Asia - South China Morning Post

Smoke from charcoal grills hangs over rows of food stalls as vendors at a Kuala Lumpur mall skewer lamb and pull long strands of noodles by hand, with the smell of cumin and chilli filling the evening air.

At an outdoor area of 1 Utama Shopping Mall, dishes from China’s Muslim heartlands – Lanzhou beef noodles, Xinjiang lamb skewers, hand-grabbed lamb and others – are drawing steady crowds at a Chinese Muslim food festival, now in its third year.

The growing popularity of the festival is a sign...

In the hinterlands of Australia’s historic goldfields, Vicki Plumridge jumps for joy when she digs a small golden nugget out of the earth. The retired retail worker was ‌learning how to use her new metal detector when it started bleeping by the moss-covered ruins of a building.

After Plumridge dug the nugget out of the shallow dirt with a plastic trowel, ‍a guide estimated it was around 0.2 of a gram of gold, worth about A$40 (US$26.58).

“But to me, it’s worth a million dollars,” said the...

Nearly 12 years after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished with 239 people on board, the search for answers to one of aviation’s most haunting riddles resumed on Tuesday in the remote southern Indian Ocean.

Armed with cutting-edge deep-sea robots and smarter data, US investigators are scouring the seabed for clues that have eluded governments, experts and grieving families for more than a decade.

MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur just after midnight on March 8, 2014, bound for Beijing on what...

Sitting on the pavement outside the emergency ward of the National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases in South Delhi’s Mehrauli, Asha promised her son she would not leave his side.

Nineteen-year-old Nitish was reluctant to be admitted to a government hospital, even after doctors said he needed further tests to understand the cause of his sudden breathlessness.

He had been struggling to breathe for two or three days – something he had never experienced before – and his family...

Myanmar’s military junta is staging the country’s first general election since its coup in 2021. Western critics have dismissed it as a “sham”, while the generals have insisted that the polls are “free and fair”.

Posting on X, Tom Andrews, the United Nations rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, called the election “a theatre of the absurd”. He may be right but it is also beside the point.

Andrews was a long-time foreign supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose second-term government was...

The unmistakable smell of durians from rows of trucks laden with the thorny greenish-yellow fruit signals the arrival of the long-awaited season for lovers of the “king of fruits” in Sarawak, Malaysia, boosted by an abundant supply of local durians now flooding the market.

The surplus, particularly of the “kampung” variety from the south of the state, inspired trader Akmal Hakim Saidan, 29, and his siblings to offer rock-bottom prices – as low as 1 ringgit (0.25 US cents) per fruit to draw...

Japan is no stranger to political volatility, often characterised by a rapid turnover of prime ministers, and when Sanae Takaichi took office in October, many had believed her premiership would not last long.

But more than two months later, Takaichi has proved the sceptics wrong and even managed to bring back voters who abandoned the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party and rallied behind far-right groups like the anti-immigrant Sanseito party in the July election.

The LDP under then prime...

Australian authorities on Tuesday said there would be an increased police presence in Sydney on New Year’s Eve, less than three weeks after 15 people were killed in the Bondi terror attack.

More than 2,500 officers will be on high-visibility patrols in Sydney on Wednesday, New South Wales (NSW) Police said in a statement.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said Wednesday would see the “largest deployment of police for a New Year’s Eve celebration ever”.

The measures are in place to help people feel safe,...

How can Australia operate effectively in Asia if fewer Australians can speak regional languages, understand political and cultural dynamics, or build enduring relationships across the region? This question lies at the heart of debates over the nation’s Asia capability and has gained renewed urgency following submissions to the recent parliamentary inquiry into building Asia capability in Australia.

For more than three decades, successive Australian governments have recognised that meaningful...

South Korea said it will formally end its dwindling yet much-criticised bear bile farming industry this week, though about 200 bears are still kept in pens and bred for their gall bladders.

The Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment announced on Tuesday it will ban breeding and possession of bears and extraction of their bile beginning on January 1. The change is in line with a revised animal rights protection law that imposes up to two or five years of prison sentences for violators.

South...