Month: February 2026

The US and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Saturday morning, the Israeli Defence Ministry and US officials said. United States President Donald Trump confirmed the strikes in an eight-minute video posted to Truth Social, stating that Washington had begun “major combat operations”. He also called for Iranian people to take over their government when the strikes were over. “We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally … obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy. We’re going to…

Led by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s X-LANCE Lab – one of China’s top audiovisual and language processing research entities – the model is named Habibi, meaning “my dear” in Arabic. In presenting their findings, the research team spearheaded by Chen Yushen described the project in a paper as “the first open-source framework for unified-dialectal Arabic speech synthesis”. Advertisement “To the best of our knowledge, research on unified-dialectal Arabic TTS is absent, not to mention an open-source framework,” the authors said in the paper, “Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal…

Chinese scientists have used a cutting-edge gene-editing tool to correct a DNA mutation responsible for cognitive and behavioural problems – a move that could eventually lead to the development of new autism therapies. In lab tests, mice that had been engineered to have the mutation showed a striking change in their behaviour, such as the way they interacted with other mice, after being given an injection to introduce the edited genes. The Shanghai-based research team is looking for ways to treat Snijders Blok‑Campeau syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental condition. Advertisement The…

Until last year, Fidelity International’s most significant cornerstone commitments on the Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) market dated back to 2021, when Chinese short-video platform Kuaishou Technology raised US$5.4 billion and healthcare firm Medlive Technology completed a US$543.4 million listing. Then for the next four years, the asset manager went quiet. Late last year it returned to Chinese assets in force. It backed gold miner Zijin Gold International’s US$3.2 billion listing in September 2025, followed by crypto platform HashKey Group, snack retailer Busy Ming and pork giant Muyuan Foods.…

Ahead of China’s annual legislative meetings – typically a window into Beijing’s top-level policy agenda – this is the second entry in a series examining the complex economic recalibration driving China’s growth philosophy and its wide-ranging implications for local governments, financial investors and private enterprises. Beijing’s campaign to purge the bureaucracy of a growth-at-all-costs mindset has caught some local officials off guard, triggering a mix of confusion and contradictory messaging as provinces saddle up for their first policy meetings in the Year of the Horse. Many provincial leaders are playing…

WeRide, one of China’s big three robotaxi companies, has cut research and development (R&D) costs by “millions” of US dollars by using artificial intelligence to train its fleet in virtual worlds, its CEO said. While rivals had also developed AI models simulating the physical world, WeRide’s efforts stood out as it was using its world model Genesis to support its global expansion strategy, said Tony Han. “It’s the first real marriage between physical AI and generative AI,” Han told the South China Morning Post. Advertisement A major challenge for the…

Early in 2021, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw and held talks with both General Min Aung Hlaing, the chief of the armed forces, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of the civilian government. The meeting was a chance for China to voice support for Myanmar’s “national conditions” development path and signal China’s long-term pragmatic approach to ties with its southwestern neighbour, irrespective of who was in power. That strategy, however, came under strain just weeks later, as the military under Min Aung Hlaing…

If Caligula were the president of the United States, Taiwan’s leader William Lai Ching-te might still kowtow to him. By now, it seems pretty clear that US President Donald Trump has no real policies to speak of, only caprice and vague ideological preferences. That was how bad emperors acted, and Trump obviously sees himself as some kind of king, unrestrained by anything other than his personal inclinations. It’s not surprising there have been “No Kings” protests across the US. From his lifelong business habit, Trump is a taker and an…