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AdvertisementTibetChinaDiplomacyCould China’s Tibet mega dam help boost its sway with South Asian neighbours?Using the dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo to share electricity could carry ‘significant strategic value’ for Beijing, analysts say
Reading Time:3 minutesWhy you can trust SCMPVanessa Caiin Shanghai,Sylvie Zhuangin BeijingandMeredith Chenin Hong KongPublished: 6:00am, 24 Jul 2025China’s latest mega dam on the Tibetan Plateau could help draw neighbouring countries closer into its economic orbit by supplying electricity and boosting growth, analysts have argued.AdvertisementAccording to some estimates, the dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo will be the world’s biggest, producing up to 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, three times the output of the Three Gorges Dam.
State news agency Xinhua said over the weekend that its output would “primarily deliver electricity for external consumption” but would also meet local demand in Tibet.
But the project has drawn concerns about the ..

AdvertisementUnited StatesUSEconomy, Trade & BusinessTrump administration issues plan to limit AI exports to ChinaMove comes amid hawks’ concerns that US chips could help Chinese AI, military development
Reading Time:3 minutesWhy you can trust SCMP1Bochen Hanin WashingtonPublished: 5:31am, 24 Jul 2025Updated: 5:38am, 24 Jul 2025The White House on Wednesday released proposals to restrict exports of American AI equipment and limit the spread of Chinese AI models as part of a sweeping plan to shape the rules governing the fast-moving technology.
AdvertisementThe 28-page AI Action Plan marks US President Donald Trump’s administration’s first comprehensive strategy on the topic and comes as national security hawks have raised concerns that superior American chips may reach China – including through third countries – and advance its AI and military development.Under the plan, the US Commerce Department will lead an effort to develop new export controls on chipmaking subsystems to close “loop..

Known for its bright red color and wooden interior, the vintage lorry carried stories, songs, and goods across Saudi Arabia’s rugged landscapes/ Image: SPA TL;DRFrom the 1940s to 1970s, red vintage trucks were the backbone of transport across Saudi Arabia.These trucks moved people, goods, and culture, connecting isolated villages to growing cities.Though no longer in use, their legacy lives on in stories, memories, and even modern truck manufacturing in Saudi.In Saudi Arabia, from the 1940s through the 1970s, vintage red trucks, mostly American-made, often Fords, became essential for getting people and goods across long stretches of desert. Known locally as a “lorry,” the truck wasn’t just transport. It was a lifeline.Families used it to reach cities. Pilgrims used it to reach holy sites. Merchants relied on it to bring goods, like dates, spices, and livestock, to local markets. In a time when camels were still common, the red lorry offered something new: comfort, speed, and a sense of..

With zero natural rivers or lakes, Kuwait depends almost entirely on seawater desalination to meet its water needs/Image: Renderhub TL;DR:Kuwait is one of the only countries in the world without a single natural lake or river.
The country relies heavily on desalination plants and imports to meet its freshwater needs.
Despite geographic limitations, Kuwait has built one of the world’s largest per-capita water systems.
Kuwait’s shimmering skyline and bustling urban centres sit on a desert landscape with one defining characteristic: the total absence of natural freshwater bodies. It has no rivers, no lakes, and no perennial streams. In fact, the country holds the rare distinction of being among the very few globally with zero internal renewable freshwater resources. So, how does a modern nation keep its taps running, crops growing, and population hydrated in such an arid setting?No Rivers, No Problem:According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Kuwait has no..

AdvertisementMalaysiaThis Week in AsiaPeopleMalaysian security guard counts cost of viral knockout by MMA coach: ‘I was embarrassed’Security guard Muhammad Alim Muhamad Adnizam says he is thankful not to lose his job after challenging MMA coach Tony Lim to a fight
Reading Time:3 minutesWhy you can trust SCMPSCMP’s Asia deskPublished: 6:55pm, 23 Jul 2025A security guard in a block of flats in Malaysia thought he had the upper hand when he challenged a resident smaller than him, not realising the man he had picked on was a mixed martial arts (MMA) coach.AdvertisementNot only did Muhammad Alim Muhamad Adnizam, 24, end up having to get stitches, he had to watch his embarrassing knockout go viral. In addition, he was reassigned to another building and counted himself lucky he did not lose his job, the New Straits Times newspaper reported on Tuesday.
In the video of the street brawl on July 10, Alim can be seen aggressively provoking another man, later identified as 22-year-old amateur MMA f..

AdvertisementArtificial intelligenceTechTech TrendsAlibaba unleashes Qwen3 coding model for developers to push AI agent adoptionIn new benchmark tests, Alibaba’s Qwen3-Coder outperformed rival models from Moonshot AI and DeepSeek
Reading Time:2 minutesWhy you can trust SCMPWency Chenin ShanghaiPublished: 6:30pm, 23 Jul 2025Alibaba Group Holding is looking to ratchet up the high-performance development of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, with Wednesday’s release of a new open-source coder under its Qwen3 family of models.AdvertisementTouted as the company’s “most advanced agentic AI coding model to date”, the Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct – built on a so-called Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture – features a total of 480 billion parameters, 35 billion of which are active, and supports a 256,000-token context window, expandable to 1 million tokens through extrapolation methods.
In a blog entry on developer platform GitHub, the Qwen team of Alibaba Cloud – the AI and cloud computi..