Asia - South China Morning Post

Late one night in southern Nepal last month, whispers spread of an unusual wedding taking place. Inside a modest home, an 18-year-old girl was about to be wed to a Chinese national nearly twice her age.

The match was illegal. Nepal’s minimum age for marriage is 20, and the bride’s youth alarmed onlookers. Police were called and the ceremony in Bara district was swiftly brought to a halt.

But the episode shone a spotlight on the trafficking of young Nepali women into marriage with Chinese...

Every quarter, Knight Frank publishes an index tracking the movement of prime residential prices and rents in leading cities around the world. Although the index is just a snapshot that should be treated with caution given significant differences in the performance of submarkets within cities, its findings are nevertheless revealing.

In the sales market, five of the six cities with the fastest growth in prices last quarter were in Asia. In Tokyo, prices rose a staggering 56 per cent on an...

Malaysia’s former economy minister Rafizi Ramli has renewed his attack on Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s reformist agenda, alleging that anti-corruption officers targeted candidates who challenged the leader’s daughter in internal party polls earlier this year.

In an episode of his Yang Berhenti Menteri (The Minister Who Quit) podcast streamed on Friday, the Pandan MP and former Anwar ally alleged that the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) had investigated several contenders for the...

The first giant panda cub born in Indonesia is noisy, nursing well and showing other signs of good health, the conservation park where he was born said on Sunday.

Indonesian Safari Park released video and photos showing the fuzzy newborn in an incubator and squirming and squealing while being cuddled by his mother.

The mother, 15-year-old Hu Chun, gave birth to Satrio Wiratama - nicknamed Rio - on November 27 at the park in Cisarua, West Java province.

The name symbolises the hope, resilience,...

Japan has dropped out of plans to build a major nuclear power plant in Vietnam because the time frame is too tight, Japanese ambassador Naoki Ito told Reuters, potentially complicating Vietnam’s long-term strategy to avoid new power shortages.

Vietnam, home to large manufacturing operations for multinationals including Samsung and Apple, has faced major power blackouts as demand from its huge industrial sector and expanding middle class often outpaces supplies, strained by increasingly frequent...

Thailand launched air strikes on Cambodian military positions on Monday after a Thai soldier was killed, pushing a shaky US-brokered truce to the brink of collapse as it vowed to cripple its neighbour’s ability to fight back over the shared frontier.

Each side accused the other of shattering the peace by mounting attacks on border bases and personnel over the weekend, in the fiercest eruption of hostilities for months between the Southeast Asian neighbours.

The violence has forced thousands of...

An Australian firefighter was killed overnight after he was struck by a tree while trying to control a bushfire that had destroyed homes and burnt large swathes of bushland north of Sydney, authorities said on Monday.

Emergency crews rushed to bushland near the rural town of Bulahdelah, 200km (124 miles) north of Sydney, after reports that a tree had fallen on a man. The 59-year-old suffered a cardiac arrest and died at the scene, officials said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the...

Japan is turning to artificial intelligence to crack down on manga and anime piracy, aiming to stem copyright losses worth trillions of yen and recover revenue from one of its most valuable cultural exports.

The move comes as creators increasingly look to overseas markets for growth amid stagnating manga and anime sales at home, observers say.

A report by the anti-piracy organisation Authorised Books of Japan last month estimated that illegal online distribution had deprived publishers of about...

Younger Japanese are proving to be the most resistant to immigration, defying assumptions that generational change would produce greater cosmopolitanism.

A new survey found that 70 per cent of those aged 18 to 39 expressed safety concerns about foreign workers – higher than any other demographic.

This unexpected reversal reveals a generation grappling with anxieties that cut across conventional narratives of openness and globalisation.

The study by the Yomiuri newspaper and Waseda University’s...

Taking a short cut through Pattaya’s “Scammer Alley”, a neon maze of bars, hotpot restaurants and 24-hour Korean barbecue joints, taxi driver May shakes her head.

The money washing around this Thai resort is so thick with fraud that even her own bank account has been frozen.

“They pay with QR codes linked to mule accounts,” she said, referring to bank accounts legally registered under Thai names but secretly controlled by the foreign cybercriminals who have turned this part of Southeast Asia...