China’s national aviation regulator has signed new partnership deals with its counterparts in Hong Kong and Macau to accelerate type certification for the country’s widebody airliner, the C929, which is being developed to take on mainstream model...

Subscribers: The Daily Pulse won’t be published on May 1 because of China’s Labour Day holiday. We will resume publication on Monday, May 4. Crude oil prices jumped to a four-year high after US President Donald Trump suggested that a US naval blo...

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, South Korea’s two memory chip giants, are warning of a prolonged and severe global supply crunch, weeks after the two companies disclosed increased investments in their China wafer fabs to meet surging artificial i...

Chinese social media reacted with amusement and disbelief as Britain’s King Charles gave US President Donald Trump a World War II-era British submarine bell as a gift, highlighting differing cultural interpretations of the unusual gesture. “Gifti...

Activists sailing on dozens of boats attempting to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip to deliver humanitarian aid say Israeli forces intercepted them overnight Wednesday into Thursday, detaining the crews while the flotilla was sail...

A viral appearance in the swimsuit round by a male beauty pageant contestant in the Philippines has sparked a wider debate about male beauty standards and whether pageantry is ready to make room for people who do not fit its traditional ideals. RJ Pe...

As a rift widens among Republicans over US-Israeli air strikes on Iran, a top Korean-American leader said Seoul must recognise that President Donald Trump is heavily influenced by a faction he calls “new neocons”. Conservative commentator Tucker ...

A 24-year-old Malaysian woman has been jailed for two years for throwing her newborn out of her 38th-floor flat in Kuala Lumpur. The court on Wednesday convicted Lua Mei Zhu of causing the death of her baby girl on February 26, 2025, the New Straits ...

Operating costs for Hong Kong’s industrial and commercial sectors have jumped by 50 per cent since the start of the United States-Israel war with Iran, according to an oil industry representative, who has said distributors will pass on subsidies to...

Malaysia’s system for tracking repeat domestic abusers is under scrutiny after police said a man accused of assaulting his pregnant wife until she miscarried had been married nine times and was free on bail while appealing a 10-year jail sentence f...

China will work with Australian businesses on jet fuel shipments in an important “first step” in alleviating supply crunches, according to Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong. The agreement came on Wednesday as part of Wong’s talks in Beijin...

Sri Lanka’s loss-making Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport will need a complete overhaul if it wants to attract investors, analysts warn, after a 30-year lease agreement with an Indo-Russian joint venture failed commercially. The nation’s se...

Five years after Tibetan herder Tenzing Tsondu was hailed as “China’s most handsome man” for a seven-second video clip, he is now a romance film actor who dreams about more experiences in the wider world. Known by his Mandarin name Ding Zhen, h...

Bai Chongen is a prominent Chinese economist and government adviser. He is the dean of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and serves concurrently as vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. From 2015...

A series ⁠of reversals suffered by Mali’s Moscow-backed military government has dented Russia’s image as ⁠a self-styled security guarantor in Africa and threatens its strategic and economic interests on the continent. The military junta, whic...

Viral posts of an Australian street dubbed the country’s “most beautiful” have enticed coachloads of visitors to a picturesque seaside town – and locals have had enough of it. Just a two-hour drive south of Sydney, Gerringong is much like man...

Common security interests in the region have led to Japan’s unprecedented sharing of its Mogami-class warships with India, according to analysts. The move dovetails with New Delhi’s drive to localise industrial and defence production. Enhanced na...

Chinese solar exports surged in March, doubling to a record high as demand accelerated across dozens of markets, according to a new report. The spike comes as global energy systems react to renewed geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and the dua...

Some Hong Kong residents are still vaping in hidden corners despite a new ban on the public use of alternative tobacco products, the South China Morning Post has observed, with at least two penalised by authorities. “We will issue penalty tickets w...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. An independent committee investigating the deadly blaze at Hong Kong’s Wang Fuk Court residential estate he...

The three Malaysian elephants sent to Osaka in Japan from Zoo Taiping and Night Safari should be brought home, according to Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability Minister Arthur Joseph Kurup. Arthur made the call amid concerns that Japan...

An elderly man drowned while swimming at Lung Mei Beach in Hong Kong’s Tai Po on Thursday morning. Police said they received a report at 7.25am of a swimmer struggling to stay afloat. Officers rescued the 73-year-old man about 100 metres (328 feet)...

Tour groups from Hong Kong to mainland China are expected to rise by up to 40 per cent year on year over the Labour Day weekend, with travel agents citing improved safety and hygiene as key factors attracting visitors. The agents also said that sligh...

R&B singer D4vd used chainsaws he bought from Amazon to cut up the body of the teenage girl he murdered and left to rot in the trunk of his Tesla, prosecution documents claimed on Wednesday. The internet breakout star killed Celeste Rivas Hernandez b...

A French teen is facing mischief and public nuisance charges in Singapore after posting a video on social media of himself licking a straw from an orange juice vending machine and then putting it back. Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien, 18, was charged ...

Philippine authorities have introduced a new national playbook for raiding and prosecuting online scam centres, as criminal networks once tied to the country’s offshore gaming industry splinter into smaller and harder-to-detect operations. The rule...

A young scientist who was a leader in Britain’s AI chip field has returned to China, joining Nanjing University earlier this year as an associate professor at its School of Artificial Intelligence. Song Yuhang, whose published papers on artificial ...

Ant International, the overseas spin-off of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, has connected more than 150 million merchants with over 2 billion consumer accounts around the world, as it positions its payments network as core infrastructure for the eme...

Almost everyone has heard of OpenClaw, the late-2025 agentic AI release which takes artificial intelligence technology one step further. Rather than leaving the user to turn answers given in a dialogue box into real life action, the latest AI iterati...

Indians are now Australia’s largest migrant group, supplanting the English for the first time ever, in a change that highlights the rise of immigration as an increasingly contentious political issue. Some 971,020 people in Australia – or 5.2 per ...

A senior monk in China has attracted widespread social media attention for enthusiastically playing electronic games. Venerable Huayan, from Mingjiao Temple in Hefei in central Anhui province, has been a Buddhist monk for 20 years. He began to play e...

The fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran has continued to shatter global markets. These are the major takeaways of what happened overnight. What did Trump say? US President Donald Trump spoke with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Puti...

Note: This story has been updated to clarify former transport minister Anthony Cheung Bing-leung’s remarks about his readiness to step down following the 2012 Lamma ferry tragedy. Where exactly does the buck stop? Senior Hong Kong civil servants ar...

Geely Automobile Holdings, Chery Automobile and BYD, the most profitable listed Chinese carmakers last year, all reported double-digit declines in net profit in the first quarter, highlighting a squeeze at home amid reduced purchase incentives. Hangz...

Brics nations are assessing whether a digital payments framework linking their currencies could lessen the impact of Western sanctions, tariffs and US dollar volatility without destabilising the Washington-led global financial system. Under the plan ...

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the United States is considering reducing the number of its troops in Germany, amid a row with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the Iran war. “The United States is studying and reviewing the pos...

China is the United States’ “most consequential threat and competitor in space,” leveraging its capabilities “as a tool of diplomacy and influence”, US lawmakers were told at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, as the two countries’ rac...

Hong Kong’s monetary authority warned of interest-rate uncertainty amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East, after leaving its base rate unchanged on Thursday in tandem with the US Federal Reserve. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said US in...

The United Nations is bloated, costly, badly in need of reform, and too often works against US interests, but pulling out of the international organisation would see China expand its influence and leave Washington at a major disadvantage, according t...

Federal investigators say they believe the man who carried out a mass shooting at Brown University and later killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor did not act randomly. Instead, former Brown student Claudio Neves Valente, 48, appea...

The United Arab Emirates’ decision to leave a global cartel of major oil-exporting countries is seen to reflect a widening fracture within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The UAE announced on Tuesday that it would leave the Organisation of the ...

Can tourism be considered successful if arrivals increase, but the local communities – the very soul of the destination – feel strained and excluded? Too often, tourism success is measured in arrivals, occupancy and revenue. These numbers matter....

Britain’s King Charles and Queen Camilla commemorated victims of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attack on New York on Wednesday, laying a floral bouquet at the memorial where the World Trade Centre’s twin towers once stood. The royal visit to l...

The extraordinary clash at the Federal Reserve between Jerome Powell and Donald Trump entered new territory on Wednesday when the outgoing US central bank chairman said he would remain on as a governor – and the president lashed him with another in...

US President Donald Trump spoke with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, discussing the wars in Ukraine and Iran even as Washington pressed ahead with its naval blockade of Iranian ports. Trump told reporters as he met with astronaut...

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday sharply limited the use of race in drawing electoral districts, in a decision that could reshape congressional maps nationwide and boost Republican prospects ahead of midterm elections. In a 6-3 ruling split along id...

The man charged with trying to storm the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and kill US President Donald Trump took a picture of himself in his hotel room just minutes earlier, outfitted with an ammunition bag, a shoulder gun holster an...

The two-month war with Iran has cost about US$25 billion, a Pentagon official told lawmakers on Wednesday, as US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth defended a record US$1.5 trillion military budget that faces backlash from Democrats. At a House Armed Ser...

US President Donald Trump said that a US naval blockade against Iran could last months, leading oil prices to spike to their highest level in more than four years which held into Thursday. With diplomacy between Iran and the United States at a stands...

Sweden’s government said on Wednesday it planned to introduce legislation requiring social media platforms like TikTok and Snapchat to take down criminal gangs’ ‘murder adverts’ within an hour or face hefty fines. Criminal gangs active in Swe...