San Francisco Passes Resolution to Decriminalize Psilocybin Mushrooms

Four years ago, party-goers dressed as police officers were reportedly mistaken for the real thing amid a deadly crowd crush in South Korea’s capital. Now, as Seoul prepares for its fourth Halloween since the disaster, police have launched a week-long nationwide crackdown on imitation police uniforms and equipment, aiming to stop any such confusion from happening again. The nationwide operation, announced by the National Police Agency on Sunday, runs until Monday next week. More than 4,500...

The Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is likely preparing to secure a fourth term in power in 2027, has complained that officials cannot be trusted.

Japanese companies are moving to pay compensation to ⁠users following waves ⁠of cyberattacks that have disrupted internet ⁠services and raised concerns about economic stability. GMO Internet said customers would be compensated for losses stemming from unauthorised access following a cyberattack on its foreign exchange trading service, and all customers would receive 5,000 yen (US$32) ‌as “an initial gesture of good faith”, CEO Masatoshi Kumagai said in a blog post on Sunday. The move comes after...

Long before artificial intelligence became the next big thing in the tech industry, Wang Jian was crafting the foundational infrastructure that would eventually power it. In 2008, he joined Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – as chief architect and founded Alibaba Cloud in 2009, convincing the company’s leadership to invest heavily in building a cloud computing infrastructure from scratch. Today, Wang’s purview has expanded considerably. As an academician at the...

Are China’s increasingly powerful open-weight AI models a cybersecurity threat, or could restricting them ultimately make the internet less secure? The dilemma has become a growing concern as Chinese developers including DeepSeek, Z.ai and Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – continue to challenge their American rivals by releasing models that anyone can download, modify and deploy. The growing impact of advanced AI on global cybersecurity has also forced governments...

Singapore has expanded its investigation into haze-creating fires in Indonesia that have blanketed the city state in smog, requesting information from 10 locally registered companies. The National Environment Agency (NEA) sent notices seeking documents and details of land concessions in Indonesia owned by the firms, their firefighting and blaze prevention measures, and their relationship to other relevant companies, according to a Friday statement. All 10 Singapore-registered companies were...

While few dispute that China is narrowing the gap with the United States in developing artificial intelligence (AI) models, there is one area where Chinese firms are already the undisputed leaders: video. China has seen a proliferation of advanced generative AI video models – systems trained on visual data to generate or edit video content based on user inputs such as text prompts, images and audio. The country’s vast short-video ecosystems and looser copyright rules have helped give Chinese...

North Korea sent a letter to the United Nations Security Council accusing Seoul of fabricating a landmine explosion that injured three South Korean soldiers, its state media reported Monday. Tensions between the two Koreas have soared since the South last month blamed the blast inside the heavily fortified demilitarised zone that separates the countries on landmines laid by the North, an accusation it has fiercely rejected. The North Korean permanent representative to the UN sent a letter on...

“How can South Korea’s law be this weak? Twenty-three people died!” Those were the words of Chinese mother Li Shun-ji after South Korea’s Supreme Court upheld a reduced four-year prison sentence for Aricell CEO Park Soon-kwan last Tuesday over a 2024 factory fire that killed 23 workers, including Li’s then-24-year-old daughter, Yan Jing-jing. The blaze at the lithium battery manufacturer’s factory in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi province, killed 17 Chinese nationals, one Laotian national and five South...

After HSBC RedCoin launched on Friday, Anchorpoint – the stablecoin-issuing joint venture led by Standard Chartered – said it plans to launch a retail product on a public blockchain, even as it takes a “prudent approach”. “Our next major milestone is to [help] bring regulated digital money into everyday payments and commercial applications, while connecting traditional payment infrastructure with this emerging digital finance,” said Dominic Maffei, CEO of Anchorpoint. “This is a public...

Long before artificial intelligence became the next big thing in the tech industry, Wang Jian was crafting the foundational infrastructure that would eventually power it. In 2008, he joined Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – as chief architect and founded Alibaba Cloud in 2009, convincing the company’s leadership to invest heavily in building a cloud computing infrastructure from scratch. Today, Wang’s purview has expanded considerably. As an academician at the...

Philippine police are investigating a laptop found alongside images of child abuse at the former home of Meghan Markle’s estranged father, with “full results” expected in a week, the country’s interior minister told reporters. Thomas Markle, whose daughter is married to Britain’s Prince Harry, had been living in Cebu in the Philippines until reportedly returning to the US earlier this year. Philippine interior minister Jonvic Remulla said the country planned to take “appropriate legal actions”...