Hong Kong police arrested 119 people for various offences and issued fines totalling more than HK$1.5 million (US$192,300) to hundreds of residents for breaching Covid-19 social-distancing rules in an overnight citywide sweep that began on Christmas ...

Cathay Pacific has suspended flights departing from London’s Heathrow Airport to Hong Kong for two weeks starting on Sunday, amid a new wave of Omicron Covid-19 infections across the world.“Due to recent government restrictions, we unfortunately ...

Xinjiang’s Communist Party chief Chen Quanguo is to leave his post, state news agency Xinhua reported on Saturday.Chen has been targeted by foreign sanctions over the crackdown targeting the Uygurs and other Muslim minorities in the region that he ...

When recently asked whether the US would come to Taiwan’s aid if China invaded, US President Joe Biden said: “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”His response caused confusion in both Beijing and Washington, with China’s foreign ministry is...

The story of how Thailand’s largest Catholic community came to be in one of the country’s poorest provinces is an unlikely one.Tha Rae village in the rice-growing province of Sakon Nakhon, not far from the Laos border in northeastern Thailand, is...

Hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines, Asia’s largest Roman Catholic nation, were marking Christmas on Saturday without homes, adequate food and water, electricity and mobile phone connections after a powerful typhoon left at least 375...

A 26-year-old jobless man has been arrested over robbery at two convenience stores in Hong Kong by threatening staff at knifepoint and forcing a worker at one of the outlets to transfer HK$2,700 (US$346) to his e-wallet.Inspector Fu Ho-sing from the ...

Above the imposing main entrance of the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which opened back in 1951, is the motto “Service to the Nation”. For years, as many graduates of the country’s elite network of engineering schools headed off f...

Until this week, Andrea Fessler had never heard of Ho Feng-shan, a Chinese diplomat who helped her father and grandparents survive World War II.As a consul general to Vienna, he defied his government and issued thousands of visas that enabled persecu...

This month marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of a Chinese intellectual and diplomat who played a key role in on of the major turning points in the Second World War – an event being commemorated in a new book.The biography details the life of...

China needs to do more to explain its system and values to the world, to avoid misunderstanding and mistrust in the West, according to the founder of a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank.In an interview on Talking Post with chief news editor Y...

Whether it was government shake-ups, social shifts or a looming dilemma, the significant issues that stood out in China in 2021 are almost guaranteed to remain in the spotlight 2022.Like much of the world, the Covid-19 pandemic is a shadow hanging ov...

This year will go down as a tough period for Chinese technology firms, as Beijing moved to exert control over the once-freewheeling sector. In the last of a four-part series, the South China Morning Post looks at the market fallout, the cost to inves...

TikTok’s 10,000 content moderators are exposed to a regular diet of child pornography, rapes, beheadings and animal mutilation, according to a lawsuit filed against the video-sharing platform and its parent, ByteDance Inc.It gets worse. Content mod...

The first taste of an illicit drug may seem like a harmless thrill, but this can be followed by years of suffering and pain, long-time addicts have warned, appealing to young Hongkongers to steer clear of illegal substances amid the Christmas cheer.T...

South Africa on Friday condemned the planned auction of the key to the prison cell that once held ex-president and national hero Nelson Mandela.The key to the cell on Robben Island, where Mandela was jailed for 27 years, is the headline item of a Jan...

Discarded surgical masks which fall into the sea could be releasing microplastics as they degrade, polluting an amount of water equal to 54,800 Olympic-sized swimming pools.Dr He Yuhe at City University’s State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution ma...

Mary*, a 32-year-old domestic worker from the Philippines, had her world turned upside down when she realised she was pregnant – about six months ago, amid the Covid-19 pandemic in Hong Kong.“I was happy and nervous. I wasn’t expecting to get p...

German businesses have warned that China’s attempts to target Lithuania over its relationship with Taiwan could be a “devastating own goal” as it forces decoupling on “politically disagreeable” partners.Beijing has denied that it is targeti...

A vulgar anti-Biden slogan made for an awkward moment on Friday during President Joe Biden’s phone calls with children tracking Santa’s flight when a father said, “Let’s Go Brandon.”The refrain, a sanitised version of “F*** Joe Biden”, ...

Pope Francis celebrated Christmas Eve Mass before an estimated 2,000 people in St Peter’s Basilica on Friday, going ahead with the service despite the resurgence in Covid-19 cases that has prompted a new vaccine mandate for Vatican employees.A mask...

A 14-year-old girl was killed by Los Angeles police when they opened fire on a suspect who was allegedly assaulting someone in a North Hollywood clothing store on Thursday.The victim, identified as Valentina Orellana-Peralta, was in a changing room w...

As a long-time fan of K-pop who had been teaching herself Korean since her early teens, Sichuan native Liu Yue took what appeared to be a logical step and applied to a university in South Korea in 2018.Fast forward to December, the 22-year-old is sti...

A Moscow court on Friday slapped Google with a nearly US$100 million fine and also fined Facebook’s parent company Meta US$27 million over their failure to delete content banned by local law, as Russia seeks to step up pressure on technology giants...

A massive fire swept through a crowded river ferry in Bangladesh early on Friday, leaving at least 39 people dead and 70 injured, officials said.Many passengers leapt from the vessel into cold waters to escape the blaze.It took 15 fire engines two ho...

Iran fired multiple ballistic missiles on Friday at the close of five days of military drills that generals said were a warning to arch-enemy Israel.“These exercises were designed to respond to threats made in recent days by the Zionist regime,” ...

Commercial airlines around the world cancelled more than 4,500 flights over the Christmas weekend, as a mounting wave of Covid-19 infections driven by the Omicron variant created greater uncertainty and misery for holiday travellers.Airline carriers ...

Hong Kong police have shut down a drug manufacturing plant that was capable of producing HK$240 million (US$30.8 million) worth of crystal meth.Acting on a tip-off and follow-up investigation, officers from the Kwun Tong anti-triad squad swooped at a...

A group of US officials have applied for visas as part of a delegation to China to provide security support during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics after Washington announced it would conduct a diplomatic boycott of the Games, according to sources.Th...

China is not the Soviet Union and will not lose if there is a new cold war, Beijing’s ambassador to the United States has said.Qin Gang also urged policymakers in the US to “cautiously” manage ties with Taiwan, which he said has become a major ...

Hong Kong customs has confiscated nearly 430 million smuggled cigarettes with a market value of HK$1.2 billion (US$153.8 million) this year, more than double the amount in 2020.Seizures this year included a haul of 20.8 million cigarettes, worth HK$5...

The US will lift travel restrictions on eight southern African countries imposed last month over concerns about the fast-spreading Covid-19 Omicron variant, a senior Biden administration official said.Foreign nationals who are barred from the US beca...

A Chinese state-owned asset management company said it will spend 6 billion yuan (US$930 million) to buy a 20 per cent equity stake in the consumer credit unit of Ant Group, as part of the expansion of the capital base of a vehicle created this summe...

Hong Kong’s constitutional affairs minister has blasted The Wall Street Journal over an editorial describing Sunday’s legislative election as a “sham poll”, accusing the newspaper of “arrogance which knows no bounds”.In his second strongl...

China’s move to set up a global force in the strategic rare earth sector could help it pre-empt and respond to future external challenges, including trade tensions with the United States, analysts say.The China Rare Earth Group was formed after the...

US talk show host Trevor Noah has kicked up a storm with comments likening China’s role in Africa to “colonialism”.Noah is the hugely popular host of The Daily Show, a satirical US cable network programme. And the point of contention is a 13-mi...

Hongkongers got the chance to enjoy a new harbourfront experience on Christmas Eve after a stretch of promenade opened to the public with a fence-free stepped area to the water’s edge and pedal boat rides.The new 280-metre extension in Wan Chai bri...

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on Friday that Washington grew “arrogant and self-confident” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the expansion of the Nato military alliance.In recent years President Vladimir Putin has g...

Three employees of a long-established child protection group in Hong Kong have been arrested over the abuse and neglect of at least 18 toddlers, including yanking their hair, hitting their heads, slapping their faces and tossing them on the floor, ac...

Malaysians took to social media to protest Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s handling of severe floods that has left dozens dead and displaced more than 61,000 people with the “Do Not Donate To Government” hashtag trending on Twitter.The phr...

A Hong Kong woman was cleared on Friday of obstructing police during a search conducted seven months into her pregnancy, after a magistrate found that all the officers involved tried to hide the truth about the arrest.Housewife Lau Siu-fan told the K...

A former top Chinese internet censor and anti-cult security official has pleaded guilty to corruption charges and accepting 54.64 million yuan (US$8.6 million) in bribes.Peng Bo, 64, was arrested in August, five months after being placed under invest...

Chinese police have detained three men who took advantage of a 23-year-old mentally disabled woman for a controversial live-streaming show, including teasing her, touching her genitals and forcing her to drink beer and hug and kiss different men.The ...

Josie Wang and her family are not Christian. But they have celebrated Christmas every year since 2016.That was the year her son William, then a toddler of three, started learning English with a private education company in Beijing.Christmas then mean...

The northeastern province of Jilin, which has the second lowest fertility rate in China, will offer loans and tax breaks to parents as it tries to boost its declining population and fast ageing society.The provincial government announced on Thursday ...

Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, said it has punished 917,000 content creators and permanently shut down 11,000 online merchants this year, as it moves to create a safe and reliable online shopping environment.The short video app developed by B...

The northern Chinese city of Xian has punished officials for mismanaging a quarantine hotel where the Covid-19 outbreak that prompted a lockdown of 13 million residents originated.The city reported 49 new cases on Thursday, bringing the total number ...

Cambodia’s long-time ruling party voted to endorse Prime Minister Hun Sen’s eldest son as “future prime minister” but did not specify a time frame for when he might succeed his father, who has been in power for 36 years.A statement from the C...

China’s internet watchdog has started a new campaign to weed out social media manipulation, including inflating engagement records, discrediting competitors and hiring ghostwriters to influence online discussions.The campaign will keep authorities ...

Hongkongers looking forward to a relatively warm Christmas Day should brace for much colder weather over the rest of the holiday season, with temperatures dipping to nine degrees Celsius (48.2 degrees Fahrenheit) or below on Monday.The Hong Kong Obse...