Published: 12:12pm, 22 Aug 2025Updated: 12:54pm, 22 Aug 2025
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. How the Philippines forced China to adjust historic mission to moon’s far side
Chinese space engineers made small but deliberate changes to last year’s historic sample retrieval mission to the far side of the moon to avoid political friction in the South China Sea, according to a new paper.
2. Trump was put up for Nobel Peace Prize, so he must be a top mediator. Right?
US President Donald Trump’s mediation tactics revealed a power politics approach and constituted ill-advised interference in the long term, Zhang Luwei, a research associate at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said in an article published on the institute’s social media account last week.
3. ‘We’ll be Taliban soon’: Malaysian state to jail Muslims for skipping prayers
Malaysia’s Terengganu state has warned it will start fully enforcing a sharia law enabling the imprisonment of Muslim men for up to two years if they skip Friday prayers without a valid reason – a move widely seen as emblematic of the multicultural country’s tilt towards religious conservatism.