Asia - South China Morning Post

A typical day for Aizat Halim begins at 5am, as he sets out on a drive to his fruit farm in Janda Baik, about 50km (30 miles) from his home in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur – a distance that reflects the gap between his current and former lives.

Farming, the 31-year-old said, was always his first career choice, despite graduating in marketing from colleges in the US and the United Kingdom.

In 2020, he started a pineapple farm on family land, leaving a cushy air-conditioned job as a marketing...

A 12-year-old boy was fighting for his life in hospital after being mauled by a large shark in Sydney Harbour, police in Australia said on Monday.

The boy had been jumping off rocks with friends late on Sunday afternoon at Shark Beach in Vaucluse, around 9km (5.5 miles) from the central business district, when he was attacked by the shark.

He ‍was pulled from the water by friends and emergency services with ‍severe injuries to both legs, and remains in a critical condition.

“It was a horrendous...

Just under a third of Singapore residents in a recent survey by global communication firm Edelman believe that the next generation would be better off than the current one – a drop of 11 percentage points from last year’s findings.

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 figures showed Singapore as being among four other Asian countries that registered a double-digit decrease, with the city state’s 31 per cent mark just under the global average of 32 per cent.

The 26th edition of the annual survey,...

Talk of the United States acquiring Greenland has often been dismissed as rhetorical provocation. But the latest escalation is harder to wave away. President Donald Trump said it would be “unacceptable” if the US did not control Greenland only hours before Vice-President J.D. Vance hosted the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers.

When territorial language is paired with senior-level diplomacy, it forces allies to draw public red lines, narrows the space for quiet crisis management, and turns...

The number of firearms in Australia reached an all-time high of more than 4 ‌million in 2025, the centre-left government reported on Sunday, ‍a day after saying it would introduce a gun reform bill in parliament in response to the Bondi massacre.

There were a record 4,113,735 guns in Australia last year, with ⁠1,158,654 of those in the most populous state of New South Wales where the Bondi attack took place, the government said, citing Department of Home Affairs data.

The Labour government on...

Indonesian authorities said on Sunday they had located the wreckage of a fisheries surveillance plane that went missing in South Sulawesi province on the slope of a fog-covered mountain, and had recovered the body of one of the 10 people on board.

The ATR 42-500 turboprop owned by aviation group Indonesia Air Transport lost contact with air traffic control on Saturday at about 1.30pm local time around the Maros ⁠region in South Sulawesi.

There were seven crew members and three passengers on...

The latest developments in Venezuela are interpreted as part of a broader US strategy to secure access to major oil resources. They are much more than that: the US raid signals a transformation in the global economy wherein a country’s power is increasingly determined not by its political actions, but by its capacity to embed resource wealth within a self-sustaining production system.

These deeper processes did not begin today, but rather around 2008-2009 when, according to an integrated...

South Korea has begun deploying its most powerful conventional ballistic missile, the Hyunmoo-5 – dubbed the “monster missile” for its massive warhead – to frontline units, military officials said on Sunday, a move that underscores Seoul’s effort to strengthen deterrence against North Korea.

The ground-to-ground missile, capable of carrying a warhead of up to eight tonnes, began entering frontline units late last year and is expected to complete full operational deployment before the current...

A peculiar gridlock has settled on Singapore’s political scene with the position of Leader of the Opposition (LO) vacant after Pritam Singh was removed from the post by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, with public discourse now centred on the constitutional basis, or lack thereof, for the role.

Created in 2020 by then prime minister Lee Hsien Loong after Singh’s party won a record 10 seats in parliament, the non-statutory position contrasts sharply with its counterpart in Westminster systems, where...

Somewhere on the cavernous loft floor, cooing softly from inside a stack of crates, a feathered fortune waits for its moment to shine.

It’s “basketing day” for Asia’s richest pigeon race, held in Pattaya, eastern Thailand. In 24 hours’ time, a US$2 million prize pot will be shared among the lucky owners of the birds that find their way home.

For now, those hopes are packed tightly, wing to wing, into crates: more than 5,000 perfectly conditioned racers waiting to be scanned, logged and stamped...