Asia - South China Morning Post

A total of 3,498 properties around critical security facilities and remote islands in Japan were bought by foreign individuals or entities in fiscal 2024, with nearly half from China, a government study showed on Tuesday.

Separately, the government announced it will demand from April 2026 increased disclosure when corporations attempt to acquire forested lands or properties deemed of national security importance, such as requiring them to disclose the nationalities of company heads in...

Standing in the rain outside a suburban Sydney railway station, seventeen-year-old Naveed Akram stares into the camera and urges those watching to spread the word of Islam.

“Spread the message that Allah is one wherever you can … whether it be raining, hailing or clear sky,” he said.

Another since-deleted video posted in 2019 by Street Dawah Movement, a Sydney-based Islamic community group, shows him urging two young boys to pray more frequently.

Authorities are now trying to piece together what...

Economic and political stakes continue to rise from the Thai-Cambodian border conflict as the crucial high season for tourism begins for both countries.

Thailand has imposed an overnight curfew in parts of Trat, the southern Thai province abutting Cambodia and a gateway to several popular resort islands.

Late on Monday, Thai immigration police also announced extra screening of all air arrivals to prevent foreign “mercenaries” from slipping into the country.

Meanwhile, Cambodia alleged the Thai...

Three men had to be rescued after they fell into a 15-metre (50ft) deep well in India on December 5.

The accident happened after the men were involved in a drunken brawl at a funeral ceremony in India’s southern state of Kerala.

The discovery of a Malaysian baby boy left behind a house in Kampung Alor Lintang, Terengganu state’s Kampung Raja on Sunday has revealed a case of incest involving a teenage girl and her younger brother, Sinar Harian reported.

Acting Besut police chief Deputy Superintendent Md Sani Md Saleh told the Malay-language daily that investigations found the baby was the result of an illicit relationship involving the 16-year-old girl and was born in secret.

“Shortly after birth, the baby was reportedly...

Malaysians hit back online this week after Indonesia’s home affairs minister appeared to play down the significance of flood relief Malaysia sent to the neighbouring nation’s disaster-hit Aceh province, where catastrophic floods and landslides on Sumatra’s northern tip have killed more than 1,000 people.

The backlash followed remarks by Home Affairs Minister Tito Karnavian in a podcast clip published on Saturday, which later went viral, in which he said that the medical supplies delivered from...

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. ‘It’s life’: ex-NBA star in Singapore for brain cancer treatment exudes hope

Former National Basketball Association (NBA) centre Jason Collins, who has a deadly form of brain cancer, is undergoing an experimental treatment in Singapore, with those involved in the trial...

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s revival of Tokyo’s claim to islets whose symbolic weight far outweighs their size has rekindled an old dispute that may play well with nationalist supporters at home, but risks derailing hard-won diplomatic progress abroad.

Seoul swiftly shot down Takaichi’s assertion last week that the rocky outcrops, known as Takeshima to Japan and Dokdo to South Korea, belong to Tokyo.

“Dokdo is clearly our inherent territory,” the presidential office said in a...

Crouched between mountains of discarded plastic, Lanh strips the labels off bottles of Coke, Evian and local Vietnamese tea drinks so they can be melted into tiny pellets for reuse.

More waste arrives daily, piling up like technicolour snowdrifts along the roads and rivers of Xa Cau, one of hundreds of “craft” recycling villages encircling Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, where waste is sorted, shredded and melted.

The villages present a paradox: they enable reuse of some of the 1.8 million tonnes of...

The United States and Pakistan are reviving defence and minerals cooperation in a bid to reset their uneasy ties, marking a policy shift that has stirred anxiety in India even as Washington seeks to reassure New Delhi.

Washington has approved hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades for Pakistan’s ageing F-16 fighter jets and opened the door to more than US$1 billion in financing for US companies involved in critical minerals projects in the South Asian nation.

These moves mark the most...