Asia - South China Morning Post

A Sydney man said he had received death threats and was “terrified” to leave his home on Monday after his photo was widely shared online as the gunman responsible for the Bondi Beach shooting.

A father and son duo opened fire on a Jewish festival at Australia’s best-known beach on Sunday evening, killing 15 people, including a child, and wounding 42 more.

Authorities have condemned the attack as an act of terrorism, although they have not named the two shooters. Police said one, aged 50, was...

Cambodia accused Thailand on Monday of striking deep inside its territory, bombing areas less than a two-hour drive from the country’s main tourist draw, the centuries-old Angkor temples, in a reignited border conflict.

Dozens of people were killed in five days of fighting in July before a truce was brokered and then broken within months, part of a long-standing conflict rooted in the colonial-era demarcation of the countries’ 800km (500 miles) frontier.

Renewed fighting between the Southeast...

Numbers do not always tell the whole story. But they are revealing nonetheless. In 2013, direct investment transaction volumes in India’s commercial property sector stood at around US$1.3 billion. By contrast, in China (excluding Hong Kong), investment activity reached US$27 billion. In South Korea, transactions stood at US$12.2 billion, data from MSCI shows.

The woefully low level of investment in India – a leading emerging market that at the time was already the world’s third-largest economy...

When Indonesian domestic helper Darwati sent her husband a video from Hong Kong, he had no idea it would be the last time he heard her voice.

Eli Cahyono, 39, picked up his phone in the small hamlet of Bendasari in Indonesia’s Cilacap Regency on November 26 and saw a video message from his wife. Moments later, disbelief turned to panic.

Darwati, 48, was trapped in a blaze tearing through one of the towers at Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district. Through the haze of thick black smoke,...

Malaysia is set to receive 12 pieces of fine art – including works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Henri Matisse – after discussions with US officials to repatriate assets tied to the global corruption scandal at 1MDB.

The works are being held by Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses in the United States and estimated to have a combined value of over US$30 million, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) said in a statement on Saturday. They were purchased by Jasmine Loo, a former...

Malaysian religious authorities are investigating allegations that a 30-year-old woman from a deeply conservative northern state of Kelantan was also married to a second man in neighbouring Thailand, after her sister-in-law made the claims in a social media post.

The controversy erupted on Thursday when a woman who identified herself as Ekin Derahim alleged on Facebook that her brother’s wife had secretly married a second man in Songkhla, Thailand, more than a year earlier without the family’s...

South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk-yeol began plotting to impose martial law barely a year after taking office, aiming to cling to power by provoking a military confrontation with North Korea, special investigators have found.

Announcing the results of a 180-day investigation on Monday, special prosecutor Cho Eun-suk said Yoon and his closest aides had devised a scheme to form a military junta, suspend democratic institutions, seize control of the legislature and judiciary and eliminate all...

Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korea’s supreme leader, has been spotted with what appears to be a Chinese-made foldable phone.

Images released by state media on Sunday showed Kim holding the phone in her right hand during a trip to a hospital opening alongside her brother, Kim Jong-un.

Although the brand name cannot be seen in the picture, the phone closely resembles the Chinese brand Honor’s “Magic” line, advertised as “the world’s thinnest foldable smartphone”.

The V3 model of the...

South Korean police raided the headquarters of the cultlike Unification Church on Monday and named its leader as a suspect in the bribery of several high-profile politicians.

The church, known for its mass weddings, is at the centre of a mounting scandal in South Korea over alleged payments to lawmakers from both ruling and opposition parties.

Prosecutors raided the church’s headquarters in Seoul on Monday as well as the imposing countryside residence of leader Han Hak-ja, who is already on...

Japan’s sharp reduction in funding for a leading international body fighting infectious diseases risks damaging Tokyo’s credibility and long-held “peace diplomacy”, in a move analysts say could give China an opening to expand its influence across developing nations.

The Switzerland-based Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, established in 2002, has saved an estimated 70 million lives in more than 100 countries by boosting testing capacity, surveillance systems, community networks...