Asia

Three people, including South Korean soldiers, were injured in a suspected mine blast inside the demilitarised zone (DMZ), South Korea’s Yonhap News TV reported on Monday. The DMZ, which has divided the peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean war ended with an armistice, is among the most heavily mined places in the world. “A soldier was seriously injured during an operation in the DMZ involving the 25th Infantry Division,” a military official said, referring to the buffer zone separating the two...

A fierce 30-minute bidding war for a rare Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama pumpkin bag – seized in Singapore’s S$3 billion (US$2.35 billion) money laundering case – sent its final price soaring on Sunday night. The limited-edition yellow monogram leather piece, which was a collaboration between the luxury fashion house and the Japanese artist who recently died at 97, eventually went under the hammer for an eye-watering S$87,000. A flurry of 42 last-minute bids pushed the closing price to more than...

Japan’s Environment Ministry is stepping up measures against longhorn beetles that are devouring cherry trees, with a request for 6.7 billion yen (US$43 million) to counter invasive species in the next financial year’s initial budget. According to the ministry, the requested amount, which is an increase of 11 times the initial budget of 600 million yen for the 2026 financial year, will be used to eradicate the red-necked longhorn beetle and strengthen measures to protect trees, including plum...

Tribal leader Petronila Munoz walked across the sweeping Philippine grasslands she has called home for generations, uncertain about its future, as a sprawling tech hub for a US-led initiative takes shape. With little information and no prior consultation, the indigenous chieftain said her Aeta Hungey tribe was uncertain how much of their land could be affected or what would become of the livelihood it provided. “There’s still no clarity,” Munoz said inside the tribe’s traditional meeting hall....

Europe faces a fourth-quarter jet fuel deficit, even as it turns to far-flung suppliers including South Korea, which is set to boost its jet exports to Europe to a four-year high in September, according to analysts and shipping data. The continent has been importing more jet fuel from nations including Nigeria, the United States and Canada since the outbreak of the Iran war over half a year ago, which hit Middle Eastern supplies and cut off around half of Europe’s jet imports. Europe remains...

The Philippines’ rise to upper-middle-income status was supposed to mark a new phase for one of Southeast Asia’s most closely watched emerging economies. Instead, analysts say the milestone has done little to shield the country from short-term pressures weighing on growth: sluggish public spending, delayed infrastructure, high living costs and the fallout from investigations into alleged irregularities in flood control projects. Those strains have left the Philippines looking like a regional...

In early July, China fired a test missile from a nuclear submarine into the South Pacific for the first time, a weapon capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Washington and Canberra were livid. The Pacific has long been the exclusive testing ground for such long-range missiles from the United States. How dare China! The reaction from Pacific island states was more measured. While leaders from Tuvalu, Palau and the Solomon Islands strongly criticised the test, the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum...

The recent opening of a new road bridge between North Korea and Russia may look like a modest infrastructure project. In reality, the 1km stretch across the Tumen River carries implications far beyond the movement of vehicles between two border towns. For China, it is a reminder that its influence over North Korea is no longer as secure as it once appeared and that Russia may be increasingly capable of challenging Beijing’s interests on its northeastern periphery. The bridge, inaugurated on...

North Korea fired two missiles off its eastern coast on Sunday, its second set of tests in roughly a week and days after Pyongyang accused the US of driving tensions on the Korean peninsula through a series of military drills. Nearly three ‌hours after launching a short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) towards the East Sea, or Sea of Japan, on Sunday afternoon, North Korea ‌fired a similar missile, according to South Korea’s defence ministry. If the subsequent launch is confirmed to be a ballistic...

The prospect of United States, Chinese and Russian leaders meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Shenzhen this November has revived the Yalta analogy. Talk of a Trump-Xi-Putin summit – echoing the 1945 meeting that reshaped the world – surfaced during the first Trump term, and speculation returned last year with the 80th anniversary of the second world war. No such meeting occurred. However, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted the two presidents back-to-back in...

Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak said on Sunday that he would remain in Kajang Prison as he and his legal team study the conditions attached to his “conditional pardon”, including the payment of a 50 million ringgit (US$12.3 million) fine before he can be transferred to house arrest. In a statement issued on his behalf by Messrs Shafee & Co, Najib said his transfer to house arrest depended on the conditions of the pardon being fulfilled. “Until the fine is paid to the court, our...

As heatwaves become more frequent and intense across Asia, the region faces a dangerous power paradox. Soaring demand for air conditioning threatens to push electricity grids closer to failure just as extreme heat puts the infrastructure under greater strain, raising the risk of cooling disappearing when people need it most. That risk has been visible across the region this summer. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung called a record heatwave a “national disaster” in August after the death...

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim caused a bit of a stir in India recently with his spirited rendition of a Bollywood classic – a lighthearted moment that also neatly captured his broader push to deepen ties with the South Asian giant. A video of Anwar singing, from memory, Kishore Kumar’s 1965 hit ballad “Khwab Ho Tum Ya Koi Haqeeqat” (“Are you a dream or are you reality?”) was first posted to his social media accounts last Sunday before quickly being picked up by Indian news outlets. The...

When Jordan Seow joined OpenAI in June 2025, he became the company’s first locally hired forward-deployed engineer in Asia-Pacific, joining a Singapore office that then had fewer than 20 employees. The 29-year-old is now part of a fast-growing workforce built in Singapore by the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies. Experts say the city state is emerging as a regional hub – not for training the latest AI models, but for the increasingly crucial task of deploying and adapting them...

A former Australian official’s use of a hypothetical “aggressive Indonesia” to make the case for Aukus at a public inquiry has been called “clumsy diplomacy” by analysts, who say the comments risk reviving old suspicions as Jakarta and Canberra try to strengthen security ties. Michael Pezzullo, a former deputy secretary of strategy in Australia’s defence department, made the remarks in testimony on September 2 to the Aukus Public Inquiry, an independent, crowdfunded review of the trilateral...

For years, the race to build ever more powerful artificial intelligence followed a well-worn Silicon ⁠Valley principle: move fast and break things. But in a series of cascading events over a 10-day stretch, the largest ⁠AI labs found themselves reeling as their own creations threatened to break humanity itself. An Anthropic researcher quit the firm, warning that the pace of AI development poses an existential threat, possibly within a decade. Another researcher at the firm said the odds of human...

A senior ally of Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim announced his resignation from cabinet on Saturday – a day after confidence in the prime minister’s administration took a severe hit when disgraced former leader Najib Razak was allowed to serve out his jail term under house arrest. Anthony Loke, the secretary general of the Democratic Action Party (DAP), said that the party could not accept the decision to allow Najib to complete his sentence in the comfort of his own home. The former prime minister is...

Cloud seeding operations will be carried out in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya following worsening haze conditions in Malaysia, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. The agency said the operations would be scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. “However, the operations are subject to weather conditions and the availability of suitable clouds for the seeding process,” its director general, Meor Ismail Meor Akim, said in a statement on Saturday. The operations will be carried out...

Alina B.K. should have been preparing for her end-of-year university exams, but news of devastating floods along the Nepal–Tibet border kept pulling her back to a troubling question: what kind of future awaits her? The 21-year-old forestry student, who coordinates the Pokhara network of Nepalese Youth for Climate Action, said she struggled to concentrate as reports of death and destruction deepened her fears about a changing climate. “With the floods and deaths happening around us, it is really...

The death toll from an explosion and gun attack at a police headquarters in northern Pakistan rose to at least 31, including 16 police personnel, a senior police official said on Saturday, with fighting ongoing. An attacker rammed an explosives-laden car ‌into the Old Police Lines complex while gunmen stormed the compound on Friday afternoon as officers and ⁠their families were praying in a mosque. The police complex at Kohat, a town of around 220,000 people in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa...

Fears that advanced artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity have dominated global headlines, but in Japan the technology is being used for a sweeter purpose – developing never-before-seen convenience store desserts. For customers tired of the usual egg sandwiches and rice balls, major chains are turning to AI to develop products, including some unexpected flavours. Lawson, one of the country’s biggest convenience store operators, said on Tuesday it would roll out three new food items,...

South Korea’s Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won withdrew his nomination on Saturday following allegations concerning his involvement in a Covid-19 treatment and approval of its clinical trials. “After much deliberation, I decided to step down as the nominee for minister of the justice ministry. I apologise for failing to live up to your expectations,” Kim said during a press conference at the National Assembly. Kim, who said he did not want to add any burden to Lee Jae Myung’s...

Briton Johnny Gibbs has been in Australia for six months, surfing and working part-time – like countless other young people drawn to the country’s pristine beaches and laid-back way of life. He is one of thousands that venture Down Under on so-called “working holiday visas” – a chance to work, and play, in Australia for as long as three years. But the future for some backpackers is now in doubt, following the government’s announcement of plans to cut the number of visas issued – and detain...

Japan’s wartime kamikaze pilots remain among the most recognisable symbols of the Pacific war: young men flying aircraft into Allied ships on missions from which they were not expected to return. Far less well-remembered are the fukuryu – suicide frogmen trained in the closing months of World War II to walk into the sea with mines on bamboo poles, then wait beneath the waves for an Allied invasion fleet. Kanade Hamamoto was one of many Japanese people who had never heard of them, despite...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is caught in an energy policy bind with no easy exit. Cutting Russian oil imports to avoid potential new US tariffs could increase fuel prices ahead of key regional elections, or stress government finances. Maintaining such purchases could cripple Indian exports to its largest market. India, the world’s third-largest oil importer and among the biggest buyers of Russian crude, reacted unusually strongly on Thursday to a US congressional bill that would allow...

In Silicon Valley and beyond, the architects of artificial intelligence are increasingly warning about the risks it poses to humanity. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants the industry to slow down. A former engineer at his company, who also worked at its rival OpenAI, told reporters after quitting earlier this month that he was “genuinely frightened” unchecked AI development might mean “we could all die in the immediate future”. Even Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known...

EOS-05 is a single satellite that is part of a broader imitative of India to strengthen its ISR capabilities.

From church vandalism to grave desecration, assaults against Christian minorities are increasing in the large state of West Bengal since the BJP, an RSS offshoot, came to power in May.

The motivations of individual women who join militant organizations cannot be reduced to a single explanation. The organizational incentives are easier to identify.

The Chinese narrative attempts to erase the independent agency Tibet exercised before 1951, framing Shipki La as a historical link between China and India (not Tibet and India).