About 60 per cent of Hong Kong’s first batch of dental graduates who underwent mandatory internship training have joined the city’s Department of Health, a move that has helped “significantly ease” the manpower crunch. The development followed a controversial amendment to the Dentists Registration Ordinance in 2024, requiring all dental graduates in Hong Kong to complete a 12-month internship before obtaining a full licence starting in 2025. The measure aimed to enhance hands-on clinical...

Chinese President Xi Jinping is heading to India for the first time since 2019 and finalising plans for a US trip as he works through his busiest month of international travel in years. Xi will attend the annual Brics summit in New Delhi over the weekend and meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa are among other leaders going to the event, which gathers some of the world’s biggest energy producers and users. The India trip gives Xi...

Turkey has unveiled plans to more than triple its defence spending over the next three years, driven by regional conflicts and a desire for a greater security footprint across Europe and the Middle East. Rather than ramping up its purchases from Western allies, Nato’s second-largest military power will direct most of its 229 per cent budget increase between 2027 and 2029 towards expanding domestic production. Announcing the plan on Sunday, Vice-President Cevdet Yilmaz said the aim was to ensure...

Battle-testing modern weapon systems can come at a steep price: a country must send its forces to war. But for China’s 4.5-generation J-10CE fighter aircraft, exports have opened another route. Pakistan provided the aircraft’s first major combat test during its four-day conflict with India in May 2025, when Islamabad’s J-10CEs were used in an air battle. Two US officials told Reuters that at least two Indian aircraft were downed, including a French-built Rafale – though the precise losses,...

The Hong Kong government will not cap the number of admissions under its talent schemes, with the labour minister saying “the more, the better” amid a global race for skilled workers, despite rising concerns over whether the city can absorb the influx. Wrapping up a five-day visit to Hong Kong by overseas innovation and technology specialists, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han said on Friday that no quota would be set for the two main categories of talent passes – one for...

On September 1, former Ukrainian defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced that Alex Karp, CEO of artificial intelligence and data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, would become the lead investor in a new defence technology company he is building. This confirmed what Fedorov had only gestured at two days earlier in an interview with the Financial Times: that what he was selling investors was never really drones. In that interview, he also suggested he was ready to trade drone-warfare...

A flurry of cybersecurity breaches, internal whistle-blowing, and declining visibility into model safety has sparked fresh alarm over the US artificial intelligence boom, igniting calls from some experts to slow down development – even as critics warn that deceleration risks surrendering America’s technological lead to China. The mounting concerns come just weeks before President Xi Jinping and US leader Donald Trump are set to meet for a high-stakes summit in Washington. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman...