A former Hong Kong politician and prominent democracy campaigner has accused British police of asking her to “self-censor” and “retreat from public life” after officers asked her to agree to avoid public gatherings. The request, outlined in a signed “memorandum of understanding” seen by the Guardian, has alarmed exiled dissidents who fear it may embolden attempts to silence criticism of Chinese and Hong Kong officials worldwide. Carmen Lau, who moved to the UK in 2021, was asked to sign the formal agreement in March by Thames Valley police after her…
Month: July 2025
31 die in Chinese nursing home as Beijing flood death toll rises to 44
The official death toll from storms in Beijing has risen to 44, with Chinese officials saying on Thursday that 31 people died in a flooded nursing home. Advertisement Beijing vice-mayor Xia Linmao said the nursing home was in the mountainous outlying district of Miyun, where 37 people in all have died in the storms over the past week. The home was built in 2021 in Taishitun township upstream of the Miyun Reservoir, and offers residential care for the severely disabled, orphaned, elderly and low-income residents. Miyun Communist Party boss Yu…
Taiwan recall: cross-strait crisis averted for now, but new uncertainty ahead
The spectacular collapse of Taiwan’s mass recall campaign against opposition lawmakers over the weekend has averted an immediate cross-strait crisis, according to analysts. Advertisement Yet the ripple effects are reverberating across the Pacific – casting fresh uncertainty over Taiwan’s defence ambitions, complicating its ties with the US, and recalibrating the island’s delicate political balance amid escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington. Saturday’s unprecedented recall vote, which targeted 24 opposition Kuomintang (KMT) lawmakers accused by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and allied civic groups of blocking key legislation and undermining…
More than 30 killed in nursing home hit by Beijing floods
Flooding killed 31 residents at a care home for elderly people on the outskirts of Beijing this week, local officials have said. Footage showed emergency teams wading through chest-high water trying to rescue those trapped in the home in the Miyun District. Many of those who died were reportedly immobile. Local officials have admitted there were “loopholes in emergency planning” and said the incident was a painful lesson that served as “a wake-up call”. A total of 44 people have died in the Beijing floods, which have come during a…
‘Extreme limits’: China-led mission discovers Earth’s deepest animal oasis
In the crushing darkness of the northwest Pacific Ocean, a China-led deep-sea expedition has pulled back the curtain on the deepest live habitat ever known to exist: thriving colonies of tubeworms and molluscs. Advertisement The improbable hidden oasis of life – in numbing waters up to 9,500 metres (31,150 feet) deep – synthesises energy by feasting on chemicals such as hydrogen sulphide and methane that seep out of faults in the tectonic plate. The remarkable creatures have bypassed the need for sunlight. Instead of photosynthesis, they obtain energy from chemical…
Anger grows in China over reports of online groups sharing explicit photos of women
Anger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, which shared photographs of women, including sexually explicit ones, taken without their consent. The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called “MaskPark tree hole forum”. It said it had more than 100,000 members and was “comprised entirely of Chinese men”. Men reportedly shared sexually explicit images of women either in intimate settings…
China’s Tokyo embassy sounds alarm after 2 citizens attacked in Japan
The Chinese embassy in Tokyo has issued a security alert after two Chinese nationals were wounded in an attack in the Japanese capital on Thursday. Advertisement Four unidentified men armed with iron pipes attacked two Chinese men as they were walking in Tokyo’s Kanda district at around 9am, according to Japanese media reports. The two victims sustained head wounds but their condition was not life-threatening. Police were searching for the attackers, who were believed to be in their 20s and reportedly not known to the Chinese men before the incident.…
Chinese official makes rare admission of failings over deadly Beijing floods
A Beijing city official has issued a rare public acknowledgment of official failings in the authorities’ response to the severe flooding that hit China’s capital this week. Yu Weiguo, a Communist party secretary for Miyun, the northern district worst affected by this week’s extreme weather, said in a press conference on Thursday that there were “gaps” in the city’s readiness for the deadly floods. More than 40 people are confirmed to have died in the flooding that hit Miyun and Yanqing, another Beijing district, on Sunday and Monday. Nine are…
US-China trade talks signal shift that could reshape global order: analysts
As the dust settles on the latest round of US-China trade talks in Stockholm this week, the world’s two biggest economies may be shifting towards “indirect forms of negotiation” by strengthening partnerships with third countries that could reshape the global economic order, analysts said. Advertisement The talks concluded on Tuesday with Beijing announcing that both sides had agreed to extend their “tariff truce” by another 90 days. On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said the two countries had reached a “fair” deal on trade, without providing further details. No breakthroughs…
DeepSeek founder shares best paper award at top global AI research conference
A research paper co-authored by Liang Wenfeng, founder of Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek, was honoured with the best paper award at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference in Vienna, Austria, widely recognised as the premier global conference for AI researchers. Advertisement The paper, titled “Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention,” was published on February 27, with Liang listed as one of 15 authors. The “native sparse attention” mechanism is a core improvement that underpins the high efficiency and low-cost performance of DeepSeek’s AI models. The…