News - South China Morning Post

Hong Kong police have arrested a foreign man at a bar in Yau Ma Tei on suspicion of possessing an imitation firearm. The 36-year-old Australian was arrested a second time on Wednesday night for criminal damage after he allegedly vandalised the detention facility while in police custody. Police were first alerted at 10.14pm on Wednesday when a passer-by reported a person behaving suspiciously near...

Danish jewellery maker Pandora opened a US$150 million factory in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday, its largest manufacturing facility and its first production site outside Thailand as it bids to diversify its manufacturing footprint and bolster supply-chain resilience. The Vietnam factory, Pandora’s fourth worldwide, will increase the company’s overall manufacturing capacity by around 50 per cent and...

Two power outages hit Hong Kong’s Ho Man Tin, the first lasting more than four hours overnight into Thursday, disrupting hotel operations and about 1,000 households. CLP Power, which supplies electricity to Kowloon and the New Territories, said equipment near Waterloo Road in Kowloon first malfunctioned at 11.18pm on Wednesday, affecting about 1,000 customers. “After CLP Power’s engineering person...

Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Pike to death on Wednesday for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure, and Tennessee’s governor halted the remaining execution for the rest of the year. Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, h...

Hong Kong’s inaugural five-year plan highlighted its DNA as an international city while emphasising the market economy, the chief executive has said. Speaking at a National Day reception on Thursday, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said the city needed a blueprint with strategic vision amid the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape and accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, as he highli...

China and the Philippines have launched a war of words after their coastguards challenged each other in the waters off the Batanes Islands, an area that has become the latest maritime flashpoint as Beijing ramps up pressure against Manila-Tokyo delimitation efforts. The Philippine coastguard said on Thursday it had sent one of its biggest vessels and an aircraft to “disrupt and drive away” a Chine...

Huawei Technologies is making rapid progress in rolling out a new breed of advanced chip based on its self-developed Tau Scaling Law, with the Chinese company set to adopt the processors across the newly released Mate 90 smartphone series. The roll-out marks another step forward in the Chinese tech giant’s push to overcome stringent US export curbs, which has seen Huawei rewire its smartphone busi...

Ross Surace is preparing to raise the price of a coffee by 50 Australian cents and a panini by A$1 (US$0.70) when the country bans credit card surcharge fees starting on Thursday. The co-owner of Lennox Street Deli in Melbourne’s Moonee Ponds neighbourhood said bank-imposed card fees already cost his business more than A$1,000 (US$690) a week, even after the cafe recoups some of the expense by add...

Switzerland’s glaciers, which are disproportionately impacted by climate change, have lost nearly 20 per cent of their mass in five years, experts said on Thursday, with 2026 registering the second biggest melt on record. Swiss glaciers saw 5.5 per cent of their volume melt away this year, the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) network found in a new study, published after a record hot sum...

Researchers have identified a potential source of uranium in a long-explored mining district in the southern Philippines, as Manila moves to establish nuclear power and expand its critical minerals industry. The discovery, which could provide uranium for the nuclear fuel cycle if further exploration confirms its viability, was made in the Larap-Paracale mining district in Camarines Norte province,...

A growing number of young Chinese women are paying for romantic photo shoots with male models, seeking a brief taste of love through a novel form of emotional companionship. This trend has gained significant traction on mainland social media, with customers spending up to 8,000 yuan (US$1,200) for an hour-long session featuring couple-style poses, including hand-holding, embraces, staged kisses, a...

The Chinese ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, has described the personal rapport and “mutual respect” between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump as the “most valuable strategic asset in our bilateral relations”. “Their personal connection and in-depth dialogue have helped keep China-US relations on course at critical moments,” Xie said during a speech on Wednesday...

US President Donald Trump has announced US$200 billion in energy investments from South Korea, including US$54 billion towards a long-discussed liquefied natural gas project in Alaska and more than US$100 billion in planned longer-term nuclear power investments. Besides the Alaska LNG project and pipeline and the nuclear plants, the Trump administration announced a US$22.3 billion natural gas-fire...

Perhaps no story illustrates the secret of China’s industrial success better than its rise as the world’s gold superpower. China has revered the metal for millennia, yet it has never had a gold-based economy. Its own deposits were simply too scarce. In 1975, as China began its economic modernisation, it desperately needed gold to fund reform and build up foreign reserves. Despite its best efforts,...

Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee and senior government officials are attending a ceremony and a National Day reception as the city celebrates the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Some Hong Kong retailers are forecasting double-digit sales growth over the National Day “golden week” holiday, but industry leaders have warned that the expected influx of mainland Chinese visitors may deliver far smaller gains across the sector as tourists remain cautious about spending. The cautious outlook came after authorities estimated that about 1.29 million mainland visitors were expected...

The two Koreas urgently need to restore military communication to prevent a landmine dispute in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) from escalating into an armed clash, according to observers. The danger is growing as North Korea presses ahead with leader Kim Jong-un’s order to fortify its side of the 4km (2.5 mile) wide buffer zone separating it from the South. South Korea views the works, including the...

A woman who filed a lawsuit saying she was sexually assaulted by seven men at a Cornell University fraternity house told police weeks after the incident that she could “say with 100 per cent confidence I was raped”, according to a report by CBS New York, which said it obtained a transcript of her interview with investigators. The transcript, which has not been publicly released, raises new questio...

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he discussed the release of political prisoners in China with his counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Washington last week. “We talked, and I think we had some very, very important discussions. Hopefully fruitful discussions,” Trump told reporters in the White House. Families had stepped up pressure on the Trump administration to push Beijing to release the...

At a hearing reviewing China’s compliance with its World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments, a senior US trade official said Beijing was targeting entire industrial sectors for global dominance while retaining a non-market economic system. Terry McCartin, Assistant US Trade Representative (USTR) for China, Mongolia and Taiwan Affairs, said China’s anticompetitive behaviour posed a major challeng...

The fields in Xinjiang’s Awati county – a cotton hub hit by US sanctions – were nearly ready for the October harvest. Yusup Molamaiti, a 36-year-old technician, recalled what it was like manually planting and harvesting 37 mu (about 2.5 hectares or 6 acres) of scattered plots of land. “Planting a single mu took up to three hours with two people laying plastic film by hand,” he said. Harvesting wou...

Russia attacked Ukraine with missiles and drones on Saturday, killing two and wounding 19 others, officials said, as Kyiv awaits supplies of air defence munitions after a shortage has ‌left it exposed to Russian attacks. Eleven people were wounded in the capital, Kyiv, by an attack that used ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones. “Civilian infrastructure was hit even before the air raid...

Hong Kong student numbers at UK private schools experienced a record decline after Britain imposed a 20 per cent tax on fees last year, with total enrolment falling by 17 per cent and new admissions down by 26 per cent. A consultant specialising in student recruitment for British private schools said enrolment levels had returned to those seen before Hong Kong’s emigration wave, with parents becom...

Hong Kong police have arrested 65 people, including 11 sex workers and 54 others involved in suspected illegal gambling, in a two-day joint crackdown with fire services and immigration authorities targeting triad-linked income sources. The force said on Saturday that another three people were issued summonses for running an illegal petrol station during the joint operation conducted on Thursday an...

The Chinese ambassador to India’s attempt at bridge-building has triggered a fierce nationalist backlash back home, including accusations that he has lost sight of his role. “The ambassador seems to have forgotten his actual job,” one social media user wrote this month of Xu Feihong, arguing that the envoy’s role was to make Indians more friendly towards China – not the other way round. Another to...