Asia

The warming El Nino weather phenomenon could form later this year, potentially pushing global temperatures to record heights. There is a 50-60 per cent chance of El Nino developing during the July-September period and beyond, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The World Meteorological Organization will issue an update on El Nino on Tuesday. Here’s what you need to know about El Nino and its cooler sister, La Nina. Why the name? El Nino and La Nina are two...

Asian countries are heavily reliant on imported oil and gas and could suffer serious economic fallout after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, Morgan Stanley said. The manufacturing-intensive, export-reliant region was “more sensitive” to oil price volatility than Europe or the US, the New York-based investment bank said in a research note on Sunday. Asia’s oil and gas trade deficit stood at 2.1 per cent of gross domestic product, it calculated. Every sustained US$10...

President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s decision to promote coastguard officer Jay Tarriela – despite Beijing’s calls for him to be sanctioned – is being read by analysts as a calibrated signal of how the Philippines intends to manage its maritime dispute with China. Rather than a routine personnel move, they say, the elevation of one of the government’s most outspoken maritime voices suggests Marcos is doubling down on a strategy that pairs public exposure of Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea...

Millions of migrant workers, who support some of the Middle East’s most crucial sectors, are in the line of fire as Iran retaliates against the US-Israeli strikes that killed the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. Southeast and South Asian nations supply a large share of the labour in the Gulf, including medical practitioners, construction workers and household help that make up a migrant workforce the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates at over 24 million. The Philippines,...

Singapore’s long-standing effort to stay equidistant between the United States and China is entering a more volatile phase, with recent comments by officials reflecting their awareness of the mounting strain, analysts have said. Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan on Friday told parliament that Singapore would not act as a proxy for any major power, stressing that the city state must be prepared to “courteously stand up and say no”. Observers say his remarks come at a time when geopolitical...

India and Canada on Monday reached a string of agreements, including on critical mineral cooperation and a “landmark” uranium supply deal for nuclear power, the countries’ leaders said in New Delhi. The pacts, which also covered technology and promoting the use of renewable energy, were announced after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney hailed a fresh start in the relationship between their nations. “Our ties have seen a new energy, mutual trust and...

Airspace closures across the Middle East have left tens of thousands of travellers stranded and forced airlines to divert routes, threatening to derail the fragile recovery in Asia’s tourism and aviation sectors, as the conflict involving the US and Israel against Iran continues to escalate. Major transit hubs, including Dubai and Doha, remain shut or are operating at reduced capacity for a third straight day, upending Europe–Asia connections that depend heavily on Gulf airspace. Airlines are...

The fragile ceasefire between the Taliban and Pakistan has broken, and there is now open war in South Asia. This week has seen a dangerous escalation between the former allies, starting when Pakistan carried out a series of air strikes on what it says were terror “camps and hideouts” in Afghanistan’s border provinces. Pakistan claims it killed 80 militants, whereas the Taliban says villages were hit and 17 civilians were killed. The two have since engaged in a deadly tit-for-tat of ground and...

For years, India has prided itself on a foreign policy doctrine of “dehyphenation”: maintaining productive, parallel relations with conflicting countries such as Israel, Iran and the Arab Gulf states without letting any one bilateral tie poison the others. That doctrine is now being tested to the limit. The killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by US-Israeli strikes within days of Narendra Modi returning from a high-profile visit to Tel Aviv provided instant ammunition for the...

Myanmar’s military junta granted amnesty on Monday to more than 7,000 prisoners convicted of financing or sheltering a “terrorist group”, a designation it has used to outlaw pro-democracy factions opposing its rule. Thousands of dissenting civilians have been swept into jails since Myanmar’s military snatched power in a 2021 coup, ending a decade-long experiment with democracy and detaining elected figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi. Pro-democracy activists backing Suu Kyi and armed groups challenging...

With memories still raw from the deaths of scores of its nationals during the Gaza war, Thailand has issued an alert to its estimated 110,000 citizens working across the Middle East as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran rages across the region. Around 60,000 Thais are working in Israel’s fields, factories and shops, drawn by “danger money” wages higher than those available at home or in competing markets. Thai authorities have said an additional 250 Thais are believed to still be in Iran, while...

None of Japan’s prefectural governors are willing to accept soil collected in decontamination work near the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex without further safety information and support from the central government, according to a Kyodo News survey. A search for final disposal sites for 14 million cubic metres (500 million cubic feet) of removed soil and other waste in Fukushima after the March 2011 nuclear disaster is a key part of the government’s reconstruction efforts in...

Oil prices surged by the most in four years on Monday as the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei amid a widening conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran brought tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to a near standstill. Freight costs climbed sharply alongside crude, as traders swiftly priced in the war, which analysts say will have far-reaching consequences for Asia’s heavily import-dependent economies. Benchmark Brent crude jumped 13 per cent to a high...

A man has been arrested in Johor after an 11-second viral clip showed him clinging to the front of his ex-wife’s moving car before tumbling onto the road in full view of onlookers. Police said the suspect had clung to the car for around 2km (1.2 miles) and that he had tested positive for ketamine. The incident unfolded at about 3.30pm on Saturday outside a supermarket in Bandar Seri Alam, a township in Johor, the southern Malaysian state bordering Singapore, after an argument between the pair...

Kim Jong-un will have seen the footage. A supreme leader of nearly 37 years, killed alongside members of his own family. Citizens celebrating in the streets. Rivals already angling for a role in the political transition. If the US-Israeli strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday was intended to send a message to the world, analysts say North Korea almost certainly received it. Though the lesson likely learned – do not negotiate with the US and never be in Iran’s position...

Images claiming to be from the wedding shoot of South Korean Girls’ Generation group member Tiffany Young and actor Byun Yo-han spread rapidly online – before being confirmed as artificial intelligence-generated fakes. Soon after Young, 36, and Byun, 39, announced they had registered their marriage, photos reportedly of couple began circulating across social media and online communities under the title “Tiffany–Byun Yo-han wedding photos”. The images depicted Young in a pink-toned wedding dress...

Australia’s internet regulator said it might push search engines and app stores to block artificial intelligence services that failed to verify user ages after a review found more than half had not made public any steps to comply by a deadline next week. The warning reflects one of the most aggressive efforts globally to rein in AI companies, which face a growing number of lawsuits for failing to stop – and even encouraging – self-harm or violence, while researchers caution that such platforms...

At least 10 pro-Iranian protesters were killed in clashes with police as they tried to storm the gates of the US consulate in Pakistan’s main port city of Karachi on Sunday. Security forces opened fire at the consulate, resulting in the deaths of 10 protesters, with 34 injured, said Sukhdew Assardas Hamnani, a spokesman for the Sindh government. “The police reached the site and took the situation into control,” he said. Faisal Edhi, who runs Edhi Foundation, a rescue service, said several of...

For her New Year’s resolution, Cheryl Tan decided that she would drink less alcohol on nights out. The 26-year-old Singaporean finance professional said she was starting to find it increasingly difficult to shed the effects of hangovers, rendering her immobile long into the next day. “It seemed like recovery after a night out was taking too long, and I started to scale back so I would be more productive,” she said. Cutting back has also saved her money. A cocktail at a bar in Singapore could...

I underestimated Japan’s determination to ruffle China’s feathers. In a November 2023 column, I argued that the apparently cordial meeting between President Xi Jinping and then US president Joe Biden in the US unsettled Japan, which wanted to attain its goal of becoming a “normal country” again. In a column last December, I said Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s hardened position against China – exemplified by her November 7 speech saying China’s forceful takeover of Taiwan could pose an...

Explosions were heard in the Afghan capital Kabul Sunday, Agence France-Presse journalists said, with the Taliban government saying they were responding to aerial Pakistan attacks. A spokesman for Afghanistan’s defence ministry said “air defence strikes were carried out against Pakistani aircraft in Kabul”. Months of cross-border clashes have flared since Thursday when Afghanistan launched an offensive along the frontier, with Pakistani forces hitting back on the border and from the skies. The...

The killing of Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli air strikes has prompted governments across Muslim-majority South and Southeast Asia to reiterate calls for restraint as protests flared in several cities, with some religious and political movements hailing the cleric as a “martyr”. Iranian state media confirmed Khamenei’s death on Sunday and declared a 40-day mourning period, casting the assassination as a pivotal moment for the Islamic Republic he had led since...

When Malaysian rapper Zamaera hit send on an email to South by Southwest’s (SXSW) music team in mid-December, she had already been told she was returning to Austin as a showcasing artist. What she wanted was bigger: a stage for Malaysia, the kind Japan, Taiwan and Britain already had at the US music festival. “They have a stage … for Japan. Taiwan already has a stage … even the UK and Germany,” the 31-year-old rapper, born Sharifah Zamaera, told This Week in Asia in an exclusive interview. She...

The Philippines cannot afford an aircraft carrier, could not sustain one if it had it and, according to most analysts, does not need one. What it needs is messier, cheaper and harder to photograph, they say: a web of missiles, patrol boats, frigates and surveillance assets designed not to project power, but to deny it. Two recent developments have made that choice harder to ignore. Last month, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr openly mused that an aircraft carrier with “accompanying...

If all goes to plan, in under three years the world’s largest stadium will tower over Hanoi’s southern suburbs as a shimmering monument to the good times ahead for Vietnam and, by extension, its leader To Lam, the secret policeman who now holds power. The golden, drum-shaped Trong Dong Stadium, with a capacity of 135,000, is the centrepiece of a proposed US$38 billion new town designed to ease Vietnamese capital’s chronic congestion. Vingroup, the country’s dominant cars-to-minimarts...

Flights across the Middle East were being cancelled on Saturday as several countries slammed their airspace shut after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates all announced at least partial closures of their skies in the hours after smoke began rising over Tehran and Iran began retaliatory attacks in the region. Iranian missiles hit capital cities around the wealthy Gulf region, killing at least one, as witnesses...

The coordinated US and Israeli strikes inside Iran mark more than another episode in a long-running confrontation. They represent a structural escalation – one whose consequences extend well beyond the Middle East. This is not the start of a new war. It is the next stage in a conflict that has been unfolding since October 2023, gradually shifting from proxy exchanges and shadow operations to direct state-on-state confrontation. On February 28, Washington moved from strategic backstop to visible...

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un gifted new sniper rifles to top government and military officials following a weeklong ruling party congress celebrating his leadership, with state media highlighting an image of his teenage daughter taking aim at a shooting range as her increasingly prominent appearances fuel speculation Kim is grooming her as a future leader. Kim presented the rifles to senior party and military officials on Friday, calling them a sign of his “absolute trust” and gratitude for...

Ahead of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s scheduled summit next month with US President Donald Trump, the message from Tokyo appears to be that the US Supreme Court decision to invalidate Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs will not affect Japan’s promised capital investment projects in the United States. That could prove a costly misstep for Japan. With the Supreme Court invalidating the legal basis for Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, countries that have concluded trade agreements with the US...

China and South Korea have resolved a trade dispute over hot-rolled steel coils through a price-undertaking deal, mirroring the solution used in China’s electric vehicle (EV) stand-off with the European Union. Analysts say the deal, which will see exporters raise export prices to avoid anti‑dumping duties, could avert punitive tariffs and safeguard market access for Chinese exports. The China Iron and Steel Association said in a statement issued on Thursday night that it “welcomed and supported”...