Asia - South China Morning Post

Chinese businesses in Indonesia have issued an unusually blunt warning to President Prabowo Subianto that a wave of tougher rules is hurting investor confidence, exposing growing tension between Jakarta’s push for control of the resources sector and foreign capital that has helped power the country’s nickel boom.

Several ministers in Jakarta have pushed back, saying Indonesia must prioritise sovereignty over its natural resources, while stressing the government remains open to dialogue and has...

Ahead of next year’s Apec summit, Vietnam has a grand plan to transform Phu Quoc, its largest island, into Southeast Asia’s leading conference and exhibition hub.

The 137 trillion dong (US$5.2 billion) blueprint includes an airport overhaul, a light-rail line, clusters of luxury hotels and a brand-new sewerage system – much of it paid for by one of the country’s largest conglomerates, in return for tracts of land, operating concessions and the cachet of building national landmarks.

But problems...

A Maldivian military diver died Saturday while searching for the bodies of four Italian divers believed to be deep inside an underwater cave.

The group of five Italian divers is believed to have died while exploring a cave at a depth of about 50 meters (160 feet) in Vaavu Atoll on Thursday, according to Italy’s Foreign Ministry. The recreational diving limit in the Maldives is 30 meters (98 feet).

Maldives presidential spokesman Mohammed Hussain Shareef said that Mohamed Mahudhee, a member of...

A collision between a goods train and a bus killed at least eight people and injured 35 in the Thai capital Bangkok on Saturday, police said.

Firefighters and rescuers cordoned off the collision site, with investigators seen peering into the burnt-out shell of the bus.

Pedestrians were ushered away from the busy downtown intersection, which is used by tens of thousands of vehicles each day.

“Eight people have died and 35 others were injured,” Bangkok police chief Urumporn Koondejsumrit...

Even as Singapore positions itself at the frontier of AI technology, human intelligence still remains critical, according to the city state’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan.

“We should beware of just trying to throw every problem, and every step in a solution, at a large-language model (LLM),” he said on Saturday at the AI Engineer conference, referring to deep-learning technology behind generative AI services such as ChatGPT.

Balakrishnan warned against discarding traditional AI models...

Every dry season, the Teesta River shrinks a little more – and with it, the livelihoods of millions of Bangladeshis who depend on its waters to survive.

Dhaka has been asking India to help for years. Now, it is asking Beijing instead.

Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, who took office in February, formally asked China earlier this month to help with its Teesta River restoration project, Bangladeshi state media reported.

The US$1 billion scheme aims to dredge and rehabilitate more than...

Malaysian police will investigate claims that fugitive financier Jho Low returned to the country for secret meetings.

Inspector-General of Police Mohd Khalid Ismail said the claims that Low, whose full name is Low Taek Jho, had come to Malaysia for meetings had not been verified.

“We have not verified whether the claims are true or otherwise,” he told reporters on Saturday. “We will take appropriate action to investigate the matter further.”

He was commenting on an article by Sarawak Report...

As the ground shook beneath her feet and the powerful tsunami rolled in from the Pacific Ocean on March 11, 2011, Masako Saito feared for her coastal community. Saito’s entire family escaped from Soma City in Japan, where massive waves caused utter devastation, and she could not return to witness the chaos for herself until the following month.

It was “beyond recognition”, according to Saito. The once-thriving community had been largely flattened, replaced by mounds of debris and fishing boats....

For most residents of South Korea’s capital, the Han River is a place for evening strolls, picnics and a brief respite from city life.

But for Kim Jun-young, chief of the Hangang Bridge CCTV Integrated Control Centre in Seoul’s Gwangjin district, it is where his team pulls people back from the edge every day.

Established in 2021, the centre uses AI for comprehensive emergency response, monitoring 900 CCTV cameras across 17 of the 21 pedestrian-accessible Han River bridges. Beyond suicide...

Western social science has made three metaphysical mistakes.

The first was to assume that its laws and lessons were, like the physical sciences, universally applicable to all societies. Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt captured the prevailing zeitgeist well when he wrote in 1983: “The world’s needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenised.”

That may have been true 40 years ago. It is no longer.

One indirect consequence of this assumption – that the whole world was converging towards a...