Why AI race with US is a ‘knockout game’ China cannot afford to lose

China has been urged to break out of rigid bureaucratic metrics that stifle the creative breakthroughs needed to compete globally. Photo: Reuters

China must fundamentally overhaul its innovation ecosystem or risk losing technological sovereignty and national security in an existential AI “knockout game” with the US, a Chinese academic has warned.

China must also implement “unconventional” reforms in cultivating and funding AI talent, as well as shift foundational research from bureaucratic state universities to leading tech enterprises, Huang wrote in an online article published on Wednesday


Singaporean man hired to tutor children forced 6-year-old to drink urine in 18-hour abuse

A Singaporean man hired to tutor primary school pupils beat and starved them instead. Photo: Shutterstock

A Singaporean man, hired by his aunt to tutor primary school pupils, instead beat them with a clothes hanger, forced them to hold push-up positions for long periods, punched and starved them.

One of the children, a six-year-old Chinese national, was abused for 18 hours and forced to drink his own urine.

On Thursday, the 31-year-old pleaded guilty to two counts of child abuse,


Germany jails man 10 years for fatal attack on train conductor

The man had attacked the conductor after being found without a ticket, hitting the conductor so hard that he later died of brain haemorrhage

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Erdal Calar, father of the dead train attendant Serkan Calar, holds a picture of the victim in the courtroom of the Regional Court of Zweibruecken, western Germany last month. Photo: AFP

A German court on Thursday handed down a 10-year prison sentence to a 26-year-old man who fatally assaulted a train conductor during a ticket inspection in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate five months ago.

The court sitting in Zweibrücken found that


‘Token economy’ emerging as AI use soars in China, experts tell conference

Chinese tech industry experts say the rapidly increasing use of AI tokens is giving rise to a token-based economy, with the tiny units underpinning artificial intelligence services evolving beyond a technical metric and into the basis for delivering and pricing AI services.

“The [Chinese] digital economy has gone through the stages of the data economy and the computing economy. Today, the token economy is emerging,” Yin Hao, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said on Wednesday while delivering a keynote speech at the China Internet

Girl in Germany dies after family dog bites her

People at the scene had attempted to pull the Pit Bull Terrier off the girl, but failed to prevent her suffering serious injury

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Pit bull terrier. American pit bull terrier. A girl in Germant died after her family’s Pit Bull Terrier bit her while they were playing. Photo: Shutterstock

A four-year-old girl has died after being bitten by her family’s pet dog while playing, police and prosecutors in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt reported on Thursday.

The dog was described as an American Stafford, a breed commonly known as the Pit Bull


Indonesia’s Tokopedia denies mass lay-offs, but ‘restructuring’ deepens tech winter fears

Reports of sweeping lay-offs at Tokopedia, the Indonesian e-commerce giant majority-owned by China’s ByteDance, have renewed concerns about Southeast Asia’s largest digital economy as analysts warn the country’s tech winter shows few signs of easing.

The cuts have also raised questions over the future of one of Indonesia’s best-known home-grown digital champions, with analysts saying Tokopedia’s deeper integration into ByteDance’s ecosystem could shift more technology, product and strategic decisions outside the country.

A Gojek rider delivering a Tokopedia package to a customer in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: GoTo Group / AFP

Chinese paratrooper saves unconscious comrade in dramatic mid-air chute emergency

The two Chinese soldiers’ parachutes became intertwined and entangled during a training exercise on May 28. Photo: Handout

A Chinese paratrooper rescued an unconscious colleague after their parachutes became entangled in mid-air, the military’s official newspaper reported on Thursday.

First Lieutenant Wang Rui, a team leader in the unspecified brigade, was making his 16th-ever jump, at an altitude of 800 metres (2,600 feet).

Wang jumped from the transport aircraft but right before his parachute was to deploy, he was struck by

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8 Hong Kong teens arrested over taking cash from gang to splash paint on doors

A screenshot of a police broadcast shows evidence collected as part of the investigation. Photo: YouTube/HK Police Force

Eight teenagers have been arrested after allegedly being recruited via social media by a crime syndicate to splash paint on the doors of flats and businesses across Hong Kong to intimidate debtors.

The four boys and four girls were apprehended alongside a 24-year-old man on suspicion of criminal damage and conspiracy to commit criminal damage as part of a citywide police operation on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The force said on Thursday that a crime syndicate had used popular social


China child influencers slammed for ‘distorting values’ in staged online videos

A three-year-old girl is fed extensively by her parents leading her to weigh as much as 35kg from eating hearty meals in front of a camera as a live-streamer. A young boy and a girl of his age are presented as a couple and perform intimate exchanges onscreen. Another young boy is filmed eating live worms and snails.

These unsettling scenes are from viral videos featuring so-called online celebrity children, a group which emerged years ago but has triggered controversy in the meantime.

In early

Child live-streamers in China are rapidly expanding their online presence and creating a lucrative market for e-commerce sales. Photo: Shutterstock

Bonnie Tyler, singer of epic ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ dies at 75

Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983 and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75.

Tyler died “unexpectedly” in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said on Thursday in a statement on her website. She was hospitalised in May in Faro, where she had

Bonnie Tyler sings in Paris in 1984. Photo: AFP