Asia - South China Morning Post

Thailand is turning to live-streamers to clear a looming durian glut, slashing prices as weaker Chinese demand threatens its biggest export market.

Top online seller Pimradaporn Benjawattanapat, or Pimrypie, led a high-energy live stream on Tuesday night, pitching to her combined 31 million TikTok and Facebook followers.

Known for selling everything from her own-brand fish sauce to luxury perfumes, Pimrypie priced premium Monthong at as low as 100 baht (US$3) per fruit, well below typical market...

Being a Malaysian Indian is apparently a good indication that you are unlikely to fall for a scam. Police have found that potential victims from the ethnic group are more than likely to frustrate scammers with a barrage of questions.

Malaysians lost an estimated 2.7 billion ringgit (US$684 million) to online scams last year alone, according to data from cybersecurity firm Fortinet Malaysia – a 76 per cent increase from the previous year – as syndicates adopt increasingly sophisticated methods...

Thailand’s vision for a land bridge splits opinion: some see it as a crucial new Asian trade route for a global economy held hostage by geography, while others view it as an expensive and environmentally ruinous distraction for a kingdom with plenty already on its plate.

But to its backers, the proposed road and rail corridor, bookended by ports on the Gulf of Thailand and another 90km (56 miles) away on the Andaman Sea, to bypass a vital chokepoint, has never felt more urgent.

Iran’s virtual...

Singapore ground handler SATS has apologised after one of its employees was filmed tossing passengers’ luggage onto a conveyor belt at Changi Airport, in a video that drew scrutiny partly because Changi has long been ranked among the world’s best airports.

SATS is a separate aviation services company that provides ground-handling services at Changi, which is operated by Changi Airport Group.

The minute-long video, posted on social media on Sunday, showed a worker in a blue shirt moving large...

India’s major airlines warned of a potential suspension in services unless the government lowered jet fuel prices.

“The airline industry in India is under extreme stress and on the verge of closing down or of stopping its operations,” the Federation of Indian Airlines, representing carriers including IndiGo, Air India and SpiceJet, said in a letter to India’s Civil Aviation Ministry, seen by Bloomberg.

They sought a return to pandemic-era cost caps on aviation turbine fuel and a reduction or...

Asia’s oil import-dependent economies will benefit from the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) exit from Opec, though the ongoing closure of the arterial Strait of Hormuz may not offer any immediate relief from soaring prices, analysts say.

Global oil prices continued to surge on Wednesday, with benchmark Brent crude oil prices hitting US$111 a barrel and US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) approaching US$100 a barrel. Before the Iran war, Brent was trading around US$70 a barrel, while WTI was about US$65...

Plans to build a mosque in Fujisawa, a city southwest of Tokyo, have become the latest flashpoint for Muslim communities in Japan, as a growing need for places of worship meets resistance from some local residents.

Muslim community leaders and scholars say the opposition in Fujisawa reflects a broader pattern in Japan, where resistance to mosques has increasingly been shaped by negative overseas coverage of Islam and claims spread on social media.

A public meeting in February called to allow...

When Lee Kun-hee, the patriarch behind Samsung Electronics, died in 2020, his dynasty soon dealt with a crisis on two fronts: first, a multibillion-dollar inheritance tax. The following year, his son Jay Y. Lee was jailed after being convicted of bribing South Korea’s former president Park Geun-hye to win support for his succession.

At the time, some observers speculated that the sheer scale of one of the world’s largest death levies could threaten the family’s control over the...

Shortly after completing a bachelor’s degree in 2023, Warren Neo considered doing what many business graduates in Singapore do: look for a corporate job.

Instead, he became a full-time barista.

“I considered going into human resources, since that was what I specialised in at university, but I discovered my interest in making coffee during my part-time job,” said Neo, 29, who majored in business at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

“I gave myself a chance to pursue being a barista...

There is a time and a place. Just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean you should exercise it. The United States and its allies keep claiming they have the right of navigation in international waters by sending their navies through the Taiwan Strait. Their intention to provoke is clear despite their justification under international law.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s row with Beijing over her remarks about militarily intervening in a Taiwan crisis has yet to die down....