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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..

Trump says US has struck trade deal with Japan2 hours agoShareSavePeter Hoskins & Tom EspinerBusiness reporters, BBC NewsShareSaveWatch: 'I just signed the largest trade deal in history' says Trump on Japanese tariffsPresident Donald Trump says the US has agreed to a “massive” trade deal with Japan, one of the country's largest trading partners.
Japan has agreed to invest $550bn (£407bn) in the US while its goods sold to America would be taxed at 15% when they reach the country – below the 25% tariff Trump had threatened.
Trump said on social media that Japan would open its economy to US goods, including cars, trucks, rice and certain agricultural products.
Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba welcomed the announcement, saying it was “the lowest figure to date among countries with trade surpluses with the US”.
“I just signed the largest trade deal in history, I think maybe the largest deal in history with Japan,” Trump touted at a White House event on Tuesday eveni..

Protests in Ukraine as Zelensky signs bill targeting anti-corruption bodies4 hours agoShareSaveVitaly ShevchenkoRussia editor, BBC MonitoringShareSaveAnadolu via Getty ImagesProtesters gathered in Kyiv on Tuesday after a bill was passed targeting the country's anti-corruption bodiesPresident Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a bill that critics say weakens the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption bodies, sparking protests in several cities and drawing international criticism.
The new law grants the prosecutor general control of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu) and Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (Sap), and critics say it undermines their authority.
In an address on Wednesday, Zelensky said both agencies would still “work” but needed to be cleared of “Russian influence”.
After the bill passed, hundreds of people gathered in Kyiv for the biggest anti-government protest since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Demon..