Asia - South China Morning Post

When Indonesian farmer Sutiono, 43, saw news footage of the towering inferno at Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong on November 26, he immediately called his wife, Siti Khotimah, 40, knowing she worked at the estate.

He had spoken to her just hours earlier on that fateful day. She seemed upbeat and was looking forward to returning home for the first time in seven years. Their daughter’s 11th birthday was only a day away.

Khotimah had come to Hong Kong to work as a domestic helper and raise money for her...

The Philippines will move to dismantle the “syndicate” that pilfered public funds while ramping up infrastructure spending early next year to revive the economy, according to a key cabinet official.

The Department of Public Works and Highways will cleanse its ranks to ensure the corruption scandal it is currently embroiled in would not happen again, Secretary Vince Dizon said.

“This syndicate has been here for so long,” Dizon said in an interview on Tuesday. “That’s why it’s very hard to destroy...

In an unprecedented move, Cambodia has withdrawn its entire delegation from the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand, citing safety concerns amid renewed border clashes between the two neighbours.

The Cambodian team had attended the opening ceremony of the 33rd SEA Games in Bangkok on Tuesday, but the decision to pull out came a day later amid deadly fighting along the frontier.

The Games, which run until December 20, are being held in Bangkok and the Thai provinces of Chonburi and Songkhla.

At...

India’s largest airline is experiencing its toughest crisis in years after cancelling thousands of flights amid a severe pilot shortage – a result of its failure to hire enough staff to meet new government rules designed to combat pilot fatigue.

Analysts say the turmoil at IndiGo highlights the structural challenges faced by a fast-growing aviation market currently dominated by just two carriers.

About 3,000 IndiGo flights were cancelled last week, including more than 1,000 on Friday, accounting...

President Donald Trump said he plans to reach out to the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia as more than half a million people flee a revived border clash, one of eight conflicts the US leader says he has ended with tariff threats.

Fighting between the Southeast Asian neighbours, which has killed at least 11 people, erupted over the weekend along their 800km frontier, with both sides exchanging artillery fire and Thailand using F-16 fighter jets after accusing Cambodia of firing rockets into...

South Korea’s recent moves to lower tensions with Pyongyang – from removing its propaganda loudspeakers to downplaying the North’s human rights record – may ease frictions on the peninsula, but analysts say they are unlikely to help restart stalled denuclearisation talks between North Korea and the US.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un continues to spurn engagement with US President Donald Trump, while Washington appears to have shifted its focus away from curbing Pyongyang’s expanding nuclear...

A woman who wanted to lodge a report after a traffic accident was barred from entering the Jasin police headquarters in Malaysia’s Melaka state due to a dress code violation, according to police.

Melaka police chief Deputy Commissioner Dzulkhairi Mukhtar said an internal inquiry was held after the matter was brought to light.

“We confirm the incident involving a woman being not allowed to enter to make a report due to non-compliance with the dress code for government premises as per a government...

The global artificial intelligence community’s attention was recently focused on DeepSeek’s latest open-source model, Math-V2, the first open-source AI model to score a gold medal-level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad. But while California might hone in on the test scores, Jakarta and Nairobi are looking at something else entirely.

For the Global South, the critical question is more likely to be whether that reasoning capability can optimise fertiliser distribution in a...

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is set to speak with a top Indonesian official this week in hopes of salvaging a trade framework at risk of collapsing, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

Greer will speak to Airlangga Hartarto, the Indonesian coordinating minister for economic affairs, in an effort to revive a deal struck in July that would see US tariffs on Indonesian goods reduced from a threatened 32 per cent to 19 per cent in exchange for a series of concessions.

But US officials...

South Korea’s decision to return its presidential office to the Blue House, undoing Yoon Suk-yeol’s costly relocation, has reopened old questions over the superstitions said to have driven the impeached ex-president’s decision.

The move is widely viewed as rolling back a legacy tarnished by the former leader’s failed attempt to impose martial law last year. Yoon had insisted on moving his office despite the high costs to taxpayers and security concerns.

“The presidential office will leave behind...