Asia

One year after lifting its long-standing two-child limit, Vietnam is offering incentives for people to have more babies as the communist country risks getting old before it gets rich. A new population law and regulations coming into effect on Wednesday extend maternity leave from six to seven months for mothers having a second child as well as offering financial help. If Hanoi residents Nguyen Kim Bich and her husband have a second child, she will get an extra month of maternity leave, free...

Oman Air is looking to capitalise ⁠on the Gulf ⁠state’s appeal as a largely ⁠untapped tourism destination as it launches flights from Muscat to Singapore on Thursday and considers an expansion to North Asia over the next year. The new nonstop Singapore service was underpinned by a lower cost ‌base and the airline’s year-old membership in the Oneworld alliance to aid with connections, as serving the city state with a stopover in Kuala Lumpur failed nine years ago, Oman Air CEO Con Korfiatis said...

Norman Wong sold his Hong Kong flat and relocated to a rented home in Malaysia after concluding the city no longer offered the quality of life he expected for the price. “What am I actually getting for this money in terms of quality of life?” asked Wong, a healthcare professional from Kowloon. “Space is at a premium in Hong Kong that most of us have simply accepted as the norm. When I started seriously looking at Malaysia, I realised I didn’t have to accept that any more.” Wong is part of a...

In a tiny Tokyo restaurant filled with the smell of Nepalese dumplings, Budhathoki Samjhana surveys the business she built from scratch but may now have to give up as Japan tightens visa rules. Even though Japan has a rapidly ageing population and is suffering labour shortages in many sectors, opposition to immigration is growing and the new rules for business manager visas were introduced by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in late 2025. Nepalese national Budhathoki, who spent a decade away...

An investigation into alleged financial irregularities at a Hindu temple closely associated with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is threatening to tarnish one of his party’s signature projects. Two office bearers at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya have resigned, while police arrested eight officials of the trust managing the site after allegations of embezzlement surfaced earlier this month, a person familiar with the matter said, who asked not to be identified because the investigation was...

A viral YouTube video, a one-star review on a delivery app, a heated post on a parenting community – all of these will fall under the same legal standard in South Korea starting next Tuesday. The revised Information and Communications Network Act, widely known as the “fake news” law, introduces punitive damages for YouTubers with more than 100,000 subscribers and high-traffic TikTok accounts if they display what authorities define as “unlawful” content. Platforms such as Naver, Kakao, Google and...

Islamabad has warned that any attempt by India to deprive Pakistan of its share of water under the Indus Waters Treaty would amount to the “weaponisation of water” and could have serious consequences for regional peace and security. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and other government officials made the remarks at an international seminar on the 1960 World Bank – brokered treaty, which governs the sharing of water from the Indus River system between the nuclear-armed neighbours. The treaty has come...

A potential sale of BrahMos missiles to the United Arab Emirates could mark a significant step in India’s push to become a serious arms exporter, giving New Delhi a foothold in one of the world’s most competitive security markets, analysts have said. The talks also include the potential sale of Akashteer, India’s automated air-defence command-and-control system, according to a Reuters report from June 22. No deal has been signed and discussions remain in the early stages, but analysts say a UAE...

The US State Department has backed a potential sale of AGM-114R Hellfire missiles to Singapore, valued at US$22.3 million, in a deal it said would strengthen the city state’s defences, a key US strategic partner in Asia. The department on Tuesday said the sale would include 67 Hellfire missiles – a type of precision-guided, air-to-ground missile – as well as spare parts and support equipment. Lockheed Martin will be the principal contractor. “This proposed sale will support the foreign policy...

A roof collapse at a tutoring centre under construction in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday killed at least 14 schoolchildren, police and rescue officials said. Eight other children were also injured and were being treated at a hospital, senior police official Faisal Kamran said, adding that the owner of the tutoring centre and another person have been arrested. Kamran said rescuers were continuing to search through the rubble after receiving reports that more children could be...

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr faced a stern challenge on Tuesday after the influential Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) religious movement staged a protest on Metro Manila’s busiest highway to demand that the presidential palace stop going after one of its members, Senator Rodante Marcoleta. The rally at Edsa – the highway where a 1986 people power uprising helped topple Marcos’ father, who was the country’s long-time dictator – has raised the stakes of a looming criminal case involving...

Indonesia’s former education minister Nadiem Makarim, one of the country’s best-known tech founders, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after a Jakarta court found him guilty of abusing his authority in a corruption case linked to US$87 million in state losses. The verdict against the Gojek co-founder could unsettle business sentiment and dampen foreign investment appetite in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, adding to concerns about legal certainty in cases involving government...

When people talk about the race for artificial intelligence, they usually focus on software. Headlines revolve around ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek or the latest breakthrough model. Governments announce AI strategies and investors pour billions into start-ups promising to transform everything from medicine to education. Nonetheless, the most consequential battle in the AI age may not be over algorithms at all. It may be over the machines. Behind every chatbot response and AI-generated image lies a...

Setting up a new regional chamber of commerce will “fulfil a long-felt need” to bridge the gap between the Greater Bay Area and Asean, with Hong Kong acting as a “natural connector”, the business group’s inaugural chairman has said. But given existing agreements and bilateral relations between the city and individual member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, analysts said the economic benefits introduced by the new chamber were likely to be more modest than dramatic. The Asean...

It has been nearly five years since then Workers’ Party (WP) MP Raeesah Khan uttered her first lie in Singapore’s parliament but its aftershocks continue to reverberate, as some political observers argue that public fatigue has set in. They say it would be in the interest of both the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) and the WP to avoid further drawing out the issue when there are more pressing matters to address for citizens. Mustafa Izzuddin, a senior international affairs analyst at...

For most of his adult life, Siranudh “Psi” Scott kept a dark secret. Allegedly abused by his older brother as a teenager, he buried the trauma, chose to remain silent and – outwardly at least – carried on as a scion of one of Thailand’s most powerful families. Then, last month, he shared a raw, emotionally exposed confession with his hundreds of thousands of social media followers. Psi, 29, publicly accused his brother Sunit of sexual abuse, eliciting a groundswell of public empathy, testimonies...

More Singapore residents aged below 40 had never married in 2025 than in 2020, government data released on Tuesday showed, with the sharpest increases among those aged 25 to 34. The findings come from the Department of Statistics’ General Household Survey, Singapore’s mid-decade national household survey conducted between the once-a-decade Population Census. The survey also found that women who had been married had fewer children on average than five years earlier; English strengthened its...

East Timor is seeking to turn closer ties between Asean and China’s Greater Bay Area into investment and technology opportunities, even as the bloc’s newest member faces a major challenge of building capacity to benefit from regional integration. While collaboration between the two regions could become a powerful engine of growth, policies had to ensure inclusive and sustainable advancement, East Timor’s Vice Prime Minister Francisco Kalbuadi Lay said at the South China Morning Post’s GBA-Asean...

Malaysia will deploy military veterans as full-time hostel wardens at a group of elite boarding schools from Wednesday, in a new push to curb bullying after a series of abuse cases stirred widespread public anger over student safety. The first 16 former Malaysian Armed Forces personnel will report for duty at eight Mara Junior Science Colleges, in a move reminiscent of Netflix’s hit K-drama Teach You a Lesson, where a Special Ops veteran takes on school bullies. Mara Junior Science Colleges are...

The Philippines is uniquely positioned to serve as a gateway for Greater Bay Area businesses into Southeast Asia, the country’s trade secretary said on Tuesday, as she outlined Manila’s push to promote a pro-investment environment. Speaking at the South China Morning Post’s GBA-Asean Summit 2026, Cristina Aldeguer-Roque urged investors to view the Philippines as a springboard into the region and to tap into the country’s young, digitally fluent workforce. “We are a maritime, demographic and...

Singapore authorities have caught a rider seen in a viral video striking a “Superman” pose while riding an e-bike in the latest of a series of crackdowns. In the video, taken in the early hours of May 23 outside Keppel MRT station, the rider is caught on camera going faster than cars on his vehicle. At one point, he even lies on his stomach with his legs extended as if he is flying. Based on the 170 metres he covered in about 8 seconds, his speed is calculated to be almost 80km/h (50mph). In...

Security around the Malaysia-Thailand border has been tightened after two Malaysian men were wounded in a roadside bomb blast in Narathiwat province, an area riven by a deadly insurgency against Bangkok. While police say the men – Abdullah Syarapi Abd Rahman, 45, and Muhammad Yusri Udin, 38, both from Kelantan – are not believed to have been the target of the improvised explosive device (IED), the incident highlights the dangers of the ongoing conflict in Thailand’s southernmost...

Nepal has culled more than 600,000 birds and destroyed around 1 million eggs as an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu spreads across the Kathmandu Valley, shutting the capital’s only zoo and raising fears among scientists over the virus’ potential to mutate into a form transmissible between humans. The outbreak began in eastern Nepal in March before reaching the densely populated valley around mid-June – a development that health experts say raises the risk of human exposure. More than 60 poultry farms...

We have selected seven stories from the SCMP’s coverage of Asia over the past week 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. Malaysia has never had so many Chinese tourists. It wants more As Thailand loses its allure, Malaysia turns to viral algorithms to entice millions of independent Chinese travellers. 2. Pakistan rattles India with new Chinese-built stealth submarine The last time...

Diners at a sleek teppanyaki restaurant in Tokyo’s Asakusa district wait happily as chefs sear marbled Kobe beef over open grills. Expectations are high at Kisshokichi, one of the world’s largest Kobe beef chains. But behind the brand’s success lies a dilemma shared by businesses across Japan. Founder Kiyomi Akagi, now in his mid-sixties, faced a question confronting a growing number of ageing owners: who would take over? With no successor prepared to manage the company’s 50 restaurants, Akagi...

Esmeraldo Maligsa, a farmer and president of the Bohol Ubi Growers Association, harvests 2,000kg (4,400lbs) of ube, the purple tuber native to the Philippines, every seven months. He and the other farmers in his group manage a collective yield of between five and eight tonnes, fetching prices of 90 pesos to 100 pesos (US$1.50 to US$1.60) per kilogram. Such is the going price for ubi kinampay, dubbed the “Queen of Philippine yams”. Grown in Bohol province and nearby areas in central Philippines,...

Japan is accelerating plans to acquire and develop military drones by stepping up cooperation with Ukraine and learning from Kyiv’s wartime experience against Russia as it seeks to deploy more unmanned systems across its territory. Complementing this strategy, Japanese companies are also collaborating closely with their European counterparts to manufacture anti-submarine drones. “The entire international community has witnessed how warfare has changed since the outbreak of the Ukraine war and...

Australia’s competition regulator said on Tuesday it had taken Amazon’s Australian ‌unit to court, alleging its Prime subscription contracts contained unfair terms that allowed the company to add advertising to its video streaming platform. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleged that between November 2023 and August 2025, Amazon Australia used unfair Prime Video contract terms to make negative changes for over ⁠1 million annual subscribers without offering...

South Korea’s US$518 billion semiconductor push aims to transform the artificial intelligence boom into a durable industrial advantage and keep up with leading rival China, according to observers. The plan is intended to secure supplies of advanced memory chips needed for AI data centres and computing infrastructure, while easing pressure on the Seoul metropolitan area by creating a second major chipmaking base in the country’s southwest. President Lee Jae Myung on Monday unveiled the...

South Korea’s World Cup squad is set to be greeted on arrival by heightened police security rather than the usual airport welcome ceremony, as fury over head coach Hong Myung-bo’s failed campaign spills into online death threats, viral restaurant bans and renewed calls for sweeping changes inside the country’s football establishment. Hong and eight players, including Kim Min-jae, Hwang Hee-chan, Hwang In-beom and Lee Kang-in, were due to arrive at Incheon International Airport on Tuesday morning...