An explosive news report says election commission members objected to the measures that excluded millions of people from voting, which critics say favor the government.

Lian Yunzhi of China solved a Rubik’s Cube five times in an average of 4.27 seconds, setting a women’s world record.

When the presidents of the United States and China meet in Washington, the world will be watching to see whether their two countries can make good on their agreement to work towards “constructive strategic stability”. In the sixth part of a series, Chong Ming Lee and Vincent Chow examine what’s behind the call for “pacing” by American AI giants – effectively a slowdown in development – and how the phenomenon is being viewed in China. After years of rapid development, leading US AI executives are...

The body of a child was found on Wednesday on the coast of an outlying island in northeastern Japan, with police investigating whether it could be a six-year-old boy who went missing in the area earlier this month. The body, which was found around 11.20am on Tobishima, Yamagata Prefecture, was dressed in what appeared to be a navy blue and red Spider Man-themed jumpsuit, similar to the clothing the boy was wearing when he disappeared, according to prefectural police. A man in his 70s alerted...

U Kyaw Moe Tun has kept a low profile at the General Assembly for years, part of an arrangement to keep his post despite the military-backed government’s efforts to remove him.

US President Donald Trump has sold shares worth tens of millions of US dollars in major tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms in July, a move that may reveal some of his views on the sector, especially as competition with China intensifies. Microsoft topped the list of sales transactions, with six trades totalling up to US$31 million, according to filings disclosed by the US Office of Government Ethics on Tuesday. The data detailed Trump’s trading activity in July,...

While starting salaries for fresh graduates and entry-level workers in Singapore continue to creep upwards, the number of people in entry-level roles is shrinking, according to new data, indicating an increasingly tough job market for those at the start of their careers. Data published last month by global professional services firm Aon showed a 2.5 per cent year-on-year salary increase for entry-level employees, alongside a 3.2 per cent drop in entry-level headcount. The findings come as...

Chinese storage makers, long known for packaging chips into modules, have been moving up the value chain into wafer-level operations, with the latest firm to make the jump investing 4.5 billion yuan (US$672 million) in an advanced packaging project. The sum, which Shanghai-listed Biwin Storage Technology will pour into the third phase of its advanced packaging and testing project in Dongguan, in southern China’s Guangdong province, will exceed the 3.09 billion yuan it put into the first two...

Inside a car wash lounge in the southern Philippine city of Davao, Shenilane Formento scrolls through messages on her Chinese-made Oppo phone as she waits for a customer to pay. Formento, 29, has worked as a cashier for about a year. She follows developments in the South China Sea through news reports shared on her social media feeds, including frequent confrontations between Philippine and Chinese forces in the disputed waters. While she found such incidents “disappointing”, she ultimately...

As the U.S.-China rivalry hollows out the WTO, Japan and ASEAN have a chance to build something new.

India has joined a new multilateral grouping comprising a cross-regional mix of middle powers, in a move analysts say reflects New Delhi’s efforts to broaden its diplomatic options as it pushes for changes to the global order. External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar co-chaired the inaugural Partners for Multilateralism (P4M) Summit on Monday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. “We meet at a time when the global order is under stress,” Jaishankar said...

Brunei’s measured defence ties with Beijing reflect its low-key approach to South China Sea disputes, with analysts saying that goals such as peacekeeping offer the safest room for both sides to maintain diplomacy. A meeting between Bruneian and Chinese defence officials in Beijing last week, when both nations pledged closer practical cooperation and support for regional stability, underscored that tact. But observers also expect ties to remain modest, constrained by maritime claims and Bandar...

The Philippine government is exploring nuclear power options to guard against global energy shocks. One proposal is to switch on a plant in Bataan that has been mothballed for 40 years.

The lawyer for an Indonesian businessman arrested in Singapore for allegedly using counterfeit S$10,000 (US$7,830) notes at a casino has said his client was a victim of fraud himself. The businessman, identified only as Steven, is accused of exchanging 34 fake S$10,000 notes for chips over three visits to the Resorts World Sentosa casino in June. The notes were accepted but later found to be counterfeit. His lawyer, Dosma Sijabat, told Tempo news magazine on Tuesday that the fake bills did not...

The U.S. Embassy said a draft law allowing users to opt out of systems that choose what they can see in their feeds could amount to censorship.

A Malaysian tofu pudding seller has pledged to donate 10,000 ringgit (US$2,452) to help former prime minister Najib Razak cover his 50 million ringgit fine, describing the contribution as a personal payback for a lifeline extended to him 14 years ago. In a social media post, Sunny Seow, founder of the Sunnycoco brand, shared that his motivation stemmed from a pivotal moment in 2012 when he was serving a sentence in Perak state’s Manjung for past mistakes. During a visit by Najib to the area that...

The Philippine ⁠Senate, sitting as an impeachment ⁠court, on Wednesday lowered the number of votes needed to convict Vice-President Sara Duterte, reducing the threshold prosecutors must clear to secure a guilty verdict. The court ruled that only ‌senator-judges able to take part in the trial should be counted when determining the threshold for conviction. Four of the 24 senator-judges have been unable to take part in the proceedings and cannot vote. The decision means prosecutors now need 14...

Malaysians on social media are offering increasingly outlandish solutions to a months-long royal tussle in Negeri Sembilan state, from making rival claimants sleep on a bed of nettles for a week to putting the entire state through Islamic spiritual healing. The dispute has left Negeri Sembilan with two men claiming the throne, a state government at odds with the palace and no clear legal route to settle the fight. One social media user suggested reviving adat perpatih – the customary law of...

Shenzhen Camsense Technologies, a maker of spatial sensors for robotic vacuum cleaners, launched a Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) that aims to raise about HK$680 million (US$86.7 million), despite headwinds from Washington’s recent import ban on foreign-made vacuum robots. “The export and procurement for our existing client products remain normal, with potential disruption limited to new product development schedules,” Camsense co-founder Zhou Kun said about the ban’s impact. “We have...

Female prisoners in Myanmar are subjected to widespread torture, sexual violence and life-threatening medical neglect, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, underlining the chronic ill-treatment of thousands of detainees in the war-torn nation. Since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup, a protracted civil war ‌has gripped the impoverished Southeast Asian nation, devastating several regions and killing about 100,000 while displacing more than 3.5 million. In a report, the New...

Kuala Lumpur is making it easier and cheaper to bring international music stars to the city, hoping that a bigger concert calendar can help Malaysia capture more of Southeast Asia’s booming live-music economy. But as more global acts come to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian musicians are asking whether the concert boom is creating more opportunities for local artists too. Fuad Alhabshi of Malaysian rock band Kyoto Protocol said local bands once routinely benefited when major international acts came...

Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud business unit, is set to launch data centres in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, speeding up an overseas push as it seeks to win enterprise customers through its “full stack AI capabilities” spanning chips, cloud infrastructure and multimodal models. The first of these new data centres will open in the Netherlands in October. The cloud unit will also add to existing data centre capacity in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab...

Chinese Premier Li Qiang called for deeper integration of artificial intelligence and manufacturing during a visit to Shanghai, as Beijing seeks to expand advanced manufacturing and emerging industries amid intensifying global technology competition. “[We] should combine China’s strengths in manufacturing and digital technologies,” Li said during his visit to an AI application testing base in the city on Tuesday, Xinhua reported. He called for the creation of more manufacturing service...

Melaka on Wednesday officially called for a state election – the latest test for Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s government, which is already facing an internal feud and growing public frustration over failed reforms. The state assembly was dissolved effective from Wednesday following an official notification sent to the country’s Election Commission the previous day by Ibrahim Durum, the Melaka state assembly’s speaker. “A state election will be held within 60 days of the dissolution...

Singaporeans are among the most open to allowing an artificial intelligence agent to shop for them, but they also want the strictest guard rails, research shows. The latest agentic AI study from Global Payments released on Wednesday indicates the hoops agentic AI will need to jump through to be trusted to make purchases without human intervention. The study, which surveyed seven countries including the United States, China and the United Kingdom, found 59 per cent of Singaporeans are open to an...

A series of small earthquakes beneath Keningau, an inland district of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, is drawing attention to a part of the state where scientists say the fault lines are poorly understood and the consequences of a larger quake could be devastating. The latest, a magnitude 3.4 tremor on September 3, was felt in several parts of Keningau, prompting staff at the district office to suspend a meeting and move to a designated safe area. No serious damage was reported. The tremor was one of...

Paul Bratby had already drawn up plans for expanding to Hong Kong when war broke out in the Middle East earlier this year. But the founder of xBratAI, a Dubai-based AI-powered trading signals platform, soon brought that timeline forward as the Iran conflict dragged on and widened in scope. “Our Hong Kong entity had been scheduled for a few years later, but we established it in early 2026,” he said. Bratby is not alone in looking east. As missiles continue to target Gulf capitals and shipping...