Asia - South China Morning Post

The Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) said on Friday it had suspended its secretary general and will form an independent committee to investigate a “technical error” that led to Fifa, the sport’s world governing body, suspending seven naturalised players of the national team over the alleged use of doctored documents.

During a heated press conference, FAM and its legal team denied it had committed forgery, but declined to address repeated questions from reporters on how the players were...

A US$20 billion plan to build an underground light railway in Indonesia’s Bali has stalled due to wary investors and concerns over land scarcity, throwing into question whether the island’s long-promised solution to solve its notorious traffic gridlock will ever get off the ground.

More than a year after its ceremonial groundbreaking, the “Bali Urban Subway” remains in the feasibility-study phase. Officials once hailed the project as a game changer that would ease congestion and preserve the...

Mongolia’s parliament has voted to oust the prime minister in an unusually public power struggle within the ruling Mongolian People’s Party.

Opponents of Prime Minister Zandanshatar Gombojav managed to pass a controversially worded resolution on Friday that effectively dismissed him from office.

The parliament was also debating a request to resign from its chair, Amarbayasgalan Dashzegve, the prime minister’s chief rival in the internal party struggle.

It was not immediately clear who might...

Three Australians who allegedly shot and killed a fellow countryman on the tourist island of Bali earlier this year have been charged with premeditated murder – an offence that carries the maximum death penalty in Indonesia.

Dubbed the “Bali Three”, the men are accused of planning and carrying out the fatal shooting of Melbourne man Zivan Radmanovic as his wife, Jazmyn Gourdeas, hid under the covers in a villa in the Badung region just after midnight on June 14.

Radmanovic’s brother-in-law,...

Indonesia’s renewed diplomatic engagement with North Korea has raised concerns in Seoul over the possible breach of sensitive technology related to the KF-21, a cutting-edge fighter jet jointly developed with the Southeast Asian nation.

South Korean officials maintain that KF-21 data is protected under existing non-disclosure agreements with Jakarta. Still, critics point to Indonesia’s record on the joint project, including payment delays and leak scandals, which have undermined its...

Police officers might be deployed in all schools and children aged 16 and below could be banned from using smartphones, Malaysia’s government said on Friday, after a string of violent crimes and bullying involving students that shocked the nation and forced the education ministry to admit to a culture of cover-up.

Two cases of gang rape and a murder in three schools in the past fortnight have fuelled parents’ fears for their children’s safety and raised public concerns over a lack of official...

Indonesia’s intent to export durians directly to China in search of higher profits will hinge on mastering the sanitary standards and cold-chain storage that intermediary countries have provided to date, analysts said.

Sudaryono, deputy agriculture minister of the Southeast Asian archipelago, has announced that Indonesia is “actively seeking opportunities” to export directly to China as a way of increasing profits from an average of 10 to 30 per cent, the national news agency Antara reported...

Tokyo police have arrested a man accused of using artificial intelligence to create and sell explicit fake images of female celebrities, in what local media have called Japan’s first criminal case involving AI-generated pornography depicting public figures.

The 31-year-old suspect, Hiroya Yokoi from the northeastern Japanese city of Akita, admitted he began making the deepfakes to earn pocket money and repay a student loan, authorities said on Thursday.

Between last October and September this...

Former prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, who died on Friday aged 101, was best known for his landmark apology for Japan’s World War II aggression 50 years after its surrender, an expression of contrition that became the standard for subsequent leaders.

As head of an unwieldy coalition of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party and his own Socialist Party from 1994 to 1996, the bushy-eyebrowed Murayama oversaw a period of turmoil including a devastating 1995 earthquake in western Japan and a...

Malaysia’s growth unexpectedly accelerated in the third quarter, with the economy firing across all sectors and exports defying US President Donald Trump’s imposition of higher tariffs.

Gross domestic product rose 5.2 per cent in the July-September period from a year earlier, according to advance estimates from Malaysia’s Department of Statistics on Friday. That is faster than even the highest estimate in a Bloomberg survey and exceeds the pace of expansion seen in the previous three...