Shock over teen surrogate, China's ‘century baby' dies, placenta theft: 5 trending stories
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A 17-year-old girl from China's Yi minority acted as a surrogate mother and egg provider for a 50-year-old man who allegedly paid her more than 900,000 yuan (US$124,000) to conceive twin boys. The alleged arrangement has sparked widespread public outrage.
A young woman who struggles with high rent is paying US$7 a month to sleep in a toilet. Photo: SCMP composite/Douyin
A young woman in China who struggles with high rents is paying 50 yuan (US$7) a month to live in a toilet. The woman, surnamed Yang, 18, comes from a rural family in Hubei province in southern China, according to the Xiaoxiang Morning Post.
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HKFP
4 days ago
- HKFP
Hong Kong police officer's gun accidentally fires at headquarters
The Hong Kong Police Force has said that an officer's service weapon misfired at its Wan Chai headquarters on Tuesday afternoon, but no injuries were reported. At around 3pm on Tuesday, an officer at the Hong Kong Island Regional Headquarters was unloading his service weapon when the firearm was 'suspected to have accidentally discharged,' firing a single round, according to a police spokesperson. 'No one was injured in the incident,' the spokesperson said on Tuesday. 'The Police reiterated that the Force had strict rules on the use of equipment and the case is being followed up by the Hong Kong Island Region.' The first batch of Hong Kong police officers began using mainland Chinese-made CF98-A and CS/LP5 semi-automatic handguns in July. The pistols were introduced to phase out the US-made Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver and SIG P250 pistol. The CF98-A holds a 15-round magazine, chambered in 9-millimetre Parabellum. The CS/LP5, a compact variant, holds eight rounds of 9-millimetre ammunition. Superintendent Ko Cheuk-hang of the police support wing said last year that the entire replacement would be 'a long-term process' with 2,000 officers expected to be trained for the new weapons every year. They must also pass a test to use the new pistols. Chief Inspector Tang Che-leung from the weapons training division also said last year that the Chinese-made pistols had manual safety switches that would prevent misfires – a feature not found on the Smith & Wesson revolver.
South China Morning Post
5 days ago
- South China Morning Post
China's state security agency warns of phishing emails sent by foreign spies
China's top spy agency said foreign agents had sent Chinese military research institutes fake job applications in emails with a Trojan program embedded in them. In a social media post on Tuesday, the Ministry of State Security said they were among thousands of phishing emails sent by foreign spy agencies in recent years targeting Communist Party and government organs, national defence and military industrial units, as well as universities and research institutes. The post did not give details of who had been targeted in the recent attack, but said in one case an expert in shipbuilding technology at a well-known Chinese university had received an email from someone claiming to be a postgraduate student, identified as Wang. The academic, surnamed Yang, described it as a 'vague' application to be his research assistant. He asked the student to send a resume, and soon after received a reply with an encrypted Word document titled 'Resume' that required a password to open, which was provided in the email. Yang downloaded and opened the resume but became suspicious when he realised Wang was not a current university student and that his major was not related to Yang's research field. He asked further questions and the person said they were specifically interested in 'vessels and maritime equipment'. Yang then reported the email to the university's security department and notified state security authorities. According to Tuesday's post, the email was found to be a 'double trap' from a foreign intelligence agency – it aimed to use the researcher as a source of information but also included a Trojan program developed by the agency.
Asia Times
6 days ago
- Asia Times
Francophone summit turns blind eye to Cambodia's cybercrime
The French-speaking world, as represented by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), will be holding its summit in Cambodia in 2026. So what could possibly go wrong? Plenty, actually. The OIF, which has 93 members, held its last summit in France in 2024. It has not held the event in the Asia-Pacific region since 1997, when Vietnam played host. So the idea of holding the summit in a poor country that usually struggles for attention, such as Cambodia, is logical and laudable. But everything is in the timing. The decision to hold the summit in Siem Reap, Cambodia, was announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in October 2024. It comes alongside an increasing body of evidence that organized cyber-criminals are operating inside Cambodia with Cambodian government protection. The country is the 'absolute global epicenter' of transnational fraud in 2025 and is primed for further growth in cyber-criminality, according to research authored by Jacob Sims and published in May 2025 by the Humanity Research Consultancy (HRC), a UK-based group that campaigns to end modern slavery. The Cambodian government had denied the claims made in the HRC report. The research finds that the cyber-scam industry, which relies on the forced labor of the victims of human trafficking, generates US$12.5 billion to $19 billion per year, or as much as 60% of Cambodia's GDP. An estimated 150,000 people are involved in cyber scams in Cambodia, according to the report. The HRC confirms a wealth of other research that cybercrime on an industrial scale is taking place in Cambodia, as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The HRC finds that 'endemic corruption, reliable protection by the government, and co-perpetration by party elites are the primary enablers of Cambodia's trafficking-cybercrime nexus.' 'Cambodian state institutions systematically and insidiously support and protect the criminal networks involved in transnational fraud and related human trafficking,' the report says. Many of those accused of playing leading parts or obscured but purposeful roles in organized cybercrime are either connected with the ruling regime or are its core members. Hun To, a cousin of Prime Minister Hun Manet, is a director of Huione Pay, a financial conglomerate which has been cut off from the US financial system due to its alleged role in cybercrime. Ly Yong Phat, a permanent member of the central committee of the ruling Cambodian People's Party, was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury in 2024 for human rights abuses of trafficked workers subjected to forced labor in online scam centers. Cambodia's legal system, universally acknowledged as being completely under government control, is powerless to tackle the situation. It ranked 141 out of 142 countries globally in the 2024 World Justice Project Rule of Law Index. Among lower-middle-income countries, Cambodia ranks 38th out of 38. The idea of a global French-speaking community is in itself a dubious colonial relic. During the colonial period, France concentrated the Southeast Asian version of its mission civilisatrice on Vietnam and paid relatively little attention to Cambodia and Laos, which together made up French Indochina. French missionaries in the 19th century devised a system for transcribing the Vietnamese language into Roman letters, known as quoc-ngo, which became the national standard. The use of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese was stamped out at French insistence. This was a compromise solution in face of the extreme view of some French colonialists that Vietnam should simply abandon its language with everyone being made to speak French. There was no such romanization of the Khmer language, and the idea that Cambodia is a meaningful part of a 'French-speaking world' is a tenuous fiction. Today, the OIF estimates that only about 3% of Cambodians speak French. The historical Western focus on Vietnam as the region's main player continued into the post-Khmer Rouge period. During the 1990s, senior diplomats such as the US Ambassador to Cambodia Kenneth Quinn were specialists on Vietnam, not Cambodia. Quinn believed that the Hun Sen regime, a result of the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, was the best way to bring lasting peace and stability to Cambodia. With the country now recognized as a hub for state-protected organized cybercrime, the project has clearly not gone to plan. The best possible outcome from the summit, which the organizers may hope for, would be for Cambodia to make a sustained effort to combat organized cybercrime. We can expect some high-profile raids on cyber-slavery compounds as part of the summit preparations. However, previous Cambodian compound raids have left the organizers untouched, and the compounds have simply reappeared elsewhere in the country. Victims of human trafficking who thought they had been rescued by the Cambodian police were sold back into slavery. The evidence that the compounds are operating under government protection indicates that the pattern is likely to be repeated. If the idea is to try to hold the summit in Cambodia to make amends for the disastrous French colonial record in Southeast Asia, this is hardly the way to do it. David Whitehouse is a freelance journalist who has lived in Paris for 30 years. He has both French and British nationality.
