Asia - South China Morning Post

The arrest of a 17-year-old stateless teenager during a school outing to buy Eid clothes at a Sabah mall for allegedly failing to show valid residence papers, has returned scrutiny to Malaysia’s treatment of undocumented people.

Niko Ansboy, a student at Borneo Komrad, an alternative school for stateless children, was waiting outside a store during a school trip to the 1Borneo Hypermall when police detained him on Sunday.

He was stopped by officers patrolling after the Kota Kinabalu District...

The Philippines ranks among Asia’s most gender-equal societies by several international measures. Yet ask Filipino women where they truly belong and most will still tell you: at home.

A new survey has found that 83 per cent of Filipino women agree “being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working for pay”, up from 70 per cent when the same question was posed in 1994.

The findings, released by independent pollster Social Weather Stations earlier in March to coincide with National Women’s Month,...

Maritime tracking data showed that no ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, marking the first full day without any confirmed commercial traffic in either direction since February 28, when the US and Israel began military strikes on Iran.

Crossings dropped to zero, below the previous seven-day average of 2.57 daily transits, according to maritime analytics firm Windward. Although no vessels entered the waterway that day, about 400 ships sailed in the Gulf of Oman on Friday, it...

Malaysia’s government has been forced onto the defensive over its much-touted tariff deal with the United States, after a minister walked back an earlier claim that the agreement had been rendered “null and void” by a US Supreme Court ruling.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s administration signed the deal in October, promising US$240 billion in investments and purchases of American goods, including beef and aircraft, in exchange for continued access to the world’s largest consumer market at a...

Two boats carrying 21 people capsized on Monday off Henoko, a controversial relocation site for a US military base off Japan’s southern island of Okinawa, throwing all into the water and leaving two of them dead, officials said.

The Japan Coast Guard said 18 of them were students from a Kyoto high school on two boats, 10 on Heiwa Maru and eight on the smaller Fukutsu, to observe the Henoko area as part of their peace education programme.

Rescuers pulled all 21 people out of the water, but...

Lingan bin Man pulls up to the fishing jetty in the early afternoon, guiding his small boat towards a narrow strip of wooden planks as waves crash against the dock.

On board are his wife and toddler. Together, the Malaysian family inspects the day’s catch: 2kg (4.4lbs) of clams after three hours at sea.

“I can sell this for US$7,” the 52-year-old said.

For fishermen in Kampung Sungai Kurau, a village on Pulau Carey, an island in Selangor state, this has become the new normal.

Members of the Mah...

Five years after armoured vehicles rolled through the streets of Myanmar’s capital and the generals tore up an election result they did not like, a new parliament sat for the first time on Monday.

The legislature that convened in Naypyidaw was stacked almost entirely with allies of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the coup leader who ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021.

In Myanmar’s recent election, held across barely a third of the country, the army-backed Union Solidarity...

Twenty Thai crew members of a cargo ship attacked in the crucial Strait of Hormuz arrived in Thailand on Monday, with three of their colleagues still stranded on the vessel in the Gulf.

The Thai-registered Mayuree Naree was hit by two projectiles on Wednesday while transiting through the Gulf waterway, after departing a port in the United Arab Emirates.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had struck the Thai ship, as well as a Liberia-flagged vessel, in the strait because they had ignored...

Several Malaysian civil society groups on Monday accused Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s government of using a harsh criminal law provision to intimidate critics after police questioned activists, academics and political researchers over an alleged plot to topple the government.

The backlash follows an announcement in late February that police were investigating allegations of a conspiracy to “topple the government and sabotage national stability” involving “a local influential figure” and an...

From Singapore’s hawker stalls to Thailand’s street markets and Vietnam’s noodle shops, Southeast Asia is home to some of the world’s most celebrated food cultures.

Yet the region has produced relatively few restaurant chains with global brand recognition, even as Chinese food and beverage groups climb international rankings.

Analysts say structural factors – including smaller domestic markets, fragmented regional consumer tastes and fewer brands expanding aggressively overseas – have slowed the...