A prominent patients’ rights advocate and lawyer has resigned from Hong Kong’s medical watchdog to represent the father of Chau Tin-yu at an inquest into her death, after she spent four years in a vegetative state following an alleged medical blunder. Alex Lam Chi-yau, chairman of Hong Kong Patients’ Voices and a lay member of the Medical Council, submitted his resignation to council chairwoman Professor Grace Tang Wai-king on Wednesday amid concerns about a conflict of interest. His resignation...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here In the wake of Democrats’ sweeping victory in congressional elections, Asian countries are weighing how their ties with the US will shift under a lame-duck Trump administration. Observers expect the “blue wave” midterm results will push the Trump administration to heighten pressure on Washington’s Asian allies for greater US investment and increased defence cost-sharing. In South Korea, analysts have predicted that managing relations with Washington will...

Hong Kong’s education minister has shot down a suggestion to turn the final stretch of undergraduate degree programmes into an internship period to boost employability, amid a fall in entry-level jobs due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Secretary for Education Christine Choi Yuk-lin said on Wednesday that university courses should not be changed solely to meet manpower needs or be based on single indicators such as labour market supply and demand data. She was responding to lawmaker...

The installation of anti-ram bollards costing HK$5 million (US$637,230) has begun at a busy crossing in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay to prevent vehicles from mounting crowded pavements, sparking debate over whether the safety barriers justify the price tag. By Wednesday afternoon, workers had installed four fixed bollards along the pavement outside the landmark Sogo department store, while construction continued on the ground behind temporary barriers. Officials said the bollards and crash barriers...

Hongkongers will be able to create advance medical directives electronically on the city’s eHealth record platform as early as next year, setting out which life-sustaining treatments they do not wish to receive when terminally ill, authorities have said. In a written reply to lawmakers on Wednesday, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han said the electronic service for advance medical directives, which currently exist in paper form only, would be rolled out “in phases”. He said that...

The decision by a global law institute to open its first overseas office in Hong Kong reflects the city’s importance as a forum for legal international exchange, bolstered by its common law system and close ties to mainland China, a former justice minister has said. Teresa Cheng Yeuk-wah, secretary general of the International Organisation for Mediation (IOMed) and a former secretary for justice, said on Wednesday that the opening of the regional office of the International Institute for the...

Hong Kong’s first luxury expo is more than a showcase, offering international brands opportunities to find partners and develop business, the city’s financial chief has said, while exhibitors noted that bringing different sectors under one roof can help them reach new customers. The inaugural Festival of Connoisseurs, organised by Informa Markets, is the first exhibition supported by the government’s HK$100 million (US$12.7 million) initiative to attract high-quality, large-scale international...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here Democrats won control of both chambers of the US Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections, dealing a heavy blow to President Donald Trump as voters vented frustration over rising costs and the Iran war. With Democrats set to take over Congress in January, they will have the power to block Trump’s agenda and investigate his administration. Under these conditions, the president is expected to face a far more constrained final two years in office, with...

Democrats won control of both houses of Congress in midterm elections as US voters punished President Donald Trump over inflation, corruption and rising healthcare costs. The party was on track for at least 54 Senate seats after upset wins in long-standing Republican strongholds including South Carolina, Texas and Kansas. In the House of Representatives, Democrats were set to pick up dozens of seats and gain a double-figure majority. A collapse in Trump’s approval ratings amid record petrol and...

A former vice-president of the Hong Kong stock exchange’s operator and his mother have been charged by the city’s corruption watchdog over allegedly accessing confidential information of listed companies, which yielded more than HK$500,000 (US$63,720) in investment profits. Geoffrey Tong Po-hang, 39, former vice-president of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), and his mother Leung Yiu-chun, 68, appeared in Eastern Court for mention on Wednesday afternoon. They jointly face one count of...

China is becoming increasingly important to the Gulf’s economic future. Yet the Gulf remains capable of disrupting China’s own. That is the contradiction exposed by the US-Iran war. Beijing’s importance as an energy customer, investor and technology partner has grown, but its ability to guarantee the maritime routes connecting the Middle East to East Asia remains limited. The next contest in global energy will concern not only who produces and consumes it, but who can preserve access when...

Taiwan expressed concern on Tuesday over more than 100 People’s Liberation Army naval vessels and mainland Chinese coastguard ships sailing across the western Pacific, including the Liaoning strike group conducting drills in the Philippine Sea. The maritime deployment overlapped with a sharp spike in PLA aerial activity near the island. Taiwan’s defence ministry reported 49 sorties of PLA aircraft in the 24 hours to 6am on Tuesday, marking the highest single-day total this year. The number...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here Chinese social media users have voiced mixed views on the US midterm elections, criticising American politics while debating the implications of President Donald Trump’s political future for China. Held on Tuesday, the midterm elections saw Democrats win control of both chambers of the US Congress, taking the House of Representatives and the Senate from the Republicans. Democrats reached the 218-seat threshold needed for a House majority and also secured...

Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has rolled out its latest flagship artificial intelligence model, Hy4, seeking to challenge top open-weight rivals with enhanced agentic capabilities built to power its enterprise software ecosystem. Released on Wednesday, the large language model (LLM) introduced visual understanding for the first time. Hy4 could process images, analyse complex charts and conduct visual mathematical reasoning, according to the Shenzhen-based company. Tencent said the release...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here Beijing has vowed to continue working with Washington towards a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” following the Democrats’ sweeping victory in the US midterm elections on Wednesday. But analysts said a Democratic-controlled US Congress would ramp up pressure on Beijing over Taiwan, artificial intelligence (AI) and export controls, though it might also eliminate uncertainties in negotiations. When asked by reporters about the results on...

Hong Kong authorities should waive related fines and introduce a penalty mechanism for the city’s parking meter operator after a four-hour outage disabled about half of all meters, an industry expert and a lawmaker have suggested. They also called for clearer refund terms for Octopus card users on Wednesday, a day after the government promised to issue refunds to affected drivers. A back-end glitch cut off communication with about 11,000 parking meters from 8.20am to 12.15pm on Tuesday. The...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here In what appears to be an early attempt to distance himself from the Democrats’ historic gains, US President Donald Trump has sought to shift attention away from his party’s performance in the midterm elections, taking to social media to remind voters that he “wasn’t on the ballot”. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Trump wrote as early results showed Democratic gains in places...

Hong Kong’s leader has begun a four-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai to deepen economic ties with mainland China, calling for closer collaboration on finance and innovation and technology (I&T), while pledging to help Chinese enterprises expand overseas. Speaking at the annual Beijing-Hong Kong Economic Cooperation Symposium in the capital on Wednesday, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said the Northern Metropolis project would create a new platform for the two cities to cooperate on research...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here After weeks of insults, fearmongering and eye-popping spending on advertising, Americans settled down to vote on Tuesday, unleashing a blue wave that saw Democrats projected to take the House and the Senate, in a sharp rebuke to US President Donald Trump and his controversial governing style. In a stunning development, Associated Press also projected that Democrat James Talarico won the Texas US Senate election, defeating Republican nominee Ken Paxton and...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here For years, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had little influence over the machinery of the Democratic Party. That is beginning to change. The organisation has more than doubled its membership since 2024, reaching roughly 120,000, while growing numbers of DSA-backed candidates are positioning to expand its presence in Congress from two members to as many as seven. The breakthrough came in New York, where Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the 2025 mayoral...

Record El Nino expected to affect China's winter climate

Tech adventure in Shenzhen: A visit to the city of tomorrow

Chinese Premier Li Qiang delivered a keynote speech on Tuesday at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Internet Conference (WIC) Wuzhen Summit.

The Tibetan Plateau, home to the world’s largest expanse of alpine permafrost, is warming at about twice the global average but, counter-intuitively,researchers have found that ice in parts of the Tibet autonomous region is actually thickening. A team from Peking University found that shallow ground ice has unexpectedly increased over the past 20 years, affecting more than a third of the plateau’s permafrost, a phenomenon driven largely by natural climate factors. The authors noted that the...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here The United States’ midterm elections are unlikely to deliver a “disruptive” shock to relations between Beijing and Washington despite potential volatility over the issue of Taiwan, according to a prominent mainland Chinese expert in US studies. Chen Dongxiao, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said any shift in the make-up of the US Congress would mainly complicate President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda. The impact on foreign...

For autonomous vehicles, the hardest lessons to learn are the ones that can test the skills of even the most experienced human drivers: an errant cyclist darting through a red light, or an animal bolting into oncoming traffic from behind a corner. The Chinese tech giant Baidu has developed a new AI-driven simulator to prepare its Apollo robotaxis for just such rare but high-stakes road hazards, as the firm looks to gain an edge in the fast-growing self-driving taxi market. The system, Apollo...

China is willing to work with all parties to do a good job in the final stage of the 2026 APEC "China Year" and contribute to the fruitful results at the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Tuesday.

After spending 12 gruelling hours battling the Tai Po inferno, frontline firefighter Ah Fai* could not have imagined that, barely a year later, his department would find itself under the harsh glare of public scrutiny. The trauma of that night is still raw. He remembers burning debris from the bamboo scaffolding raining down from above, blocking one of the main entrances of Wang Fuk Court. “Our colleagues simply had no chance of getting in,” he said. Those who eventually breached the towers were...

China is helping to train Solomon Islands police to use water cannons as part of an ongoing security partnership that is viewed with scepticism by the West. The Chinese embassy said on Tuesday that six officers from the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force took part in a week-long training exercise, without giving dates. The programme helped familiarise officers with the use of crowd control vehicles and different scenarios in which they may be used, the embassy said. The programme cultivated a...

Polls began closing across the United States on Tuesday evening in midterm elections that will decide whether US President Donald Trump’s Republicans keep control of Congress, after a day of voting disrupted by floods and machine glitches but largely free of the problems many had feared. The first polls closed at 6pm Eastern Time (7am Hong Kong time), with most states following over the next several hours. The last state to close polls will be Alaska, at 1am Eastern Time (2pm Hong Kong time)....