Asia - South China Morning Post

Asian digital entrepreneurs that once saw Dubai as a safe, well-connected base for global expansion are now reassessing that view after the US-Israel war on Iran exposed vulnerabilities in the city’s appeal as a financial and technology hub.

For many investors and founders from India, China and Southeast Asia, the strain is not just about physical security but also about what disruption around the Strait of Hormuz has revealed about liquidity, credit and market confidence.

Dubai has in recent...

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Saturday accused Israel of failing to “reflect” on allegations of rights abuses by its forces, after Israel decried him for amplifying social media “disinformation”.

Lee irked Israel’s foreign ministry this week with his comments on a social media video with a caption purporting it showed Israeli soldiers torturing and pushing a “Palestinian kid” off a roof.

“I need to look into whether this is true, and if so, what measures have been taken,” Lee said in a...

Malaysian immigration officers have raided two massage parlours suspected of offering sexual services to clients, detaining 21 foreign workers and a local man believed to be the manager of the premises.

The raids in Johor, which began at around 3pm on Thursday, targeted outlets that publicly advertised standard massage services from 80 ringgit (US$20) an hour.

“The businesses were believed to be involved in immoral activities and employed foreigners without valid documents,” Johor immigration...

On Tuesday, Vietnam’s National Assembly elected a new prime minister. For once, the appointment looks less like a factional compromise than a deliberate bet on competence. Le Minh Hung, born in 1970, is the country’s youngest prime minister since 1955. In a system that often prizes seniority, that alone is striking.

More striking still is Hung’s profile: he is not a provincial baron or a deal maker forged in the rough-and-tumble of local politics. Hung is a technocrat with economic training in...

Days before Pakistan had helped to secure a ceasefire in the Iran war this week, the United Arab Emirates was seeking repayment of a US$3.5 billion deposit from Islamabad’s central bank.

The withdrawal, brushed off as a “routine financial transaction” by Pakistan’s foreign ministry, equated to roughly 21 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange reserves. It was accompanied by a wave of criticism on Emirati social media directed at Islamabad.

“When our security is directly threatened, we hear...

Harvest-ready rice fields are lying idle and farmers are deciding whether to skip planting for the coming season, as spiking fuel and fertiliser costs from the war in the Middle East hit one of the world’s biggest rice-growing regions.

Across Southeast Asia, tens of millions of smallholders are struggling to find affordable crop nutrients as well as the diesel needed to run tractors, irrigation pumps and rice planters. In Thailand, some farmers are leaving the crop in the ground as it is too...

Penang, the Malaysian state long marketed as the Pearl of the Orient, is better known today for its hawker food, colonial-era streetscapes and the multicultural life of George Town, whose historic core won Unesco World Heritage status in 2008.

When Francis Light, a British merchant, landed on Penang on August 11, 1786, he took possession of the 293 sq km (113 square-mile) island on behalf of the British East India Company and renamed it Prince of Wales Island.

One enduring local legend holds...

Japan’s energy security has long hinged on Middle Eastern oil. The Iran war simply exposed how breakable that lifeline had become.

While a two-week ceasefire agreed on Tuesday promises some relief by reopening the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic, analysts say the shock has laid bare vulnerabilities Tokyo cannot easily paper over.

As an archipelago nation with no cross-border pipelines, Japan draws more than 95 per cent of its crude from the Middle East and routes the bulk of it through the...

In classrooms and training centres across China, a growing number of students from Southeast Asia, Africa and beyond are learning not just the Chinese language, but how the country’s factories operate, how supply chains are managed and how products are marketed and sold across borders.

Hebei Software Institute, in the northern city of Baoding, has been at the forefront of the push. The vocational college said it had established multiple overseas-oriented programmes in recent years, particularly...

Singapore and Australia pledged on Friday to keep fuel and gas flowing between them as the Middle East conflict rattled global energy markets, with both sides also working towards a legally binding agreement on essential supplies.

At a joint press conference in Singapore, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Canberra stood ready to supply more liquefied natural gas (LNG) if the city state needed it, while Albanese’s Singaporean counterpart Lawrence Wong said his government would...