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 race gave the movement its biggest...

Malaysian police have arrested a 25-year-old woman who allegedly caused a disturbance by assaulting visitors at a shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur, with the suspect admitting her involvement in the incident. Dang Wangi OCPD Assistant Commissioner Ahmad Azwan Amin Nordin said the local woman was arrested at about 5.40pm on Tuesday in Bandar Sri Damansara to assist in investigations. “Initial investigations found that the suspect admitted to being involved in the incident,” he said in a statement...

A woman from central China has moved many online after inviting her ex-mother-in-law to live with her following the deaths of her ex-husband and ex-father-in-law. Lin, from Henan province, recently flew more than 1,000km to Guangdong province in southern China to bring her ex-mother-in-law to live with her, despite having divorced her ex-husband 12 years ago. Lin made the decision after her ex-father-in-law died of an illness in 2024 and her ex-husband died last year. Lin’s ex-mother-in-law,...

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: High voter turnout as US midterm results test Trump’s grip on Congress 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 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...

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...

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...