Stock markets rally in early trading after U.S. midterm election

The incoming US Congress is set to include a record six lawmakers of Chinese descent after Democrat Richard Pan won a California House race. Pan defeated incumbent Kevin Kiley in California’s 6th Congressional District by 15 percentage points, according to the latest results on Wednesday morning, adding another Chinese-American member to the House when the 120th Congress convenes in January. “I’m proud to be part of the growing Asian-American representation in Congress,” Pan said in a statement...

The Yale professor moved climate change into mainstream economic analysis.

The Democratic Party’s sweeping midterm election victory and takeover of both houses of Congress could slow down the pace of artificial intelligence development in the US, with implications for both the global AI trade and the technology rivalry between Washington and Beijing, analysts said. The assessment comes as concerns about AI and the data centres that power it proved to be a contributing factor in the backlash against the Republican Party and US President Donald Trump, a vocal supporter...

The world woke up on Wednesday morning to control of the U.S. Congress shifting to Democrats in a clear rejection of President Donald Trump's turbulent second term.

In the weeks leading up to the midterm elections, US President Donald Trump displayed unwavering confidence in his star power, urging supporters to close their eyes and “pretend I’m on the ballot”. But Tuesday night’s disastrous results for the Republicans – the first time in 20 years both houses of Congress have changed hands at the same time – have punctured the aura of invincibility that once shielded Trump and allowed him to keep potential critics in line with the threat that opposing him...

Follow the SCMP’s live coverage here After almost two years in which the transatlantic alliance verged on collapse, a Democratic landslide in the US midterm elections was welcomed in Europe on Wednesday, even if few believed it would be a panacea for ailing ties. The Democratic Party swept both chambers of the US Congress in a crushing rebuke of US President Donald Trump’s two-year record. For Europe, that period has led to a shattering of the post-war order and deep schisms in the Western...

A world-first Australian study has upended a decades-long approach to diagnosing and managing peanut allergies, allowing many babies to be cleared of the condition.

With just a fortnight until the Apec summit in Shenzhen, preparations are reportedly under way for the first meeting between the leaders of China, Russia and the United States. If the talks go ahead, they could bolster Beijing’s diplomatic standing, although the different priorities of each power were likely to limit consensus and yield few, if any, concrete concessions, observers said. Officials from Beijing, Moscow, and Washington had been holding serious talks to arrange the first trilateral...

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Hong Kong’s strong performance in a leading regional university league table – with five institutions among Asia’s top 10 – is the result of sustained government investment and clear policy direction, the city’s No 2 official has said, as a global alliance of 23 universities eyes the Northern Metropolis for collaboration opportunities. Addressing leaders from more than 50 top universities across five continents at the World Class University Presidents Forum on Wednesday, Chief Secretary Eric...

DeepSeek is committed to open-source artificial intelligence to accelerate the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), even if it heightens safety risks, a company engineer says, defying growing safety concerns from the US and scrutiny in China over whether the strategy poses national security risks. Speaking on Tuesday on an AI panel at the World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, DeepSeek engineer Gao Xi said open-source development promoted shared innovations and technical...