Day: July 8, 2026

Nato and its Indo-Pacific partners have pledged to expand cooperation in defence industry and advanced technology as the transatlantic security alliance boosts its military build-up in the face of deepening Russia-China ties. Secretary General Mark Rutte on Tuesday met with top officials from the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) partner nations – Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea – on the sidelines of the Nato summit in Ankara. The talks featured South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and Defence Minister Shinjiro…

US President Donald Trump declared Wednesday that the ceasefire with Iran was “over”, delivering a blistering attack on Tehran just hours after the US launched fresh military strikes on the Islamic Republic. “I think it’s over,” Trump told reporters on the sidelines of the Nato summit in Ankara when asked whether the ceasefire was “done”. “I don’t want to deal with them any more.” More to follow … Advertisement South China Morning Post

As another heatwave rolled across Europe, the warehouses emptied before the politics could catch up. Air conditioners and fans sold out across Spain, Italy and Germany, most of them Chinese. Fan sales in Spain alone on the retail platform of Alibaba Group Holding (which owns the South China Morning Post) nearly doubled last month while Midea Group’s air-conditioner sales in western Europe surged by over 70 per cent in the first six months of the year. A decade from now, such heatwaves may become ordinary. Air-conditioning units in the European…

In a homecoming for Hong Kong’s artificial intelligence community, Cao Liangliang – former principal engineer and director at Google DeepMind, IEEE Fellow and architect of foundational AI systems at Google, Apple and IBM – has returned to the city after a two-decade absence. His appointment as Chair Professor of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) last week completes an intellectual boomerang trajectory that began under renowned mentor Tang Xiao’ou at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003. From Cao’s early work at Tang’s pioneering…

The island’s opposition-controlled legislature approved a reduced NT$780 billion (over US$24 billion) special defence budget in May, rejecting a larger NT$1.25 trillion package proposed by the government. Among the excluded projects was funding for the indigenous Chiang-Kong (Strong Bow) anti-ballistic missile system, a vital component of Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te’s proposed T-Dome missile shield meant to counter aerial threats from Beijing. After the programme was dropped, the military sought to revive it either through a supplementary budget this year or by incorporating it into the annual defence budget next…