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Now that the Chinese navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian, has entered service there could be a change in the power balance in the western Pacific, the South China Sea and even the Indian Ocean, according to experts. The Fujian – China’s third aircraft carrier – was commissioned last Wednesday in Sanya, Hainan province,…
This year the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN) inaugurated a naval task force fleet command at the Jeju Naval Base. With growing emphasis on intelligence gathering and missile defense capabilities, the strategically vital island of Jeju is a prime location for the ROKN’s task force command. Enhancing naval movements in the wider seas to protect…
US forces have killed six more people in strikes on alleged drug-running boats, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday, bringing the campaign’s total number of deaths – which critics describe as illegal executions – to 76. Hegseth, in a post on X, said the United States had carried out the strikes on Sunday…
China must hardwire long-term scientific endurance into its national strategy if it intends to shape the future of space discovery, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist has suggested. Reinhard Genzel, a German astrophysicist,was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of the Milky Way. Before that,…
A Paris court granted former French president Nicolas Sarkozy early release from jail on Monday, pending an appeal, just weeks after he started a five-year sentence for conspiring to raise campaign funds from Libya. The former conservative president, 70, was jailed on October 21 after a court found him guilty in September of criminal conspiracy…
As negotiators assemble in Belém, Brazil, for COP30, the global climate conversation stands at an inflection point. Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the pledges that once inspired optimism now face a sobering reality: Emissions continue to climb, the 1.5 °C target is slipping away and the promised climate finance remains more rhetorical than real….
Catch up on some of SCMP’s biggest China stories of the day. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. US-China rivalry will adapt, spread into other areas: Pascal Lamy “Bumpy” US-China relations will persist for decades as the rivalry shifts from trade to the weaponisation of strategic sectors…
When Typhoon Fung-wong roared towards Luzon this weekend, forecasts invoked grim memories of Haiyan, the 2013 superstorm that killed more than 6,000 people in the Philippines. In Metro Manila, residents braced for disaster. But by dawn on Monday, the capital woke instead to light rain and an uncanny calm. Once again, Luzon’s Sierra Madre mountains…
Two McDonald’s shops in Hong Kong have been sold to the same buyer for HK$183 million (US$23.5 million), marking the fast-food chain’s second and third sales this month as it proceeds with an asset-disposal plan amid an improving commercial property market. A 7,357 sq ft property in Mong Kok’s Good Hope Building was handed over…
Innovation never follows a script. It accelerates, stumbles and surprises. Two years ago, a leaked Google memo warned that open-source models would someday erode the moat that seemed to protect the proprietary LLM developers. For a while, the proprietary developers defied this prophecy as they raced ahead in capabilities and reputation. By now, the memo…
