Asia - South China Morning Post

Malaysia cannot get involved in what is happening in the Middle East, especially not via military intervention, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has said.

He said that as a free country, Malaysia could voice its objections towards war and violence – but not by sending in troops.

Dialogue and engagement should be the means to resolve any form of disputes, he said.

“We do not agree when any country is attacked and colonised. We do not want any country to interfere in our national affairs,” he said on...

As trade tensions and new US tariff investigations rattle global supply chains, Southeast Asian economies are looking to broaden their options.

But analysts say that the region’s deep links with the United States and China mean any shift will be gradual rather than a clean break – and may yet work in Asean’s favour.

The disruption could accelerate supply-chain diversification, drawing more manufacturing to the region from markets such as Europe, India and the Middle East. For now, however, the...

The rapidly escalating conflict in the Middle East threatens to overshadow this week’s meeting between Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and US President Donald Trump, where the two leaders are expected to deepen economic cooperation and collaboration in shipbuilding.

Thursday’s summit at the White House puts Takaichi in a bind, caught between Trump’s call for Tokyo and others to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and her country’s constitutional limits on taking part in...

The captain of the Iranian women’s football team which played in the Asian Cup in Australia has withdrawn her bid for asylum, state media said on Sunday, making her the fifth member of the delegation to change her mind.

A former player and a Persian-language television channel based outside Iran said the players had been pressured to reverse their stance through threats against families back home. But Iranian authorities have in turn accused Australia of pressuring the players to stay.

Captain...

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said oil from a record stockpile release will be made available in Asia and Oceania immediately as buyers in the region clamour to replace barrels lost to war-related disruptions in the Middle East.

The agency released a statement after it said it received implementation plans from member states. Barrels for Europe and the Americas will only be made available from the end of March.

The IEA last week said that the oil market is seeing the biggest supply...

A passenger bus carrying Indian pilgrims slipped off a mountain road and rolled down its slopes in central Nepal, killing seven people and leaving nine more injured, police said Sunday.

All seven killed were Indian pilgrims, and seven other Indian pilgrims on board were injured and taken to nearby hospitals to get medical treatment. The other two injured in the crash, which happened on Saturday night, were the Nepali bus driver and his assistant.

The bus was returning after the pilgrims visited...

A survey showing workers in Indonesia as the happiest in Asia-Pacific has prompted discussions about the factors underpinning their positive attitudes relative to their regional peers.

A workplace report published this month by employment marketplace Jobstreet by SEEK found 82 per cent of Indonesian respondents said they felt somewhat or extremely happy at work, the highest level among eight regional markets surveyed.

The headline figure inevitably begs the question: does the result reflect...

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said he was “pretty surprised” by the US-Israel war on Iran, adding that he did not see any “rationality” in the military campaign.

Prabowo, a retired general who now heads the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, said in an interview that Iran recently told him they were wary of entering into negotiations with the US to stop the war because they felt “basically they have been tricked” twice. In an asymmetrical war, he added, “they really just have to...

Since the Iran war began late last month, it has threatened shipping across the Middle East’s two most important maritime chokepoints – the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb – through which much of Asia’s energy imports and manufactured exports flow.

For Gulf states and their major trading partners in Asia, the conflict is forcing a hard question: what, if anything, can protect supply chains if US security guarantees can no longer be taken for granted?

Analysts say the usual answers –...

What does the world’s digital economy rest on? Thousands of kilometres of fibre-optic cable lying on the ocean floor and, increasingly, in the crosshairs of great-power rivalry.

The confluence of recent subsea cable disruptions, gaps in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) and intensifying great-power competition has elevated this underwater infrastructure from a technical and commercial concern to a security issue – characterised as “this century’s hidden battleground”. It has...