ...

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday he had watched the first US strike in September on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in real time but did not see survivors in the water or the second lethal strike that he described as being carried o...

Hong Kong’s worst blaze in seven decades has exposed an ugly open secret of a murky and rapacious building renovation business that is plagued by bid-rigging and skyrocketing costs even as it staves off feeble official efforts to tackle collusive c...