The crypto-art craze sweeps into Beijing as curators open one of the world's first exhibitions dedicated to blockchain art featuring coveted 'NFTs' or 'non-fungible tokens'.
At least four people were killed and a dozen others wounded when a bomb exploded at a top hotel hosting the Chinese ambassador in southwestern Pakistan, officials said late Wednesday.
Ten “recovered” workers living in Westlite Woodlands Dormitory were found to be infected with COVID-19, the Ministry of Manpower said late Wednesday (21 April).
Sri Lankan authorities on Wednesday expelled an Antigua-registered ship that entered the island's territory without declaring a radioactive cargo bound for China.
A man who tried to force a sexual act on his seven-year-old stepdaughter was sentenced to eight years and six months' jail and 12 strokes of the cane on Wednesday (21 April).
Joe Biden's emotional voice on the call to George Floyd's family told the story of his presidency: "I wish I were there just to put my arms around you."
Thousands of protesters massed outside German parliament on Wednesday as lawmakers prepared to vote on a law amendment giving Angela Merkel's government power to impose tougher measures to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
Tesla said sorry and back-pedalled on its “no compromise” attitude towards what it called “unreasonable” customer grievance, as it succumbed to pressure on social media by some of its most important buyers and local authorities in the world’s largest market for electric vehicles. The apology, issued late on Tuesday night, came a day after a protest at the Shanghai Auto Show, where a woman wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “brake malfunction” and a Tesla logo jumped on top of the carmaker’s vehicle. She was eventually dragged away by security guards. “We are deeply sorry for the delay in resolving the owner’s issue,” Tesla said on its official account on the Weibo microblog site. “We always try our best to actively communicate with our [customers], look for solutions and we will fulfil our responsibility.”Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. The about-turn in Tesla’s public relations management underscores the importance of China’s market to the carmaker’s sales, and its stock price. Tesla delivered a record 184,800 vehicles worldwide in the first quarter, buoyed by rising demand in China, where the carmaker sold 68,982 vehicles, or 37.3 per cent of global deliveries in the same period. “Users’ complaints about the quality of its Chinese-made cars are sounding an alarm at Tesla,” said Eric Han, a senior manager with the business advisory firm Shanghai Suolei. “It is not enough to knock down Tesla’s sales, but it does damage its image.” For now, Tesla remains the runaway winner in delivering premium electric vehicles in China, priced more than 300,000 yuan (US$46,160) in the mainland’s premium EV segment. Gigafactory 3 delivered 35,478 vehicles in March, more than double the 17,259 electric cars delivered by Tesla’s three New York-listed Chinese competitors NIO, Xpeng and Li Auto. Monday’s protest at the premier trade show of the world’s largest vehicle market was not Tesla’s first run-in against Chinese public opinion. The carmaker was named last December by the online technology media PingWest, which cited unnamed former and current employees in describing its US$2 billion factory a “Giga-sweatshop,” along with claims that Tesla had used substandard components in its locally assembled Model 3 vehicles. Tesla denied the accusations and said it would sue PingWest. Tesla’s executives were hauled before five ministry-level authorities in February, and grilled about the quality of its Shanghai-made Model 3s. The carmaker, which delivered 140,000 Model 3s last year, pledged to “make rectifications,” according to media reports. In the same month, Tesla apologised to China’s State Grid – the state-owned utility – for “misleading consumers” in a war of words over what damaged the inverters on a batch of Model 3 vehicles. Another Chinese Tesla challenger? Geely launches its first electric car Monday’s protest stunt at the Shanghai Auto Show quickly snowballed, as video clips of the yelling woman on the roof of a Model 3 quickly went viral. It did not take long for China’s state media to weigh in on Tesla, after the carmaker maintained on Monday that it would “not compromise” on “unreasonable” customer complaints. “Who gave Tesla the courage to not compromise?” asked a headline on an article published on Tuesday morning by Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government’s mouthpiece media. Changanjian, the social media account operated by China’s top law enforcement agency, the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, beseeched Tesla to “respect Chinese consumers and comply with local laws and regulations.” “Where is Tesla’s responsibility, if the pioneering carmaker cannot provide safe products and cannot provide solutions to users when issues emerge?” according to the blog. Tesla Shanghai’s vice-president Tao Lin, who heads the carmaker’s communications and government affairs, was absent at an April 21 panel discussion about supply chains at the 2021 Boao Forum for Asia conference in Hainan, in which she was originally scheduled to speak. In its response, Tesla said it “respects and firmly complies with decisions of the relevant government departments, respects consumers, abides by laws and regulations, and actively cooperates with all investigations by government authorities,” according to the carmaker’s statement. “Tesla, as always, is grateful for the trust and tolerance given by our consumers, netizens and media friends, and listens attentively to suggestions as well as criticisms.” Additional reporting from Orange Wang at the 2021 Boao Forum for Asia in HainanMore from South China Morning Post:Tesla protest at Shanghai Auto Show 2021 ends with woman dragged off by security after climbing onto car and shoutingTesla drops lawsuit against former engineer, ending theft allegations that dragged in Chinese competitor XpengChinese Tesla rival NIO targets Europe with its smart EVs as it takes a first step towards going globalTesla, recharge: can China’s EV brands dethrone Elon Musk? Start-ups Li Auto, Nio and Xpeng are going global with cheaper electric cars for allTesla’s Chinese rival Xpeng ups the self-driving game with world’s first mass-produced LiDAR in P5 sedan, defying Elon MuskThis article Tesla says sorry to Chinese buyers in U-turn to its ‘no compromise’ on ‘unreasonable’ customer grievances as pressure mounts on social media and state press first appeared on South China Morning PostFor the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021.
Taiwan’s High Court has sentenced three men to longer jail terms of six to eight months for attacking Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee with red paint a year ago. Cheng Chi-lung, 52, and brothers Tseng Shih-cheng, 34, and Tseng Shih-feng, 28, all from the southern city of Kaohsiung, were found guilty of assaulting and insulting Lam and damaging his belongings by throwing paint at him in the Taipei attack. On Tuesday, they were sentenced to eight, six and seven months’ jail, respectively. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Lam, 65, had appealed jail terms of three to four months that could be converted to fines, handed down by the Taipei District Court in November, saying the sentences were too lenient and would not deter others from carrying out similar attacks on Hong Kong pro-democracy activists. Lam was one of five Hong Kong booksellers detained in 2015 for selling books about China’s leaders that had been banned on the mainland, and later said he had been abducted by Chinese agents. He moved to Taiwan in April 2019, soon after legislation was proposed in Hong Kong that would have allowed extradition to mainland China – a bill that sparked mass protests in the city and was later withdrawn. He was preparing to open a new bookshop in Taipei when the attack took place nearby on April 21 last year. “Cheng was unhappy with Lam, who used to manage Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong, over his advocacy of Hong Kong democracy and human rights,” Judge Liu Fang-tzu told the court on Tuesday. After hearing that Lam planned to open a new bookshop in Taipei with the same name to promote that cause, Cheng had asked the Tseng brothers to join him in Taipei on April 20 to carry out the attack the next day, the judge said. When they saw Lam on the terrace of a coffee shop near his new bookshop the next morning, Cheng directed Tseng Shih-feng to throw paint at him while Tseng Shih-cheng took photos of the incident, she said. The three men returned to Kaohsiung where they were arrested the next day. Speaking after the verdict on Tuesday, Lam said he was satisfied with the heavier sentences and that the jail terms would “discourage others from doing similar things to hurt people with different opinions”. Lam said he believed he was a target for pro-Beijing activists in Taiwan, and that even after a year he feared being attacked again because of his pro-democracy views.More from South China Morning Post:How documentaries portray the 2019 Hong Kong protests, with echoes of The Hunger Games and V for VendettaBeijing hits back at Western criticism of Hong Kong court’s hefty sentences for Jimmy Lai, opposition figuresDetained Hong Kong bookseller gets back to business in TaiwanThis article Taiwanese men who attacked Hong Kong bookseller get longer jail terms after appeal first appeared on South China Morning PostFor the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021.
Singapore prosecutors on Tuesday filed five additional charges against businessman Ng Yu Zhi in relation to a scheme that allegedly raised at least S$1 billion ($746 million) from investors to fund bogus nickel trades. The alleged fraud, which would be one of the city-state's biggest, follows a string of scandals involving Singapore trading firms that have shaken investor and banker confidence in the sector over the last year when some commodities, including nickel, have rallied strongly. The new charges of cheating against Ng were read out in Singapore's State Court.
It’s been a year since migrant workers in Singapore were confined to dormitories to prevent an outbreak of COVID-19 in their ranks from spreading. As vaccines roll out, workers living in dormitories want restrictions to end.
Australia on Wednesday announced it would revoke a state government's deal to join China's Belt and Road Initiative, saying it was inconsistent with the nation's foreign policy.
A Mrs World winner facing criminal charges after an on-stage fracas at a Sri Lankan beauty pageant has relinquished her title, organisers said Wednesday.
Online brokerage platform Futu Holdings has launched a follow-on sale of new shares on Nasdaq to raise about US$1.9 billion, according to a person familiar with the transaction, as it seeks new funding to expand its margin financing business amid cutthroat competition. It is the Shenzhen-based firm second fundraising in the US equity market in eight months, after Futu raised about US$314 million in August last year, hot on the heels of its US$90 million initial public offering in March 2019. Year-to-date, Futu’s share price has more than quadrupled, rising 16.3 per cent on Monday to US$177.92 in New York. The brokerage, whose name means “path to wealth” in Chinese, offers online trading service of Hong Kong, Chinese and US stocks. It is selling 9.5 million American depositary shares, with an overallotment option to offer another to 1.43 million shares to meet strong investors demand. The final offer price will be determined on Wednesday.Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Bank of America and Haitong International are joint bookrunners of the deal. They were not immediately available for comment. “The COVID-19 pandemic has further transformed the industry landscape and created new opportunities for online brokers amid lockdown and other restrictive measures,” Futu said in its filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday. “A growing number of investors have moved from offline channels to online platforms for trading activities.” Futu’s 2020 profit jumped nine-fold to 1.18 billion yuan (US$181.7 million), boosted by four consecutive quarters where its net income at least tripled, according to the company’s financial results under general accounting standards. It reported 1.4 million registered clients as of December, of which about a third were paying customers. Operated under the brand name “Futu NiuNiu,” or “bullish path to wealth” in a nod to its bull mascot, Futu said it is focused on servicing younger traders, with the average age of its clients at 36 years. The broker’s largest investor, with a 30.2 per cent stake, is Tencent Holdings, China’s dominant operator of social media and the world’s biggest games publisher. Hong Kong ranked second in the global IPO market in the first quarter after Nasdaq, recording 32 new listing and raising an all-time high HK$132.8 billion in proceeds for new issuers. In January, the exchange helped China’s short-video platform, Kuaishou Technology, raised US$5.4 billion as the world’s biggest IPO during the first quarter. Hong Kong was the world’s largest IPO market in seven of the past 12 years, according to data from the Hong Kong stock exchange. Banks and brokerages jostled to win a piece of IPO margin financing business, and interest rate for mega deals could often drop to below 1 per cent per annum. But that did not benefit smaller brokers, as they are finding it increasingly difficult to survive as revenue from commission get squeezed and those without deep pockets could ill afford to invest in technology to attract business from younger retail traders placing orders via mobile devices. The aggregate market share for small brokers in Hong Kong dropped to 7.1 per cent in June 2020, from 39.8 per cent in 1999, Futu said, citing data from the city’s bourse. “Big players have been taking away market shares from small brokers over time, in line with trend of the industry consolidation observed elsewhere in the world,” Futu said in its filing.More from South China Morning Post:Tencent-backed online brokerage Futu looks to cash in on Hong Kong IPO boom with plans to expand margin financingChinese online car-selling platform Autohome targets US$984 million in Hong Kong secondary listingTencent-backed online brokerage Futu taps Hong Kong IPO frenzy to lure paying usersFutu, Tiger Brokers land in ‘nerds vs Wall Street’ battle as social media users take on hedge funds over shares of GameStop, AMCHong Kong brokerage Bright Smart bets on online trading apps, with eye on mainland Chinese clientsThis article Futu aims to raise US$1.9 billion in follow-on stock sale in New York as Tencent-backed broker taps investors’ penchant for punting on IPOs first appeared on South China Morning PostFor the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021.
Surfers in the coastal Australian town of Byron Bay staged a "paddle out" protest Tuesday as locals rally against a planned Netflix reality show some say could attract hordes of "vacuous" Instagram tourists to their beachside paradise.
The Ministry of Health (MOH) confirmed 14 new COVID-19 cases in Singapore on Tuesday (20 April) including one new case of locally transmitted infection, taking the country's total case count to 60,865.
China will work with Indonesia to try to close the “vaccination divide” as the Southeast Asian country grapples with delays in shipments of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine. During a phone call on Tuesday with Indonesian President Joko Widodo, Chinese President Xi Jinping said China would help Indonesia to build a regional vaccine production centre while also continuing to vaccinate its own citizens. “China and Indonesia both highly prioritise public safety and health, and reject ‘vaccine nationalism’,” a Chinese foreign ministry statement quoted Xi as saying.Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Widodo has described vaccine access as a test of international cooperation. Indonesia has the highest number of Covid-19 cases in Southeast Asia and turned to China and the United States after a surge in cases in India resulted in delays in Indian-made AstraZeneca jabs distributed through the WHO-led Covax facility. China has shipped Indonesia enough raw materials to make 47 million doses of the Chinese-developed Sinovac vaccine. Indonesia also expects to receive more than 20.2 million doses from Chinese state firm Sinopharm and US company Moderna in the coming months. Indonesian Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said over the weekend that 22 million doses had been distributed so far in the country, the most populous in the region. Also on Tuesday, Xi and Widodo called for more progress on infrastructure projects under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, including on the US$6 billion Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway extension on the Indonesian island of Java. The China-financed railway was expected to be operational by early next year, but has reportedly been delayed by two years, in part because of the pandemic. Indonesian companies building the railway asked for a bigger stake in the project, after costs were set to increase by 20 per cent, Reuters reported. Belt and road projects have come under intense scrutiny, with critics saying the huge sums involved risk snaring developing countries in a “debt trap”, charges that China rejects. China’s leading planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, has also warned of major threats to belt and road projects amid the fallout from Covid-19, rising political risk in member countries and the China-US rivalryMore from South China Morning Post:Coronavirus: India to fast track vaccine approvals; Indonesia satisfied with SinovacIndonesia deploys helicopters in search for survivors after cyclone Seroja wreaks havocCoronavirus: Indonesia approves AstraZeneca vaccine; Mumbai sees record daily casesThis article China to help coronavirus-hit Indonesia close vaccine divide first appeared on South China Morning PostFor the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021.
The Czech government on Wednesday warned Moscow it might expel more Russian diplomats unless the 20 Czech nationals ejected from Russia were allowed to return to work within a day.
At least 49 passengers on a flight from New Delhi to Hong Kong have tested positive for coronavirus, authorities said, as the financial hub introduced an emergency ban on all flights from India in a crackdown over a new wave of cases.All of the passengers who tested positive flew into Hong Kong on a flight run by Indian operator Vistara on April 4.
The Arab League, United Nations, European Union and the African Union on Tuesday demanded an immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces from Libya.
Global smartphone sales snapped back in the first quarter of the year to show the strongest growth since 2015, a market tracker said Tuesday.
