Asia - South China Morning Post

As a rift widens among Republicans over US-Israeli air strikes on Iran, a top Korean-American leader said Seoul must recognise that President Donald Trump is heavily influenced by a faction he calls “new neocons”.

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson broke sharply with the president in a Wall Street Journal interview on Saturday, calling him a “slave” to hawkish interventionists willing to deploy military force.

Kim Dong-seok, the 68-year-old head of the Korean American Grassroots Conference,...

A 24-year-old Malaysian woman has been jailed for two years for throwing her newborn out of her 38th-floor flat in Kuala Lumpur.

The court on Wednesday convicted Lua Mei Zhu of causing the death of her baby girl on February 26, 2025, the New Straits Times reported.

Lua, who is not married, tossed her daughter out of the bathroom window shortly after giving birth between 1.30pm and 9pm.

A resident on the ninth floor called police at about 10.20pm after finding the baby with severe head injuries...

Malaysia’s system for tracking repeat domestic abusers is under scrutiny after police said a man accused of assaulting his pregnant wife until she miscarried had been married nine times and was free on bail while appealing a 10-year jail sentence for attacking another spouse who was previously expecting.

The 43-year-old suspect, named in local media as Rosmaini Abd Raof, was remanded for seven days in Kedah on Wednesday after police arrested him at a homestay in Alor Setar, the northern state’s...

Sri Lanka’s loss-making Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport will need a complete overhaul if it wants to attract investors, analysts warn, after a 30-year lease agreement with an Indo-Russian joint venture failed commercially.

The nation’s second international airport, built with Chinese loan, is located near a wildlife sanctuary on the island’s southern coast. It has no regular flights.

Since opening in 2013, the small airport has failed to generate enough revenue to cover even its...

Viral posts of an Australian street dubbed the country’s “most beautiful” have enticed coachloads of visitors to a picturesque seaside town – and locals have had enough of it.

Just a two-hour drive south of Sydney, Gerringong is much like many other photogenic hamlets along Australia’s east coast, with multimillion-dollar properties set against stunning views of the azure blue sea.

But recent posts on Instagram, TikTok and as far afield as China’s RedNote showing the town’s Tasman Drive have...

Common security interests in the region have led to Japan’s unprecedented sharing of its Mogami-class warships with India, according to analysts.

The move dovetails with New Delhi’s drive to localise industrial and defence production. Enhanced naval capabilities will also allow India to become a “security provider” in the Indian Ocean.

Japan offered India its Mogami design plans and the option to build the frigates in Indian shipyards using Japanese materials, according to recent reports from...

The three Malaysian elephants sent to Osaka in Japan from Zoo Taiping and Night Safari should be brought home, according to Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability Minister Arthur Joseph Kurup.

Arthur made the call amid concerns that Japan’s climate is unsuitable for the elephants and that one of them, Kelat, has suffered an injury.

Last Friday, a group of protesters gathered outside the ministry, urging the government to bring the elephants back.

They cited welfare concerns following...

A French teen is facing mischief and public nuisance charges in Singapore after posting a video on social media of himself licking a straw from an orange juice vending machine and then putting it back.

Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien, 18, was charged on April 24 and has not entered a plea, the city state’s largest English-language newspaper, The Straits Times, said. He allegedly committed the offence at a shopping centre on March 12, and his video spread rapidly when it surfaced, the report...

Philippine authorities have introduced a new national playbook for raiding and prosecuting online scam centres, as criminal networks once tied to the country’s offshore gaming industry splinter into smaller and harder-to-detect operations.

The rules aim to close gaps exposed during earlier raids, when agencies struggled to coordinate evidence, freeze assets, identify trafficking victims and build cases against operators who often left few physical traces.

Analysts and former officials said the...

Indians are now Australia’s largest migrant group, supplanting the English for the first time ever, in a change that highlights the rise of immigration as an increasingly contentious political issue.

Some 971,020 people in Australia – or 5.2 per cent of the population – were born in India, narrowly surpassing the 970,950 born in England, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The England-born population slipped from just over 1 million in 2013.

The third-largest cohort...