Asia

US President Donald Trump raised concerns about yen weakness at a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said on Friday, offering an unusually detailed account of the leaders’ talks on currencies. “At the recent Japan-US summit meeting, President Trump expressed concern about the yen’s weakness,” Katayama said at a regular news conference, adding that she was disclosing the exchange for the first time after consulting with the ‌Prime...

The good news is, when US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Washington this week, neither chose confrontation. Amid the high pomp and ceremony, what China has called “constructive strategic stability” continues. Even an uneasy truce in great power relations can be useful. Both recognise the considerable incentive to prevent their economic rivalry from spiralling out of control. Even limited understandings can reduce risks in artificial intelligence (AI) and other...

India’s “cockroach” youth movement is testing whether it can turn anger over education and jobs into a broader challenge to the country’s political establishment, two months after its protests helped force an education minister to resign over alleged entrance exam leaks. Its latest target is another powerful institution: the country’s election watchdog. The shift marks a transition for the movement from high-profile demonstrations in New Delhi to a more diffuse campaign of school audits,...

The Philippines’ decision to block messaging platform Discord for less than a day following a series of school shootings has raised questions about the government’s response to child safety online, with analysts describing the move as a show of regulatory muscle that did little to address underlying problems. The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) announced on Thursday that it had lifted the ban after what officials described as successful negotiations with Discord...

A major coal deal in Indonesia is set to secure a powerful new partner for one of the country’s biggest miners, even as the industry worries a delay in the government’s approval of production quotas could have a severe impact on the business outlook. Low Tuck Kwong and his daughter Elaine Low, the biggest shareholders of Bayan Resources, agreed on September 16 to sell a 30 per cent stake in Indonesia’s third-largest coal producer to fellow tycoon Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, better known as Haji...

Former Malaysian leader Najib Razak has no money to pay the fine to secure his transfer to house arrest, his lawyers have said, as they question the delay in releasing the full details of the conditional pardon granted by Malaysia’s king last week. King Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar last Friday decreed that Najib would be allowed to serve out the remainder of his sentence at home, on condition that he pay his 50 million ringgit (US$10.3 million) fine. The decision triggered widespread outrage among...

Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah proposed a climate alliance with neighbouring India and China, urging action to protect the fragile Himalayan ecosystem after catastrophic flooding across the region. “Glaciers and floods do not travel with stamps and passports,” Shah told world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. “As an urgent first step, we propose that we establish the Himalaya climate resilience mechanism, led by Nepal, India and China, so the Himalayas become a...

Singapore and China should look to the next phase of cooperation through potential projects in artificial intelligence and the green economy, after decades of economic ties anchored by industrial parks, eco-cities and transport corridors. Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong said on Friday that the relationship had “never been static”, arguing that the economic challenges of each era shaped the flagship developments of that time. At the FutureChina Global Forum held in the city state,...

The institutions created by the “People’s Constitution” of 1997 have become tools of the country's political and economic elite.

As middle powers reliant on international order that is in a state of disarray, Hanoi and Ottawa believe they have a lot to gain from deeper collaboration.

A veteran Malaysian politician pleaded not guilty on Friday to a sedition charge over remarks backing a rival claimant to the Negeri Sembilan throne amid the months-long royal crisis. Rais Yatim, 84, a former cabinet minister and president of Malaysia’s Senate, was charged at the Sessions Court in Ayer Keroh, Melaka, for his comments on June 5, during a ceremony proclaiming Tunku Nadzaruddin Tuanku Ja’afar the state’s 12th ruler. Rais is accused of uttering seditious words at the Parkroyal...

Unregulated companies are running a brisk trade across Japan storing and disposing unclaimed corpses, with a recent report revealing how such “cut-price morgues” are cashing in on legal loopholes to discard the nation’s dead. The business has shed light on the growing number of “lonely deaths” of elderly Japanese as the traditional nuclear family fades. Some industry insiders have expressed shock at the trend and are calling for regulation to block potential loopholes, while others point to...

The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) is looking into a social media allegation that dog meat was being sold illegally in Singapore. The screengrabs shared on the Facebook group Dogs Singapore appeared to show an advertisement in Vietnamese offering various cuts of dog meat. A check on Friday morning found that the post containing the screengrab had been deleted. SFA has not approved any source of dog meat, the agency said early on Friday morning. “All food imports must meet SFA’s requirements....

Britain’s Newcastle University faced criticism on Thursday for awarding a sustainability professorship to Anant Ambani, the son of Asia’s richest man and owner of a scandal-hit giant wildlife centre in India. Vantara, which calls itself the world’s largest rescue centre, last month announced a major reset of its procedures following concerns about its rapid and vast acquisition of animals from around the world, including endangered species. Newcastle University said on September 14, it awarded...

Phnom Penh is trying to address criticisms that the current anti-scam campaign is more about reputation management than full accountability.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has put North Korea in a propaganda bind, analysts say, by publicly revealing that Kyiv recently transferred two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea. The disclosure – made during Zelensky’s address to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday – directly challenges Pyongyang’s narrative that its soldiers fighting alongside Russian forces would choose death over surrender. North Korea is unlikely to acknowledge the transfer publicly, but may strengthen...

In lieu of decisive regulatory action and funding, much of the work of adapting to new climate realities falls on individual gardeners and cooperatives.

55 years ago, Bhutan joined the United Nations – with a rare show of support from bitter rivals. 

Tribal people in South Asia prefer being called adivasi or original inhabitants, but nationalist forces in India and Bangladesh oppose it for different reasons.

India already has the design talent; what it needs is to turn this talent into Indian-owned companies, and to build the supplier base its fabs lack.

Singapore’s major financial institutions have pledged to train more than 80,000 local employees in AI skills as the country moves to cushion white-collar workers from potential job disruption. A pioneer batch of 23 banks, insurers and asset managers has committed to train all their Singapore staff by 2028, and more than half of them have already gone through programmes recognised by an industry association, according to Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong. The firms would also study how jobs were...

South Koreans have long discussed changing the way the presidency is set up. Should it – and can it – happen now?

Prime Minister Takaichi made Tokyo’s concerns clear to Trump before Xi Jinping arrived in Washington. Will that actually impact the summit?

The F-35 is a supremely advanced fighter aircraft with many proprietary components that would be of immense value to several foreign intelligence services. It is also a consumer product.

Sri Lanka’s main opposition took to the streets on Thursday to protest against judicial reforms, including raising the retirement age for judges, that the government says are needed to reduce legal delays. Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa told thousands of supporters outside parliament that the legislation proposed by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s left-wing administration would “annihilate” judicial independence. The government unveiled two bills last month to increase the number of...

For millions of Indians, buying a cup of chai or groceries from roadside vendors has come to mean reaching for their phones rather than wallets – a habit made possible by a system that has so far charged consumers nothing for such everyday transactions. Now, a decade after the government launched the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India is asking some merchants to pay for the hugely popular system – raising questions over whether it can preserve the low-cost model that drove its mass adoption...

Singapore police have launched an investigation after a video of a man allegedly filming female students using smart glasses went viral, sparking concerns about privacy and safety. In the social media video, a man wearing black-rimmed glasses and a face mask is seen walking behind two female students wearing what appear to be uniforms from Raffles Institution, a premier school in the city state. The girls seem unaware of his presence. The man clutches his phone to his chest and presses what...

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr said on Friday that he has pardoned Mary Jane Veloso, a former death row inmate detained since her 2010 conviction for drug trafficking in Indonesia. “I’ll give you a scoop: I signed her pardon yesterday,” Marcos told reporters during a visit to the northern town of Batac on Friday. Veloso is expected to be freed after the pardon since there are no other active cases against her, though Marcos did not specify when that will happen. Claire Castro, the...

The Philippine Senate has made it mathematically easier to convict Vice-President Sara Duterte-Carpio, but observers say the ruling could intensify a battle over an impeachment trial already viewed by the public as deeply divisive. The Senate, sitting as an impeachment court, ruled on Wednesday that only senator-judges who are able to take part in the trial should be counted in determining the threshold for conviction. Under the Philippine constitution, a two-thirds vote of the Senate is...

Malaysia’s haze crisis has flared again just weeks after emergency measures and cloud-seeding operations brought temporary relief, with experts warning that smoke from Indonesian fires could continue drifting across the country until monsoon winds change. All 108 schools in Serian, a district in the state of Sarawak on Malaysian Borneo, were ordered to close on Thursday after the air pollutant index (API) breached 200 on Wednesday night, forcing pupils back to home-based learning. By noon,...