Asia - South China Morning Post

No fast-food chain has ever meant quite what Jollibee means to Filipinos.

Forget McDonald’s and KFC, Jollibee – with its sweet spaghetti and crispy Chickenjoy – is something else entirely: a cultural anchor for a diaspora scattered across every continent on Earth.

With more than a million Filipinos leaving the Philippines every year in search of greener pastures abroad, the chain has followed them almost everywhere they have gone, building a brand that taps into deep emotions by offering a taste...

Israel’s avowed goal in the Middle East war is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Yet the double standard associated with this is hardly sustainable in the long run.

The worst-kept secret in the world of nuclear politics is that Israel possesses a formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons. It began developing these in the 1950s and reached a fully operational capability by the late 1960s.

Although Israel refuses to confirm or deny this fact, arms control organisations have assessed that...

From a law lecture hall to Barbie and later the glitzy ballroom of Bridgerton, Malaysian-born actor Yong Zheng Xi is quietly carving out a place for himself on the international stage.

He appeared in the period drama as Lord Barnaby, a role that marks another milestone in a journey shaped as much by persistence as by talent.

Yong, 32, began as a singer but it was only after moving to London to pursue a law degree that his career trajectory shifted.

“When I came to London to pursue my...

Young, naive and now sleeping rough on a plastic sheet outside their embassy in Phnom Penh, Indonesians Abdul* and Hafiz* are among the expendable human resources of Southeast Asia’s scam trade.

After a year-long tumble through Cambodia’s vortex of scams, they were cast out onto a pavement – penniless and without passports – waiting for the embassy to issue new travel documents and a plane ticket home.

“Our Chinese boss stole all of our passports,” said Abdul, 20, gesturing to a dozen or so of...

A proposal to scrap a ban on tall buildings in Kyoto to make way for towers and tourism infrastructure has drawn criticism that the move would fundamentally damage the skyline of Japan’s historic capital.

A panel advising the city government suggested revising the existing height restriction – which limits buildings near Kyoto Station to a maximum of 31 metres – to 60 metres.

The panel claimed on Wednesday the change would “revitalise” the area around the station that served as the gateway to...

On March 1, after Israel and the United States initiated attacks against Iran, Amazon Web Services reported drone strikes against data centre facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The strikes caused structural damage to the company’s infrastructure, impairing cloud services for those countries.

Iran warned that US tech companies with Israeli links, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Nvidia and Oracle, were on Tehran’s list of “legitimate targets” for countermeasures.

Strikes on...

Singapore has seized over 830kg (1,800 lbs) of Asian pangolin scales hidden in a shipment bound for Cambodia, authorities said on Saturday, calling it the largest haul of its kind discovered in the city state.

Falsely declared as “dried fish skin”, the scales – estimated to be from more than 2,200 pangolins – were found in 30 bags on December 29 after officials intercepted an inbound truck carrying sea cargo, Singapore’s National Parks Board said in a statement.

The announcement came as...

The law of unintended consequences, a theory popularised by American sociologist Robert K Merton, has rarely been more applicable to any situation than to US President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Those consequences will be far greater than generally imagined.

Their impact will fall heavily on Asia, the world’s most energy-import-dependent region and will almost certainly hurt US ally Japan more than it will the US’ main rival, China. Indeed, China may even emerge from the crisis with an...

Indonesia on Saturday began implementing a new government regulation approved earlier this month that bans children younger than 16 from access to digital platforms that could expose them to pornography, cyberbullying, online scams and addiction.

With the move, Indonesia became the first country in Southeast Asia to ban children from having accounts on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox. It follows measures that Australia took last year in a world-first social...

Southeast Asian countries are racing to assert control over their data flows, driven by a potent mix of nationalist sentiment and security anxieties.

But analysts warn that while certain measures may deliver domestic economic benefits, the broader push risks undermining innovation, deterring foreign investment and even cutting the region off from the global digital economy.

On March 1, Vietnam became the first Southeast Asian nation to have in force a comprehensive law on artificial...