At Asean’s first ever artificial intelligence summit in Kuala Lumpur recently, YTL AI Labs, in partnership with the University of Malaya, launched a large language model (LLM) called ILMU – which translates from Malay into English as “knowledge” but is used in this instance by the developers as a Malay acronym. Billed as Malaysia’s first, fully sovereign AI model with data locally hosted, managed and governed, ILMU has been trained on local, contextualised data and outperforms global...

US President Donald Trump said on Monday that India has offered to reduce its tariffs on American goods to zero, even as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was making public shows of solidarity with Chinese and Russian leaders in the face of trade pressure from Washington.

While calling the US relationship with India “one-sided”, Trump wrote on social media: “They have now offered to cut their Tariffs to nothing, but it’s getting late. They should have done so years ago.”

The Indian embassy in...

Crime drama Countdown on Amazon Prime Video has drawn criticism for its perceived inaccurate portrayal of Singapore and its citizens in an episode last month.

In the 47-minute show, two American detectives question “Singaporean” Kieran Teo, played by American actor Brian Yang, at his office in Los Angeles after a murder takes place on company property.

The fictional company is called Beruang Holdings, with the characters revealing it is 60 per cent owned by Singapore’s ruling People’s Action...

A correction order under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) has been issued to US comedian Sammy Obeid after a row over his cancelled Singapore show.

“Mr Obeid’s account of protracted back-and-forth interactions with the government is inaccurate,” the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) said on Monday.

“In his posts, he claims that the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) requested edits, told him to ‘completely remove’ portions of his...

Japan and South Korea sweltered this year through the hottest summers since records began, their weather agencies said on Monday.

Temperatures the world over have soared in recent years as climate change creates ever more erratic weather patterns.

Japan’s average temperature between June and August “was 2.36 degrees Celsius above the standard value, which marked the hottest summer since records began in 1898”, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The agency did not disclose what the new...

India’s stronger-than-expected economic growth of 7.8 per cent in the April–June quarter has been hailed by leaders as a resounding retort to US President Donald Trump’s claim that the country’s economy is “dead”, even as experts warn that retaliatory tariffs from Washington could weigh on the outlook.

Bilateral ties have plummeted recently after Trump enacted a 50 per cent import tariff on India last week, doubling a 25 per cent import tariff as a penalty for New Delhi’s purchase of sanctioned...

South Korea’s retail investors are losing faith in Tesla’s stock, ramping up their selling last month amid growing disillusionment with the electric carmaker and rising interest in cryptocurrencies.

Individual investors in South Korea sold a net US$657 million of Tesla stock in August, the largest outflow since at least early 2023, according to Bloomberg calculations of depository data.

Investors have instead favoured even more volatile bets such as Bitmine Immersion Technologies, seen as a...

Government measures to deter foreign buyers from purchasing residential properties are by no means the preserve of Asian economies. In February 2024, Canada extended a nationwide ban on most foreign buyers until 2027 in an effort to curb speculation and improve affordability. In the US, a growing number of states, including Texas and Florida, have passed laws barring nationals from several countries, notably China and Russia, from acquiring land and property.

Yet in the most liveable cities in...

As Vietnam celebrates the 80th anniversary of its declaration of independence from colonial rule this week, French cultural influence remains ubiquitous, but not many people in the Southeast Asian nation are aware of its prevalence.

A massive military parade will herald on Tuesday the independence proclaimed by revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh on September 2, 1945, which was meant to end nearly a century of French rule but instead started a decade-long war until the defeated French eventually...

Shares of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix slid on Monday after the Trump administration decided to make it harder for the world’s largest memory chipmakers to ship critical equipment to their giant Chinese operations.

The surprise ruling deals a potential blow to their production in the world’s largest semiconductor market. While both South Korean companies have memory plants in their home market, China accounts for a major slice of their global output.

Samsung sank more than 2 per cent, while...