Southeast Asian leaders have long insisted they will not be forced to pick sides in the great-power rivalry between the US and China. But their posture is about to be further tested. This time, the battleground is AI. While Washington wants the region locked into Pax Silica – its bid to build a China-free artificial intelligence supply chain – Beijing wants its neighbours to join China’s own World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (Waico). Sources told the South China Morning Post...

A man armed with a sword injured several people at a Swedish high school on Friday and one person was later detained, local authorities said, triggering a massive response from emergency services. The incident occurred on Friday afternoon at the ‌Brinell high school, which has some 450 students aged 16 to 20, in the town of Fagersta in central Sweden. “We received an alarm at 2.06pm about suspected deadly violence and sent all available resources to the school,” a police spokesperson said. The...

A former assistant warden at a residential home for the intellectually disabled in Hong Kong has been accused of raping a resident multiple times two years ago. Chung Pui-kei has been charged with five counts of rape of a mentally incapacitated woman who lived at a home in Tai Po linked to the Hong Chi Association, an NGO, between July and August 2024. Prosecutor Human Lam Hiu-man outlined the five alleged incidents at the High Court on Friday and called a psychiatrist and a clinical...

Tesla has issued the largest-ever product recall in mainland China’s electric vehicle (EV) market, as Elon Musk’s firm pledges to fix a door-handle issue affecting nearly 3 million cars. The massive recall comes as Chinese regulators move to ban retractable car door handles over safety fears, after a fatal incident last year in which a driver was left trapped inside a burning vehicle as passers-by were unable to open the car doors. While Tesla is not the only company affected by the move, the US...

A US artificial intelligence start-up backed by OpenAI has built its first in-house model on Chinese lab Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, highlighting a growing shift by Western tech firms towards Chinese open-weight systems amid soaring development costs. San Francisco-based legal tech provider Harvey, whose high-profile backers also include Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, said on Thursday that its new model, Harvey Tenet, was post-trained on top of the open-weight Kimi K3 base. The company said...

Midway through a three-month negotiating period with Beijing, new data shows the trade balances of 24 European Union member states are still moving in what Brussels considers to be the wrong direction. China extended its trade surplus over all but three EU members in July compared to a year earlier, calculations based on new Chinese customs figures showed. In some instances, the monthly swing was dramatic. China’s surplus with Sweden quadrupled, while for Malta it rose by 166.6 per cent. For...

Prince Harry, Elton John ⁠and other high-profile claimants face paying ⁠millions of dollars out of their own pockets to cover the legal costs of the Daily Mail’s publisher after a judge ruled their failed privacy lawsuits were conducted in an unreasonable way. Judge Matthew Nicklin’s judgment on costs, ‌which was published on Friday, also ordered an interim payment from the claimants of £9.54 million (US$13 million), due by August 28, towards the legal costs of Associated Newspapers. Last month,...