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On August 20, Alibaba Qwen released Qwen-UI-Agent, a GUI agent foundation model for real devices covering phones, desktops, web, and deep search. Trained and evaluated on real hardware, it reads screens and mimics clicks, input, and swipes, scoring 82.1% on MobileWorld, 79.5% on OSWorld-Verified, and top in browser Web
Open-source developers have a new benchmark of their own: Qwen3.8-27B. Released August 14, it passed a million downloads in two days, hit Hugging Face's global trend list, and earned 52 on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, an interval shared with GPT-5.6 Luna and DeepSeek V4 Flash. Nicknamed 'local Opus 4.6', it
Xiaohongshu released a large model overseas, the dots3-note preview, a MoE model with 280B total and 16B activated parameters, 512K context, and text, vision, and voice understanding. Released under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face and GitHub with Huawei Ascend adapting on day zero, it signals that the platform with over 300
Research suggests more than half of electronic product failures stem from thermal failures caused by rising chip junction temperature. As transistor density climbs, power density and heat grow, making package thermal design a key bottleneck. Huatian Technology has built a full-process thermal design and simulation capa
During the World Robot Conference, a new member of the Tiangong robot family made its debut: Tiangong Omni, a lightweight humanoid just 1.35 meters tall and weighing 39 kilograms. Its slim body suits narrow-space operations, emergency rescue, and home service, and at the show it demonstrated a smooth crawling advance.
The official death toll from Typhoon Maysak’s devastating floods in southern China jumped from 39 to 159 on Friday, as authorities updated the figures for the first time in six weeks. According to media briefings held in Nanning and Guigang in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, 10 people remained missing and the disaste
The following is issued on behalf of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority: Exchange Fund Notes tender results ********************************** Tender date : August 21, 2026 Paper on offer : EF Notes Issue number : 02Y2808 Issue date : August 24, 2026 Maturity date : August 24, 2028 Coupon : 3.00% p.a. Competitive Tender
China-based Korean independence leader Sin Kyu-sik was the real mastermind behind his country’s provisional government in exile, according to new research that promotes him to a main player in the resistance against Japan’s occupation. The research was presented at a symposium in Seoul co-hosted by Gwangbokhoe, the off
Written by Eric Siu-kei Cheng. This article explores how maritime education in Taitung turns Taiwan’s eastern coastline into a living classroom. Drawing on fieldwork, community collaboration, fisheries, food education, and Green Island’s White Terror heritage, the author shows how students engage with environmental sus
Thirty-eight landlords of subdivided units (SDUs), who contravened Part IVA of the Landlord and Tenant (Consolidation) Ordinance (Cap. 7) (the Ordinance), pleaded guilty and were fined between $700 and $22,400, amounting to a total of $135,100, on August 7, August 14 and today (August 21) at the Eastern Magistrates' Co
China’s exports of strategic minerals to the United States and Japan diverged in July, with US-bound shipments showing signs of improvement while supplies of key materials to Japan tumbled. US-bound shipments of rare earth permanent magnets rose 4.6 per cent year on year and 32.6 per cent month on month in July, while
The Buildings Department approved nine building plans in June, with two on Hong Kong Island, three in Kowloon and four in the New Territories. Of the approved plans, six were for apartment and apartment/commercial developments, one was for commercial development, one was for community services development, and one was
A domestic worker has been charged with child abuse after a Hong Kong family alleged to police that their 23-month-old girl had been scalded by hot water while in her care. Khumaeroh, a 30-year-old domestic worker from Indonesia, appeared at the Tuen Mun Magistrates’ Court on Friday morning, Ming Pao reported. Many Ind
Two red tides were sighted during the past week, the Inter-departmental Red Tide Working Group reported today (August 21). On August 18, staff of the Environmental Protection Department spotted two red tides at Repulse Bay Beach and Deep Water Bay Beach, Hong Kong Island, respectively. Both red tides have dissipated an
International students accounted for more than half of the HIV infections identified among individuals entering China through the city of Wuhan over the past few years, although the number of cases remained low, according to customs data. Public health officials analysed HIV cases detected among inbound long-term visa
The Court of First Instance of the High Court today (August 21) delivered the verdict in the case concerning the "Hong Kong Alliance" (the Alliance), Lee Cheuk-yan, Ho Chun-yan and Chow Hang-tung, who were charged with "incitement to subversion" (contrary to Article 23 of the Hong Kong National Security Law (HKNSL)). T
The Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) will present the classical music lecture series "Music at Heart". The eight-lecture series will be held on Wednesdays starting from October 7 at the Lecture Hall of the Hong Kong Space Museum (HKSM), with music educator Calvin Lai as the curator and speaker. Structure
China has approved its first private-sector commercial trial for satellite Internet of Things (IoT) services, granting a permit to a Geely-backed venture as part of broader efforts to open the country’s burgeoning satellite communications market to private capital. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (M
The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) announced today (August 21) that a trial reservation system will be implemented at the High Island Geo Trail-Po Pin Chau Section of the High Island Reservoir East Dam in Sai Kung (see attached illustration) on weekends, the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Nation
A Hong Kong woman was found dead at a licensed animal shelter in Ta Kwu Ling on Thursday after she was mauled by a dog, adding to a string of attacks this week involving canines. Police said on Thursday night that a 33-year-old woman was found dead at the animal shelter in Ping Yeung Village, […]
An asset-management arm of Guotai Haitong Securities, a leading Chinese brokerage, was ordered to pay 52.5 million yuan (US$7.8 million) in fines and penalties for activities undertaken by its offshore investment business as Beijing tightens its scrutiny of capital flows. Guotai Haitong Securities Asset Management was
China has launched its first batch-scale remanufacturing project for retired wind turbines in Jiuquan, Gansu province, as an ageing fleet enters a new phase of its life cycle and Beijing seeks to encourage recycling in its massive renewable-energy sector. China Resources Recycling Group (CRRG) – a state-owned enterpris
We have selected seven stories from this week’s news across Hong Kong, mainland China, the wider Asia region and beyond that resonated with our readers and shed light on topical issues. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. Chinese team aims to put ‘smart’ diabetes probiotic on
Eleven mobile devices cleared the first batch of China's national AI-terminal intelligence grading tests in July, including nine smartphones from Huawei, Motorola, Honor, vivo, OPPO, Xiaomi and Stepfun. Vendors are calling L3 the highest level, but the real bottleneck for L4 is not model capability.
Alibaba's Tongyi Wanxiang team has open-sourced Wan-Animate-2, an end-to-end character animation framework that runs at 24 fps in real-time streaming without skeletal pose extraction. Head-to-head comparisons show parity with closed-source commercial leaders.
A fully domestic 100,000-card AI super-cluster came online this month at the National Supercomputing Internet Zhengzhou core node, with a parallel deployment in the Greater Bay Area. The NDRC is now framing the next five-year plan around a single national compute fabric.
MiniMax's H3 model now ships open weights, with text, image, video and audio fused as context and native stereo sound output up to 15 seconds at 2K. Community benchmarks show the 768p Base model running on consumer GPUs in minutes.
Hypershell's new flagship, the X Ultra, weighs 1.8 kilograms with a 1,000W motor and a 30-kilometer range, and pairs titanium and carbon fiber with end-to-end AI motion recognition. Real-world testing shows the consumer category has matured fast.
OpenRouter data shows Chinese LLMs crossed 34.25 trillion weekly tokens for the first time, with the top four slots all Chinese. DeepSeek-V4-Flash official release vaulted to number one with 570 percent week-on-week growth.
X Square Robot has open-sourced HOST, an inference-time learning framework that lets a humanoid robot watch a 29-second human demonstration and reproduce the skill at 62 percent success. The approach flips the embodied-AI recipe from offline fine-tuning to on-the-fly imitation.
Hefei-based Guizhen Chip Technology, working with USTC's Ren Xifeng group, has demonstrated on-chip generation of a 4-photon 16-qubit GHZ state and a 4-qubit cluster state, with Grover search at 0.987 average identification probability. The result is a milestone for measurement-based optical quantum computing.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming quietly returned to the Seed AI research team two weeks ago and laid down a no-distillation mandate. The mid-year All-Hands followed with a major B-side structure change that puts Doubao, Feishu and Volcano Engine under one product roof.
CosyVoice Studio bundles Alibaba's Qwen-Audio speech family, including the Artificial Analysis top-ranked Qwen-Audio-3.0-Realtime, into one platform with three product modules. Alibaba is positioning speech as the next agent entry point, alongside text and vision.
SkillHub, the OpenClaw-aligned AI skill community hosted by Tencent Lighthouse Cloud, now lists more than 100,000 AI skills and over 10 million monthly downloads. The TRACE evaluation framework is how the platform surfaces the 20 percent of skills that actually work.
Several Chinese AR optical waveguide makers are crossing the million-unit capacity threshold in 2026, with Greatar-Tech at one million SRG units and Nika Optical opening an automated VHG line. The PVG AR line from Parallel Vision is the smallest in volume but the most differentiated in tech.
Alibaba Cloud's CUBE 5.0 modular design compresses AI data-center delivery to 100 days and cuts unit cost by 10 percent. The Ulanqab deployment is the canonical example, with the city now running 17.2 million P of compute and hosting 90 percent intelligent computing share.
A three-month surge in humanoid robot shipments has produced a fast-growing third-party repair and training job in China. Trainees like Zhao Xin in Ordos now earn about six thousand yuan a month disassembling knee joints and reading App error codes, with the Unitree Go2 the most common patient.
Smart Analytics Global reports 1.91 million global humanoid robot shipments in H1 2026, up 274 percent year-on-year. Chinese vendors captured 97 percent of the total, with AgiBot at 44 percent and Unitree at 30.9 percent. The US restriction on Chinese robots landed in late July.
Solar expansion policies across China have led to a reduction in bird diversity, with wealthier and non-desert regions bearing the brunt of species loss, according to a study led by researchers in China and the US. They found that solar expansion had eaten into birds’ foraging and breeding grounds, and had left what ha
The Government announced today (August 21) that the Financial Secretary, in exercise of his authority under the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Ordinance (Cap. 485), has reappointed Mr Lam Chun-sing as the Chairman of the Mandatory Provident Fund Industry Schemes Committee (MPFISC). He has also appointed Mr Lam Fung-y
Asian stocks mostly edged higher on Friday as investors assessed the US Treasury's move to push down long-term bond yields while analysts warned that alone would not be enough to keep borrowing costs from spiking. In Hong Kong, the benchmark Hang Seng Index opened up 109 points, or 0.42 percent, at 25,807. The China En
The APNIC 62 Open Policy Meeting will consider a diverse set of policy proposals covering IPv4 management, IPv6 allocation practices, and Internet abuse handling.
Hong Kong Tiananmen vigil activists Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan have been convicted of incitement to subversion under a Beijing-imposed national security law. At the West Kowloon Law Courts Building, three national security judges on Friday handed down the guilty verdict in the trial of Chow and Lee, both former l
The world has seen tremendous progress in the capabilities of robots in the past year. Robots can now walk, dance, run and perform increasingly sophisticated movements, yet impressive demonstrations do not equal commercial value. Beyond the hype surrounding China’s red-hot embodied robotics sector, one challenge confro
The 2026 provisional register and the omissions list for the Rural Representative Election (RRE) were released today (August 21). Members of the public may log in to the RRE Voter Registration Information Enquiry System through the RRE website ( www.had.gov.hk/rre ) to check their own registration particulars, as well
A reported trip to China next week by a cross-party group of Japanese lawmakers could carry “pronounced” symbolic weight but is unlikely to herald a thaw in ties between the two neighbours, Chinese experts suggest. For the first time since bilateral relations succumbed to a bitter chill 10 months ago, a delegation of J
Japan's core consumer inflation accelerated in July from a year earlier as firms passed on rising import costs from a weak yen and the US-Israeli war on Iran, data showed on Friday, bolstering the case for a rate hike from the central bank. The data will be among the factors the Bank of Japan will scrutinise at its nex
The Panama Canal will reduce shipping volumes from next month because of a drought fueled by the El Niño phenomenon, the operator of the waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans said on Thursday. From September 3, the number of vessels allowed through the canal each day will be reduced due to a lack of rain, th
Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog has found that more than 153,000 students and staff from four educational institutions in the city were affected in a global cyberattack on online learning platform Canvas in May. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) published its findings on Thursday based on inv
The three main US equity indexes closed lower on Thursday as rising Treasury yields dented risk appetite while disappointing results from retail bellwether Walmart soured investors on the consumer sector and rallying oil prices fanned inflation worries. Walmart shares tumbled 9.2 percent after the world's largest tradi
Yields on long-term US Treasury bonds rose on Thursday despite a fresh pledge from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to potentially intervene further in a bid to lower borrowing costs. The US Treasury Department had announced on Wednesday plans to "at least double" its sovereign bond buy-backs after the 30-year yield
China recently passed the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, which took effect July 1, 2026. The U.S.-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders said that, rather than promoting unity as Chinese authorities claim, the law reinforces restrictions on “freedoms of language, education, practice of religion, culture, exp