Asia - South China Morning Post

He was your friendly neighbourhood uncle, polite and pleasant. He even brought fruits and vegetables from his orchard for people in the area.

So, when the 71-year-old Malaysian man was arrested for shooting three people dead, it came as a shock for many in Taman Kota Jaya, Johor.

Hamzah Kamat, who runs a restaurant in front of the food court where the incident took place, said the man used to go there, and sometimes even brought fruits from his orchard.

“He is a nice uncle who never caused any...

Reports of friction inside Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party suggest Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s biggest political challenge may now lie not with the opposition, but within her own party.

Despite her strong public standing following February’s general election, reports have grown louder that Takaichi is clashing with the LDP’s influential old guard – notably former prime minister Taro Aso.

Japanese tabloids, which are often more willing than the mainstream press to air insider...

Iran’s firing on two Indian-flagged oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz has raised fresh questions about how far Tehran can protect even friendly shipping as the conflict pushes closer to maritime chaos.

The attack on Saturday has been especially awkward for Tehran because New Delhi is not an adversary and still maintains working ties, including renewed oil purchases in recent weeks under a temporary US sanctions waiver.

Analysts said the attack on Jag Arnav and Sanmar Herald was likely a case...

Indonesia says it is not choosing sides. That is true in diplomacy. It is less true on the map. The “major defence cooperation partnership” announced by Washington and Jakarta on April 13 is written in the safe language of official communiques: capacity building, education, exercises, cooperation. But the harder meaning lies beneath the phrasing.

The most important line in this new defence partnership is not the reassuring one about “peace and stability”. It is the one about “maritime,...

A reported US pullback in intelligence-sharing with South Korea has exposed a new trust gap between the allies after Unification Minister Chung Dong-young publicly mentioned a suspected North Korean uranium-enrichment site.

Washington viewed Chung’s remark as disclosing sensitive information about Kusong – a site long discussed in outside analyses, but not previously identified publicly by a South Korean official in such terms – and responded by reducing the intelligence it shared with Seoul,...

Government forces in the central Philippines have killed at least 10 Maoist guerrillas in several gun battles, the military said on Monday, in a deadly flare-up of the decades-old insurgency.

Troops were fighting “remnants” of the New People’s Army (NPA) rebel group on Sunday near the municipality of Toboso on Negros island, the regional military command said.

The exact number of dead rebels was uncertain, with Philippine Army spokesman Colonel Louie Dema-ala in Manila saying as many as 19 might...

A cautious reset in India-China relations is taking root, according to analysts, with the two rivals increasingly walling off their border disputes from expanding cooperation on trade, security and multilateral diplomacy.

The clearest marker yet came last week in New Delhi, where the two sides held their first-ever bilateral consultations focused exclusively on the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Eurasian security bloc that also includes Russia, Iran, Pakistan and four Central Asian...

Forest fires raging through Laos, Myanmar and Thailand have smothered large areas in dangerous smoke, leaving overstretched firefighters battling blazes and smog-choked communities looking to the skies for rain and their governments to fix a scourge that worsens each year.

Dry season fires have brought a public health crisis to northern Thailand, including Chiang Mai, as well as much of Laos and eastern Myanmar, as parched bush provides tinderbox conditions for wildfires.

Some fires are also due...

The United States is planning to build an “economic security zone” in the Philippines to counter China’s dominance in critical technologies.

The 4,000-acre (1,619-hectare) hi-tech industrial hub will reportedly be the first of its kind in the world, operating under US common law despite being on Philippine soil.

Washington says it will be the first “AI-native investment acceleration hub” developed under the US-led Pax Silica initiative, a framework aimed at mobilising allied economies around...

Malaysia’s busiest container port has started refusing Middle East-bound cargo unless shipping lines can guarantee prompt pickup, in one of the clearest signs yet that the Gulf crisis is working its way past oil and into the everyday trade that moves across Asia.

Longer transit times, missed sailings and sharply higher insurance premiums are now rippling across the region’s logistics chain, with wine, spirits and other time-sensitive goods acting as an early indicator of disruption that analysts...