Malaysia’s claim that Myanmar has agreed to take back 5,000 Rohingya has raised hopes of easing pressure on the country’s strained refugee system but also drawn alarm from activists over the risks of returning members of the persecuted minority t...

As US tech giants face growing market scrutiny over their swelling artificial intelligence budgets, China’s top technology firms are confronting a similar reckoning: proving that billions of dollars spent on AI infrastructure will yield sustainable...

For Singaporeans who grew up stirring Marmite into hot water, spreading it on toast or eating it in local dishes, the famously divisive yeast extract is easy to love, but now it is much harder to buy. Unilever International, the Singapore distributor...

Zhou Bo is a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, a senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Centre for International Security and Strategy, and the author of the book Should the World Fear China? SCMP Plus readers get early acce...

Electric vehicle giant BYD plans to unveil its first humanoid robots within the next few weeks, as China’s electric car makers accelerate their push into the embodied artificial intelligence market. The Shenzhen-based company told the South China M...

A Chinese-led team has analysed a 240 million-year-old fossil with the oldest known preserved stomach, liver and intestinal soft tissue in reptiles. The complete skeleton fossil has highly specialised body features that indicate it lived in the water...

India’s West Bengal state will bring back eggs to free school meals after a backlash against a decision by its Hindu nationalist government to replace them with vegetarian alternatives, officials have said. The reversal follows criticism from teach...

East Timor has become the unlikely venue for a war crimes case against Myanmar’s military leadership, as proceedings advance in Dili’s courts and test Asean’s uneasy approach to the junta. Brought by the Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO), t...

A Taiwanese man has been jailed for more than 12 years for trafficking cocaine into Hong Kong seven years ago in a case that marks an embattled judge’s final public appearance as a member of the bench. Judge Wilson Chan Ka-shun delivered the senten...

China’s top leaders will gather in Beijing in October for their most important meeting ahead of next year’s Communist Party congress, when a major reshuffle is expected and Xi Jinping is due to begin a fourth term as leader. After a meeting of th...

Hong Kong taxi and minibus drivers have called for a two-month liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) subsidy scheme to be extended amid uncertainty over the war in the Middle East, and warned monthly operating costs could rise by up to 33 per cent when the p...

A barbecue chef in northwest China has become an internet sensation after users noticed his striking resemblance to Elon Musk, prompting a wave of memes and jokes online. Ma Jianping, 48, from Tongchuan in Shaanxi province, co-owns and operates Yilan...

China has lodged formal diplomatic representations with New Zealand over “negative remarks” made in its parliament, after Foreign Minister Winston Peters told a Chinese-born opposition lawmaker to “go back to your own country”. The official p...

A Hong Kong security guard who tied up a building resident’s missing cat in a plastic bag and dumped it in a rubbish bin has been sentenced to four months in prison, with the magistrate saying his actions had probably led to the animal’s death in...

Russian air strikes killed at least eight people in Ukraine on Thursday, including one in Kyiv, in attacks extending as far as the western city of Lviv, forcing neighbouring Poland to scramble fighter jets to secure its airspace. The attacks come as ...

A senior Hong Kong finance official has hit back at criticism of the city’s prospects as “bias against China”, following a recent commentary by a prominent American economist who asserted that “the Hong Kong of old is over”. The government�...

It was important enough to the framers of the US Constitution to be included in the first 10 amendments known as the Bill of Rights – that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”. Today, that protecti...

This article was first published on July 26, 2016. PLA, police ready as Pokemon Go arrives in city by Zen Soo and Naomi Ng (Additional reporting by Laura He) Pokemon Go, the augmented reality smartphone game that has taken the world by storm, launche...

The 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck southern Japan toppled houses and split open streets in the small city of Yatsushiro, but town official Akio Matsushita is most worried about the invisible threats from the lack of water and power amid the pun...

Nearly three-quarters of Cuba’s hotels have been closed and the island’s tourism sector has been brought to “almost total paralysis” by US sanctions and fuel shortages, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said on Wednesday. Detailing the scale of t...

US President Donald Trump said he would be “quite disappointed” if his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping broke a personal promise not to arm Iran. His comment on Wednesday came alongside renewed accusations that long-time US health official Anthony ...

Members of a delegation from the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa paid tribute to their ancestors at the historic Ryukyu Kingdom cemetery in Beijing, highlighting a legacy of ties that China is increasingly leveraging as a counterweight in its friction...

A French teenager who posted a video of himself licking a straw and returning it to an iJooz vending machine in Singapore was fined S$600 (US$465) for public nuisance on Thursday. The clip had gone viral after someone in his Instagram circle recorded...

The US military said it struck dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard targets in Iran, including military command centres and drone facilities, in a two-hour operation launched after Tehran fired ballistic missiles at US forces in the Middle East. “...

An anime convention in southern China recently evicted several cosplayers after they put their bare feet in water and sold the so-called “feet juice,” which attracted large crowds of onlookers eager to buy. This activity mirrored a similar stunt ...

A new law allowing patients in Hong Kong to reject life-sustaining treatments when they are terminally ill will take effect on Friday. The South China Morning Post looks into how the law will affect patients and healthcare professionals. 1. What is t...

Zhongji Innolight suffered a rocky start in its highly anticipated Hong Kong stock market debut on Thursday, as the Chinese firm felt the impact of a global downturn in investor sentiment towards the artificial intelligence sector. By the midday brea...

If you witnessed someone committing a crime, how confident would you be that you could correctly identify that person later on? As it turns out, studies consistently reveal that we tend to overestimate our ability to recall past events accurately and...

Malaysia is stepping up scrutiny of foreign-run businesses amid concerns from local operators over competition from China. The government wants to retain Chinese investment, technology and affordable consumer goods, while assuring local small and med...

Three years ago, I warned in these pages that the greatest existential threat to humanity might not emerge from a stray asteroid or a cosmic cataclysm but from uncontrolled artificial intelligence (AI). Today, the trajectory towards an AI Armageddon ...

Singtel, Singapore’s largest telecommunications company, confirmed on Thursday that it was in discussions with multiple parties over a potential stake sale ‌in its Australian telecoms unit Optus, but said there was no certainty the talks would re...

For the first time, veteran sailor Thomas Wong Kam-chuen and his partners set sail from Hong Kong on their 46-foot yacht on a two-day trip earlier this month to a holiday island in Zhuhai, testing the waters for more leisure travel to mainland China....

Asean’s optimism in concluding a long-awaited code of conduct (COC) for the South China Sea by year’s end is not shared by observers, who point to major differences of opinion between Beijing and the Philippines especially. Analysts say any event...

Five people have died after powerful gusts of wind in Brazil brought chaos to Rio de Janeiro and parts of Sao Paulo state, cutting power and bringing public transport to a standstill. Residents of Rio de Janeiro were taken by surprise when winds of u...

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has maintained its base rate following the US Federal Reserve’s decision to keep its key rate unchanged, but US traders are already betting on a rate rise in September. The city’s base rate was kept at 4 pe...

Lindsay Clancy sobbed in court on Wednesday as jurors listened to the anguished emergency call her then-husband made after returning from an errand to find she had strangled their three children in their Massachusetts home. On the roughly seven-minut...

Donald Trump’s demands that American allies in the Asia-Pacific region share more of the defensive burden have renewed questions about how far they can rely on the United States to help deter the likes of China and North Korea. Such concerns have l...

US President Donald Trump unveiled a US$22 billion plan on Wednesday to rebuild Washington Dulles airport by replacing concourses and adding a large parking garage while preserving the landmark main terminal. The announcement is the latest in a serie...

Brazil overtook Russia and Belgium in the first five months of this year to become the world’s largest importer of Chinese cars, buying US$5.2 billion worth of vehicles as brands raced to land shipments before a tariff increase took effect in July....

The man who stabbed and partially blinded author Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in 2022 was found guilty on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges for the attack, which prosecutors said was incited by death threats over Rushdie’s novel The...

Hwaseong, South Korea, past midnight. An engineer watches a defect pattern surface on her screen – the kind that, caught now, saves a week of wafers. She is locked in, fully absorbed, the way engineers get when a breakthrough is close. But she has ...

China may increasingly seek to use its dominance in the global electric vehicle industry as geopolitical leverage, giving Beijing greater influence over countries dependent on its technology and supply chains, according to analysts. “With China, th...

Global K-pop sensation BTS said on Wednesday they will not submit their music for next year’s Grammy Awards, following the Recording Academy’s introduction of new categories that include the Best Asian Pop Music Performance. The South Korean mega...

Four women have accused Jared Leto of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers, to which the actor and musician responded Wednesday that he has “never sexually assaulted anyone”. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. Thes...

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday, a choice that may intensify questions about how US central bank chief Kevin Warsh will deliver on his commitment to bring inflation back down to the 2 per cent target. The widely ‌expecte...

Two directors of a contractor linked to the deadly inferno at Hong Kong’s Wang Fuk Court have denied all allegations of bid-rigging, corruption and collusion with consultants, with one saying he was never told the housing estate’s fire safety sys...

The United States on Wednesday sanctioned a group of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong shipping companies accused of operating vessels that transported Iranian oil to China, extending Washington’s economic campaign against Tehran alongside its naval b...

Anthony Fauci repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination at a contentious US Senate hearing on Wednesday, refusing to answer questions about American funding for coronavirus research in China and allegations that he misled...

Hong Kong’s main public research funding body for universities has approved a record 12 projects worth about HK$478 million (US$61 million) in its latest financing round, with artificial intelligence featuring in more than a third of successful pro...

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged on Wednesday to take difficult decisions to overhaul England’s adult social care system, saying he wanted to work with other parties to end unfair high costs for users that he likened to US healthcare. Su...