Asia - South China Morning Post

India does not have any immediate plans to add coal power generation capacity beyond 2035, a top power ministry official said on Sunday.

“India wants to secure its energy requirements,” Pankaj Agarwal, secretary at the power ministry, said on the sidelines of a power ministry event. “As of 2035, we want to have a coal capacity of 307 gigawatts.”

He said it would be “premature to say what we want to do beyond 2035”.

India this year proposed increasing its coal power capacity by 46 per cent from...

Bangladeshi police began exhuming a mass grave on Sunday that is believed to contain around 114 unidentified victims of a mass uprising that toppled autocratic former prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year.

The UN-supported effort is being advised by Argentine forensic anthropologist Luis Fondebrider, who has led recovery and identification missions at mass graves worldwide for decades.

The bodies were buried at the Rayerbazar Graveyard in Dhaka by the volunteer group Anjuman Mufidul Islam,...

Indian regulators held IndiGo’s chief executive accountable for the severe disruptions that have roiled the country’s biggest airline in recent days, faulting the company for “significant lapses in planning, oversight and resource management.”

The Director General of Civil Aviation issued a show-cause notice on Saturday demanding CEO Pieter Elbers explain the cancellations that affected almost half of its flights the day before, adding that “you have failed in your duty to ensure timely...

In the tumultuous days before Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965, founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew clung to the hope that the city could still be part of the federal government under a looser arrangement, but his deputy had no desire to pursue this ideal.

While Lee was conflicted and even wavered at the eleventh hour when he asked then Malaysian prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman if he was certain there was no alternative, Goh Keng Swee, widely regarded as the architect of modern...

Sri Lankan authorities issued fresh landslide warnings on Sunday, with rains lashing areas already devastated by a powerful cyclone as the death toll rose to 627.

A chain of tropical storms and monsoonal rains has battered Southeast and South Asia, setting off landslides, flooding vast tracts and cutting off communities, from the rainforests of Sumatra to Sri Lanka’s highland plantations.

At least 1,812 people have been killed in the natural disasters rolling across Sri Lanka, Indonesia,...

Vijay Andrews arrived in Singapore determined to compete again.

The 32-year-old Indian fitness coach had spent months recovering from an injury that kept him out of New Delhi’s July Hyrox fitness competition. So when he learned there would be another edition in Singapore in November, he seized the opportunity.

“Singapore was geographically the closest country where a Hyrox was soon happening,” Andrews said. “I love travelling and I love fitness, so it worked out very well for me.”

He was one of...

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sailor who shoots an albatross is forced to hang it around his neck as penance, with the bird becoming a heavy burden and a reminder of his guilt.

This metaphor was invoked by Goh Keng Swee, widely regarded as the “economic architect” of modern Singapore, as his code name for Malaysia in his file of personal notes on Singapore’s separation from its northern neighbour in August 1965.

Almost all of the newly declassified...

Once a symbol of the all-American road trip, recreational vehicles (RVs) are enjoying a surge in popularity in Malaysia as families seek cheaper, more adventurous holidays – and as the government moves to develop more dedicated RV parks and streamline related regulations.

The trend reflects a broader shift across the Asia-Pacific, where a growing middle class in China, Australia and Japan is fuelling demand for road trips and camping holidays, according to market research firm Mordor...

OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue – famous for claiming to have slept with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours as part of a viral stunt earlier this year – has been arrested in Bali alongside over a dozen men for allegedly violating Indonesia’s “morality” laws.

The 26-year-old British content creator, real name Tia Billinger, remains in custody in Kuta, as does a 28-year-old Australian male and a pair of British men, according to Australia’s 9News. Fourteen others, all from Australia, have since been...

Western analysts often frame automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics as an existential threat to workers, with the risk of impending unemployment potentially triggering economic unrest.

However, 74 per cent of all industrial robots deployed last year were in Asia, where they do not appear to be replacing workers but are instead redefining roles amid innovative modes for production and higher efficiency.

As digital factories become ubiquitous, countries such as Vietnam and China are...