Close to 170 mainland Chinese motorists are expected to arrive in Hong Kong on Saturday under an expanded cross-border travel scheme, with hotels rolling out accommodation, dining, shopping and parking packages to attract the new visitors. The Southb...

Heatwaves come and go, and while this is happening with increasing frequency and intensity – as this year’s record-breaking temperatures show – they slip from attention once things cool off. What does not disappear is the lasting and costly dam...

Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Tehran-allied Houthi movement edged closer to opening a new front in the Iran war overnight, after Riyadh bombed the port city of Hodeidah in retaliation for a Houthi missile strike on one of its ships in the Red Sea. The e...

A father in central China, who spends 6,000 yuan (US$880) a month on “growth shots” for his daughter, has ignited a heated online debate regarding height anxiety. According to mainland media outlet Dazhong Daily, the father, surnamed Li, lives in...

On a sunny July afternoon along the shores of Hong Kong’s Lamma Island, the receding tide reveals an unassuming patch of greenery that scientists describe as the “ultimate underwater superheroes” for boosting marine biodiversity. Seagrass – a...

The administrator of the fire-hit Hong Kong estate is still settling contracts and gradually issuing refunds to owners after organising tens of thousands of documents, the city’s home affairs minister has said in response to residents’ concerns. ...

US missiles struck targets across ⁠Iran on Friday and President Donald Trump vowed “major military punishment” for Tehran and its Houthi allies in Yemen, though he once again left open the door to a diplomatic deal with Iran. Separately, the US...

A social media user has been arrested on suspicion of making a bomb threat, which included threats of violence, in comments posted on the South China Morning Post’s Instagram account. The 20-year-old suspect, surnamed Hui, posted two comments under...

Five years after graduating from a vocational school in the southern Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen, Chen Hao found himself working as a salesman for a local electronics factory. His daily routine involved exhausting trips between corporate clients, an...

For years, Syria was a wound the world watched fester: a country carved up by war, sanctioned into isolation and reduced to a byword for state collapse. Its economy needs US$216 billion to rebuild, according to World Bank estimates. This month, for t...

Ukraine hopes to gain support from Japan as it looks to produce Patriot air defence systems under US licence, citing the expertise of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries that manufactures the interceptors for the Japanese defence forces, according to an aide...

Trains were stopped, schools were halted and residents were evacuated in southern China as Typhoon Noul headed towards the coast. The National Meteorological Centre issued an orange typhoon alert – the second highest level in a four-tier system –...

Japan has been establishing dialogue frameworks for artificial intelligence with like-minded countries and Global South partners to reduce reliance on top US and Chinese firms and promote domestic companies abroad. The outreach signals a growing reco...

More than 30 restaurants have withdrawn from Hong Kong’s new dog-friendly dining scheme, while officers have issued 70 warnings during inspections since its launch, the city’s environment chief has said. Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse ...

US President Donald Trump told the White House press corps at its annual gala dinner on Friday that “the show must go on,” three months after an earlier attempt was interrupted by an assassination attempt. This time the mood was significantly dif...

Hong Kong student Angel Lau Yin-kwan, 16, has wanted to visit China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region for some time, to learn more about the birthplace of her favourite mainland Chinese actress, Dilraba Dilmurat. Before embarking on a seven-day no...

Chinese defence suppliers are hitting a wall when it comes to translating national strategic goals into effective enterprise-level actions, according to an analysis by industry insiders. The study, published in May by the academic journal Defence Ind...

By day, Adele Lee juggles schedules and administrative work as a personal assistant to a senior director at a financial advisory firm. Three evenings a week, the 32-year-old logs back on, this time to sell second-hand clothes through TikTok livestrea...

In an industry built on going global, K-pop’s freshest phenomenon has succeeded by doing the exact opposite: staying home. Rescene, a five-member girl group from little-known agency The Muze Entertainment, debuted in 2024 but largely flew under the...

More than 150 flights have been cancelled in Hong Kong as Typhoon Noul intensified and was forecast to come within 100km (62 miles) of the city on Sunday morning. The Observatory said on Saturday that the outer bands of intense thundery showers assoc...

On the surface, China’s cutting-edge tech sector – from the algorithmic breakthroughs of DeepSeek and Zhipu AI to the hardware of Unitree Robotics and ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) – mirrors Silicon Valley’s venture capital-backed ecosy...

In 138BC, Chinese diplomat and explorer Zhang Qian was sent as an envoy to the western regions. The Han dynasty envoy failed to achieve his emperor’s goal of launching a pincer attack against the Xiongnu nomadic confederation, but he unexpectedly d...

Japan’s tourism boom has packed the streets of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka with foreign visitors, but one of the country’s most scenic regions is still struggling to draw them north. Tohoku, the northern region of Japan’s main island of Honshu, comp...

An unconventional weight-loss remedy of drinking a mixture of an external-use constipation medication with tea has trended on Chinese social media, sparking doctors to warn the public not to try it after receiving some emergency cases. The extreme sl...

Henderson Land Development co-chairman and managing director Peter Lee Ka-kit’s family office has fast-tracked its plans in Central Asia, where rich agricultural and natural resources could trigger more than US$1 billion in investments in green ene...

US President Donald Trump has issued an executive order to install signage that warns visitors of inaccurate historical information inside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington. The highly unusual move marks the 80-yea...

Bali has “aura” and political titan Luhut Pandjaitan wants to channel it to transform Indonesia’s famed resort island into an international financial centre. But President Prabowo Subianto’s special adviser and economic tsar is not relying on...

Saudi Arabia struck Houthi military targets in Hodeida on Friday with rebel media reporting two injured after the Iran-backed group announced a maritime blockade of the kingdom and hit its ships. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis traded fire recently for ...

Beijing is doubling down on overland trade routes across Central Asia as continued disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider region expose the vulnerability of global shipping chokepoints. A new link to Afghanistan via Uzbekistan offers a pra...

A group of American tech giants, including Nvidia, Palantir and Meta, signed a public letter on Friday calling for US leadership in open-weight AI models, an area that China currently dominates. The challenge comes amid growing speculation that the T...

Two small businesses in the United States have ⁠challenged President Donald ⁠Trump’s latest round of tariffs on goods ⁠from 60 trading partners, saying that the new policy, like most of Trump’s previous tariffs, went beyond the president’...

Washington and Beijing’s top police officials met on Friday in the Chinese capital, the latest meeting by senior level representatives in advance of a much-anticipated summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, expec...

US President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs on products from the European Union in retaliation for the bloc’s US$1 billion (€890 million) fine of Alphabet’s Google. In a social media post on Friday, Trump said the US would launch a trade i...

Member states of the International Criminal Court voted to dismiss prosecutor Karim Khan for serious misconduct, the ICC said on Friday. Diplomats running ‌the executive bureau of the court’s governing body said last month the British barrister h...

She tours major international defence shows, negotiates with arms manufacturers and takes part in discussions on Europe’s rearmament. At 34, Iryna Terekh, an architect by training, heads Fire Point, a company that has become one of the driving forc...

Beijing’s point man on Hong Kong affairs has called on lawmakers to better support the city’s leader, enhance governance, inject new momentum into local development and address residents’ needs. Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macau ...

A volunteer was injected on Friday with the first dose of a rapidly developed vaccine targeting the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola driving a deadly outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Oxford University said. More than 1,000 people have be...

Washington’s recent wave of trade, tech and visa restrictions on China appears to be a deliberate push to build leverage ahead of the presidential summit in September, according to Chinese analysts. However, they warn that such aggressive pressure ...

Hong Kong can take on a new role as a “super converter” for technical standards, legal norms and innovations exchanged between mainland China and the wider world, the city’s finance chief has said. Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po stressed t...

A Russian ⁠ballistic missile strike on Friday in Ukraine’s Kyiv region killed 10 people and injured almost 100 others at a site where a defence ‌industry event was being held, Ukrainian officials and industry representatives said. The attack ca...

India’s Akasa Air and Malaysia’s AirBorneo are pressing ahead with expansion plans despite soaring jet fuel prices and disruption from the US-Israel war on Iran, in a development analysts say shows smaller Asian carriers finding room to grow whil...

Two Peking University alumni made history by winning the Fields Medal this week, a victory spotlighting a broader wave of young high-achieving Chinese scientists rising to global prominence. The International Congress of Mathematicians announced on T...

Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei has thrown his weight behind the Chinese tech giant’s Tau Scaling Law, framing the new chip-design principle as an existential necessity to survive tightening US sanctions. “The Tau Scaling Law is the only...

Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Limited (CATL) slightly missed market estimates for second-quarter revenue and net profit, as China’s weakening demand for electric vehicles (EVs) outweighed benefits from the energy shock. T...

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham was to open his newly created northern office on Friday, as he bids to launch his flagship move to reverse decades of centralising power over England in London. Ahead of officially opening his “Number 10 North”...

Salary growth for Hong Kong degree graduates slowed to a five-year low in 2025, with average annual earnings rising by just 2 per cent and sitting at HK$28,000 (US$3,570) a month as underemployment hit a record high. The University Grants Committee (...

Hong Kong’s Fire Services Department has said paramedics will operate on an “if in doubt, rescue first” principle when determining whether to resuscitate patients in need after a new law on end-of-life directives takes effect next week. Assista...

A tornado tore through an industrial site in Batam, Indonesia, ripping roofing from workshop facilities and sending helmeted workers running for cover as weather officials warned that unstable conditions could trigger further sudden storms. The short...

Hong Kong’s trade promotion body will set up a new office in Egypt within the next nine months to expand its footprint in Africa, while recalibrating resources for Nordic countries through its European bases as traditional markets face slower growt...

China may be developing a new class of nuclear-powered attack submarine with improved range and stealth, according to analysis based on recent satellite imagery. The images, captured at Shanghai’s Jiangnan Shipyard, show what analysts believe is a ...