Day: March 6, 2026

Taiwan’s legislature has agreed to begin reviewing a long-stalled special defence budget, but competing opposition proposals are set to complicate passage of the government’s NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) plan despite mounting pressure from the United States. Lawmakers began scrutinising the bill on Friday, as three rival proposals from the island’s main political parties exposed deep divisions over how much Taiwan should spend on defence and what mix of foreign weapons and home-grown capabilities it should prioritise. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government has proposed an eight-year programme from 2026 to…

The team proposed Pointer-CAD, a framework built on Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen 2.5 model, which helps designers select edges or faces of a 3D object, increasing the accuracy and efficiency in computer-aided design (CAD), a tool widely used in engineering, manufacturing and architecture. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The new method could “effectively support the generation of complex geometric structures and reduce segmentation error to an extremely low level” compared with existing technology, according to a paper published on Wednesday on open-access repository arXiv. Advertisement The authors –…

00:00 00:00 1.00x South China Morning Post

00:00 00:00 1.00x South China Morning Post

The prime ministers of South Korea and Singapore will be among the world leaders attending this month’s Boao Forum for Asia, three sources said, adding to a growing string of leaders from developed economies who have visited China this year. The annual conference is scheduled to be held in Boao, Hainan province, from March 24 to 27, its organiser announced earlier. Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong Shyun Tsai’s most recent trip to China was in June, when he met President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang and attended the Annual…

My grandma, now in her 90s, has long held together an extended family including four children and six grandchildren. As a Chinese saying goes, “Having an elder in the family is like having a treasure.” While my aunt, father and two uncles all live near her in the same city in northern China, my generation has ventured out to different places. Yet no matter where we have settled, no trip home is complete without a visit to Grandma. When I first moved to Beijing, I had to travel about five…

Beijing has pledged to expand imports and use its vast market to help other countries boost exports to the world’s second-largest economy – a move that could help balance global trade at a time when China’s export machine faces growing scrutiny. Beijing also planned to diversify markets and nurture new trade drivers such as artificial intelligence, seeking to stabilise trade as global supply chains come under mounting pressure from geopolitical conflicts, officials said. Commerce Minister Wang Wentao, commenting on China’s record US$1.19 trillion trade surplus last year that unsettled trading…