News - South China Morning Post

Hong Kong’s Generation Y residents – those aged 30 to 45 – are the city’s unhappiest age group, largely because of dissatisfaction with economic and housing conditions, a poll has found. A survey of 1,039 adults by HK.WeCare, a platform set up under the non-profit organisation Wofoo Social Enterprises, put the Hong Kong Happiness Index at 5.87 out of 10. The score remained below the passing level...

A construction worker has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering a man who confronted him about smoking while they were waiting for a lift at a private housing estate in Hong Kong. A High Court jury on Tuesday found Tam Yun-chiu, 52, guilty of killing Ho Lok-man after hearing that he repeatedly punched the victim in the face, knocked him to the ground and kicked his head on the podium floo...

The death of a 30-year-old nurse in southwestern China from a brain haemorrhage while on duty sparked outrage after authorities refused to classify her death as work-related. Chen Jiajia, a supervising nurse in the medical imaging department at Guizhou Maotai Hospital in Zunyi, experienced a severe headache and began vomiting while working on August 4, according to Dafeng News. Her colleagues swif...

The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is ⁠Francis Halzen. The scientist was honoured for “decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino ‌Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said on Tuesday. “Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a...

Kenya reported its first-ever Ebola death, the health minister announced on Tuesday, after a Kenyan man who had been living in the Democratic Republic of Congo died after returning to the country. In mid-May, the DR Congo declared its 17th Ebola outbreak, an extremely deadly disease that has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past 50 years. While Kenya has previously never reported...

Hong Kong has retained its status as the world’s freest economy in the latest annual ranking by a top Canadian think tank, although its score has declined in recent years. Switzerland overtook Singapore to claim second place, pushing the city state down to third in the league table released by the Fraser Institute on Tuesday. The Economic Freedom of the World report, compiled by the Vancouver-base...

India’s recent push to become more involved in helping end the Russia-Ukraine war comes as the costs of the conflict continue to mount for New Delhi, amid the threat of US tariffs on major buyers of Russian energy and a recent drone attack on an Indian-owned pharmaceutical plant in Ukraine. Sunday morning’s drone attack destroyed a large part of Kusum Group’s factory in Sumy, killing one person an...

Germany and France, the European Union’s two largest economies, jointly called for tougher EU trade defences, as European and Chinese negotiators prepare for crunch talks this week under the shadow of a potential trade war. “The open and rules-based trade system is massively affected by weaponisation of trade, systemic market-distorting practices, and global macroeconomic imbalances,” German Chanc...

Eight public service officers have been referred to Singapore police after a review of 191 officers’ property transactions, Coordinating Minister for Public Services Chan Chun Sing has told parliament. The review followed a working paper by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research, which identified 2007 to 2011 as the period of concern. The Public Service Division (PSD) extended the scope...

The recent US-China summit yielded a narrow, caution-filled outcome for bilateral trade: a two-month extension of the Kuala Lumpur trade truce, which now expires on January 10 next year. This reprieve eases fears of immediate tariff escalation and shows that head-of-state diplomacy can still curb spiralling confrontation. Yet the short timeline exposes the wide gulf separating the two sides’ prior...

Shenzhen Transsion Holdings, the maker of Africa’s bestselling phones, aims to kick off its Hong Kong share offering on Wednesday to raise up to US$500 million ahead of a targeted October 15 listing, according to people familiar with the matter. The company, which already trades in Shanghai and has a market capitalisation of 62 billion yuan (US$9.24 billion), could offer up to 132 million offshore...

The authority managing Hong Kong’s arts hub in West Kowloon recorded a wider deficit in the 2025-26 financial year but expects to generate more income next year by putting a residential development project out to tender. The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority’s deficit ballooned to HK$998 million (U$127 million) in the year to March 30, from HK$769 million in the same period a year earlier....

Banking apps from Mox Bank, Bank of China (Hong Kong) (BOCHK), ZA Bank and Citibank Hong Kong are among the top 10 in Asia-Pacific, according to a Sia Partners study exclusively previewed by the South China Morning Post. Sia, an international consulting firm, assessed 145 banking apps in 20 markets in Europe, Asia and Australia using 100 criteria, including functionality, user experience and feedb...

When Chinese coffee giant Luckin Coffee moved into the unit next to his neighbourhood cafe in Singapore, Folk Yard owner Chew Yit Shan grew nervous. Luckin launched with an aggressive promotional deal of S$1 (78 US cents) per cup, served in just two minutes. In the first few months following its arrival, Chew saw sales at his independent cafe drop by 15 per cent. But once the initial hype had died...

Hong Kong socialite Abby Choi Tin-fung accused her former in-laws of turning her children against her after she tried to push through the sale of a HK$72 million flat at the centre of a bitter dispute between the two families, a court has heard. Choi’s mother, Cheung Yin-fa, on Tuesday said her daughter had become hostile towards her former parents-in-law, Kwong Kau and Jenny Li Sui-heung, in the...

Governments and financial institutions in Southeast Asia urgently need to find a way to safely and quickly share data if they hope to contain a surge in scams, as cybersecurity experts warn that artificial intelligence is enabling criminal operations in the region to expand their reach rapidly. Criminal enterprises stole as much as US$114 billion from victims across the Asia-Pacific in 2025, accor...

She spent some of her teenage years helping her mother at a sundry shop in Malaysia after school, and throughout that period kept a dream of achieving something higher alive. Now, 36-year-old Suriati Sukardi is a pilot, flying AirAsia’s commercial A320 and A321 Airbus aircraft. Before that, she had landed a job as the airline’s flight attendant and served the company for eight years since 2017 whi...

North Korea’s laying of landmines along its heavily fortified border with the South has laid bare how misaligned the two nations have become over their de facto land boundary, after three South Korean soldiers were wounded in an explosion last month. Seoul blames Pyongyang for the blast near the military demarcation line (MDL) on September 21, in which one soldier lost a foot. On Tuesday, its Fore...

An Nvidia-backed US start-up has unveiled an open-weight model to challenge China’s dominance in freely available artificial intelligence, releasing a system that early third-party testing suggests could be one of the most token-efficient open models in its class. Reflection AI on Monday debuted Beam, its first open-weight model built for coding, reasoning and agentic tasks. The US firm said Beam...

China tried three times to persuade powerful families in northern Myanmar to shut down scam operations before Myanmar police made a massive arrest in 2023, according to a new documentary broadcast on Chinese state television. The three-part documentary, which was jointly produced by China’s Ministry of Public Security and state broadcaster CCTV and began airing on Monday, shows obstacles faced by...

A massive attack involving 650 drones targeted Moscow overnight, leaving at least two dead, Russian authorities said on Tuesday. Most of the drones were destroyed by air defences at long range, including 105 intercepted as they approached the capital, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin wrote on Telegram. Russian state news agency Tass reported it was the second-largest drone attack on the capital region...

A railway station in southern China’s hub city Guangzhou has set a national record for trips in a single day and drawn attention for the frequency of train departures – one every 40 seconds – during this month’s holiday period, according to the provincial government. Guangzhou South Railway Station handled 1,252 train services and just over 1 million trips on October 1, the start of the seven-day...

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi defended her absence from a Group of Seven online meeting, responding over social media to some critics who questioned why she did not attend despite her apparently free schedule. “This was a last-minute meeting arranged by the chair, France, and allowed for substitute representatives. I understand that UK Prime Minister Burnham did not attend in person and h...

Hong Kong’s leader has pledged to provide guests attending this month’s Apec Finance Ministers’ Meeting with a “high-quality” experience, as the city works closely with Beijing to assist delegations with the registration process. About 500 guests, including finance ministers and senior officials from the 21 member economies, are expected to attend the annual meeting on October 20 and 21, which wil...

Hong Kong’s leader has urged residents to pay close attention to a coming three-day debate on the city’s inaugural five-year plan and latest policy address in the legislature. The debate on the two policy documents is set to begin on Wednesday morning and continue until Friday, according to the Legislative Council’s agenda. “I look forward to tomorrow’s Legislative Council debate, during which gov...