Asia

Australian police ⁠said on Thursday they have found a ⁠body believed to be that of a missing five-year-old indigenous girl and were searching for the man who allegedly murdered her. The girl, now referred to by her family as Kumanjayi Little Baby in line with Indigenous customs, was reported missing from her home in ‌a remote community in central Australia late on Saturday. Police said they located a body of a young Indigenous girl they believed was hers shortly before midday on Thursday about...

A viral appearance in the swimsuit round by a male beauty pageant contestant in the Philippines has sparked a wider debate about male beauty standards and whether pageantry is ready to make room for people who do not fit its traditional ideals. RJ Perkins, 21, drew widespread attention after a video showed him strutting across an outdoor stage during the swimwear segment of Mister Pampanga, held in the province of Pampanga, north of Manila. Unlike the chiselled bodies typically associated with...

As a rift widens among Republicans over US-Israeli air strikes on Iran, a top Korean-American leader said Seoul must recognise that President Donald Trump is heavily influenced by a faction he calls “new neocons”. Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson broke sharply with the president in a Wall Street Journal interview on Saturday, calling him a “slave” to hawkish interventionists willing to deploy military force. Kim Dong-seok, the 68-year-old head of the Korean American Grassroots Conference,...

A 24-year-old Malaysian woman has been jailed for two years for throwing her newborn out of her 38th-floor flat in Kuala Lumpur. The court on Wednesday convicted Lua Mei Zhu of causing the death of her baby girl on February 26, 2025, the New Straits Times reported. Lua, who is not married, tossed her daughter out of the bathroom window shortly after giving birth between 1.30pm and 9pm. A resident on the ninth floor called police at about 10.20pm after finding the baby with severe head injuries...

Malaysia’s system for tracking repeat domestic abusers is under scrutiny after police said a man accused of assaulting his pregnant wife until she miscarried had been married nine times and was free on bail while appealing a 10-year jail sentence for attacking another spouse who was previously expecting. The 43-year-old suspect, named in local media as Rosmaini Abd Raof, was remanded for seven days in Kedah on Wednesday after police arrested him at a homestay in Alor Setar, the northern state’s...

Sri Lanka’s loss-making Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport will need a complete overhaul if it wants to attract investors, analysts warn, after a 30-year lease agreement with an Indo-Russian joint venture failed commercially. The nation’s second international airport, built with Chinese loan, is located near a wildlife sanctuary on the island’s southern coast. It has no regular flights. Since opening in 2013, the small airport has failed to generate enough revenue to cover even its...

Viral posts of an Australian street dubbed the country’s “most beautiful” have enticed coachloads of visitors to a picturesque seaside town – and locals have had enough of it. Just a two-hour drive south of Sydney, Gerringong is much like many other photogenic hamlets along Australia’s east coast, with multimillion-dollar properties set against stunning views of the azure blue sea. But recent posts on Instagram, TikTok and as far afield as China’s RedNote showing the town’s Tasman Drive have...

Common security interests in the region have led to Japan’s unprecedented sharing of its Mogami-class warships with India, according to analysts. The move dovetails with New Delhi’s drive to localise industrial and defence production. Enhanced naval capabilities will also allow India to become a “security provider” in the Indian Ocean. Japan offered India its Mogami design plans and the option to build the frigates in Indian shipyards using Japanese materials, according to recent reports from...

The three Malaysian elephants sent to Osaka in Japan from Zoo Taiping and Night Safari should be brought home, according to Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability Minister Arthur Joseph Kurup. Arthur made the call amid concerns that Japan’s climate is unsuitable for the elephants and that one of them, Kelat, has suffered an injury. Last Friday, a group of protesters gathered outside the ministry, urging the government to bring the elephants back. They cited welfare concerns following...

A French teen is facing mischief and public nuisance charges in Singapore after posting a video on social media of himself licking a straw from an orange juice vending machine and then putting it back. Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien, 18, was charged on April 24 and has not entered a plea, the city state’s largest English-language newspaper, The Straits Times, said. He allegedly committed the offence at a shopping centre on March 12, and his video spread rapidly when it surfaced, the report...

Philippine authorities have introduced a new national playbook for raiding and prosecuting online scam centres, as criminal networks once tied to the country’s offshore gaming industry splinter into smaller and harder-to-detect operations. The rules aim to close gaps exposed during earlier raids, when agencies struggled to coordinate evidence, freeze assets, identify trafficking victims and build cases against operators who often left few physical traces. Analysts and former officials said the...

Indians are now Australia’s largest migrant group, supplanting the English for the first time ever, in a change that highlights the rise of immigration as an increasingly contentious political issue. Some 971,020 people in Australia – or 5.2 per cent of the population – were born in India, narrowly surpassing the 970,950 born in England, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The England-born population slipped from just over 1 million in 2013. The third-largest cohort...

Brics nations are assessing whether a digital payments framework linking their currencies could lessen the impact of Western sanctions, tariffs and US dollar volatility without destabilising the Washington-led global financial system. Under the plan proposed by India’s central bank, Brics is looking to allow cross-border transactions to be settled in local currencies. Its feasibility depends on how far the bloc’s members can lessen their reliance on Western-controlled payment channels without...

Can tourism be considered successful if arrivals increase, but the local communities – the very soul of the destination – feel strained and excluded? Too often, tourism success is measured in arrivals, occupancy and revenue. These numbers matter. But they tell only a fraction of the story. We must ask: who is this success really for? Traditional growth metrics are no longer sufficient to protect the residents who host the world or the workers who power the experience. To prevent cultural...

The pace of tropical forest destruction slowed in 2025 after record losses the year before but remained at worrying levels equivalent to 11 football fields per minute, researchers said Wednesday. The world lost 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres) of tropical primary rainforest last year, down 36 per cent from 2024, said researchers from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland. “A drop of this scale in a single year is encouraging – it shows what decisive...

Even if the immediate phase of conflict subsides, the Gulf is unlikely to return to the status quo. For Asia, the central question is no longer simply whether the Strait of Hormuz is open. It is whether the waterway remains reliable, predictable and politically insulated from coercion. That distinction now matters more than ever. For China and other major Asian importers, it is a question of whether energy flows, shipping routes and sanctions exposure are increasingly being shaped by a crisis...

Perched on the bow of his long-tail fishing boat, 75-year-old Sukjai Yana untangled a handful of small fish from his net, disappointed by his catch and fretting over whether he can sell them. Some days Sukjai earns nothing: demand for fish is falling due to worries over contamination of the Mekong River and its tributaries by toxic run-off from rare earth mines upstream that is threatening millions who rely on those waters for farms and fisheries. Chiang Saen, a fishing hub in northern Thailand,...

Indonesia’s new legislation to protect domestic helpers has been hailed by rights groups as the beginning of a “new chapter” for millions – though they warn that the road to change remains long and winding. On April 21, Indonesia’s House of Representatives passed the domestic worker protection bill into law, 22 years since it was first proposed. The legislation “provides legal certainty, protects workers from various forms of unfair treatment, and encourages improvements in the skills and...

New Zealand officials rejected on Wednesday an application to install a statue commemorating so-called “comfort women” enslaved by Japan before and during World War II after Tokyo suggested it could harm diplomatic relations. Japan forced up to 200,000 women from Korea, China and Southeast Asia into sexual slavery from 1932 until 1945 and the issue remains a sore point in Tokyo’s relations with its neighbours. The Korean Garden Trust had sought to install a statue honouring the survivors at...

One of Japan’s most popular zoos has delayed its reopening after an employee reportedly told police he had burned his wife’s body in an incinerator on its grounds. Asahiyama Zoo in Hokkaido’s second-largest city of Asahikawa, which had been closed for a seasonal break since April 8, was set to reopen on Wednesday, a national holiday. But the date has been pushed back to at least Friday to allow police to search for the body, according to The Asahi Shimbun newspaper. At a news conference on...

South Korea’s jailed former president Yoon Suk-yeol had his prison sentence increased on Wednesday in a separate case linked to his failed martial law decree, in what analysts said could be a “bellwether” for the trials still unfolding from the crisis. The Seoul High Court raised Yoon’s sentence from five years to seven for obstruction of justice and other offences after finding that he used presidential security agents to block investigators trying to arrest him over the December 2024...

Thailand is turning to live-streamers to clear a looming durian glut, slashing prices as weaker Chinese demand threatens its biggest export market. Top online seller Pimradaporn Benjawattanapat, or Pimrypie, led a high-energy live stream on Tuesday night, pitching to her combined 31 million TikTok and Facebook followers. Known for selling everything from her own-brand fish sauce to luxury perfumes, Pimrypie priced premium Monthong at as low as 100 baht (US$3) per fruit, well below typical market...

Being a Malaysian Indian is apparently a good indication that you are unlikely to fall for a scam. Police have found that potential victims from the ethnic group are more than likely to frustrate scammers with a barrage of questions. Malaysians lost an estimated 2.7 billion ringgit (US$684 million) to online scams last year alone, according to data from cybersecurity firm Fortinet Malaysia – a 76 per cent increase from the previous year – as syndicates adopt increasingly sophisticated methods...

Thailand’s vision for a land bridge splits opinion: some see it as a crucial new Asian trade route for a global economy held hostage by geography, while others view it as an expensive and environmentally ruinous distraction for a kingdom with plenty already on its plate. But to its backers, the proposed road and rail corridor, bookended by ports on the Gulf of Thailand and another 90km (56 miles) away on the Andaman Sea, to bypass a vital chokepoint, has never felt more urgent. Iran’s virtual...

Singapore ground handler SATS has apologised after one of its employees was filmed tossing passengers’ luggage onto a conveyor belt at Changi Airport, in a video that drew scrutiny partly because Changi has long been ranked among the world’s best airports. SATS is a separate aviation services company that provides ground-handling services at Changi, which is operated by Changi Airport Group. The minute-long video, posted on social media on Sunday, showed a worker in a blue shirt moving large...

India’s major airlines warned of a potential suspension in services unless the government lowered jet fuel prices. “The airline industry in India is under extreme stress and on the verge of closing down or of stopping its operations,” the Federation of Indian Airlines, representing carriers including IndiGo, Air India and SpiceJet, said in a letter to India’s Civil Aviation Ministry, seen by Bloomberg. They sought a return to pandemic-era cost caps on aviation turbine fuel and a reduction or...

Asia’s oil import-dependent economies will benefit from the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) exit from Opec, though the ongoing closure of the arterial Strait of Hormuz may not offer any immediate relief from soaring prices, analysts say. Global oil prices continued to surge on Wednesday, with benchmark Brent crude oil prices hitting US$111 a barrel and US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) approaching US$100 a barrel. Before the Iran war, Brent was trading around US$70 a barrel, while WTI was about US$65...

Plans to build a mosque in Fujisawa, a city southwest of Tokyo, have become the latest flashpoint for Muslim communities in Japan, as a growing need for places of worship meets resistance from some local residents. Muslim community leaders and scholars say the opposition in Fujisawa reflects a broader pattern in Japan, where resistance to mosques has increasingly been shaped by negative overseas coverage of Islam and claims spread on social media. A public meeting in February called to allow...

When Lee Kun-hee, the patriarch behind Samsung Electronics, died in 2020, his dynasty soon dealt with a crisis on two fronts: first, a multibillion-dollar inheritance tax. The following year, his son Jay Y. Lee was jailed after being convicted of bribing South Korea’s former president Park Geun-hye to win support for his succession. At the time, some observers speculated that the sheer scale of one of the world’s largest death levies could threaten the family’s control over the...

Shortly after completing a bachelor’s degree in 2023, Warren Neo considered doing what many business graduates in Singapore do: look for a corporate job. Instead, he became a full-time barista. “I considered going into human resources, since that was what I specialised in at university, but I discovered my interest in making coffee during my part-time job,” said Neo, 29, who majored in business at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. “I gave myself a chance to pursue being a barista...