President Lee Jae Myung’s overseas trips have again drawn attention to South Korea’s shifting political standards, adding to a familiar cycle of disputes over presidential golf and the presidential plane whenever power passes between conservative and liberal administrations. The controversies centre on taxpayer money and the public’s attitudes towards presidential privilege, with governing parties defending certain activities as necessary for diplomacy or official duties and the opposition...

An analysis by Japan’s GMO Internet Group found that a North Korea-linked hacking group was likely behind the cyberattack on the company last month, sources close to the matter said, citing characteristics of the malware used and other traces left by the perpetrators. The company appears to have already reported the matter to the government and will now focus on determining the full circumstances. Kyodo News, working with security experts, also found that five IP addresses used to access a...

Bangkok’s firefighters do more snake catching than firefighting, and Pinyo Pukpinyo trains them. But he refuses to kill the snakes, and he’s running out of containers.

Video game companies have long been at the vanguard of artificial intelligence, using it in its more nascent form to dictate non-player character behaviour, simulate crowds and adjust game difficulty on the fly years before the advent of chatbots like ChatGPT. Today, the technology is increasingly being deployed to write code, create visual assets and even synthesise real-time voice-overs, supplanting humans who would have otherwise done the work. Yet studios do still pay people to animate their...

When Chinese leader Mao Zedong and then US president Richard Nixon ended more than two decades of hostility in the early 1970s and began restoring ties, one powerful force pulling them together was a shared adversary in the form of the Soviet Union. Fast forward to today. The United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, have spent eight years locked in competition and confrontation, from trade and investment to technology, amid mounting fears that they are on a path to inevitable...

Tens of thousands gathered in India’s capital in a clamor of banging drums, chants and billowing flags, with participants from across the country.

Pinyo Pukpinyo, Thailand’s most famous snake catcher, has found the critters slithering in nooks and crannies all over Bangkok. He refuses to kill them.

Tens of thousands of volunteers helped raise 108 Buddhist stupas in Bhutan on Sunday, marking the Himalayan kingdom’s ambitious plans for a “mindfulness” city aimed at driving economic growth. The 15-metre tall solid towers – sacred Buddhist monuments found across the Himalayas – stretch along 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) of riverbank near the Indian border, at the site of the future Gelephu Mindfulness City. More than 40,000 volunteers took part in building the structures as “a physical form of...

Using artificial intelligence to build even smarter systems will make artificial general intelligence (AGI) more achievable, though it would need to be done safely, leading Chinese computer scientist Tang Jie said at an event in Shanghai on Saturday. The remarks underscore how AI companies in the US and China are both chasing the holy grail of recursive self-improvement (RSI), where increasingly powerful AI systems also become better at improving themselves in an ever-accelerating...

Thousands protested in Delhi on Sunday to demand the resignation of India’s election chief over a revision of voter lists, the latest in more than a month of ‌opposition demonstrations challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Led by Congress party chief Rahul Gandhi, Sunday’s protesters say the controversial revision benefits Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Analysts say the protests and growing support for the opposition form the worst crisis for Modi since he came to power in...

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has previewed a plan for a more autonomous AI agent that can handle multiple tasks with minimal human intervention, as it steps up competition with US rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in developing coding assistants. The proposed system, dubbed super agent, aimed to reduce the need for humans to coordinate multiple AI agents and monitor their progress, addressing a key bottleneck in managing today’s increasingly complex workflows, according to a...

Tokyo has the ability to chart a stable path forward.

India’s new high-altitude combat tank was designed to go where its heavier armoured fighting vehicles cannot: the thin mountain air, narrow roads and small bridges along its disputed border with China. In its base configuration, the Zorawar weighs some 25 tonnes – light enough to be flown all the way to the Line of Actual Control – but a push to make it strong enough to withstand high-calibre autocannon fire could add an extra seven tonnes to that loadout. Reports of renewed stand-offs between...

Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke Siew Fook has dismissed a recent claim on social media that students were forced to serve alcohol at an old boys’ association reunion and centenary dinner, calling the allegations a politically motivated attack against him. The DAP secretary general, who is also a former student of St Paul’s Institution, claimed the individual who allegedly uploaded the post had been looking for every possible opportunity to attack him. “In the social media post, the...

Driving along the wide boulevards of Astana during a recent trip to the Kazakh capital, signs of China’s growing commercial footprint were everywhere. Chinese cars were becoming a common sight on the streets here, as brands from BYD to Changan made aggressive inroads in a market once dominated by South Korea’s Hyundai and Kia, said the driver who picked me up from the airport in a gleaming Changan electric vehicle. But it was not the rise of Chinese tech that had brought me to this energy-rich...

Long dubbed an “air-conditioned nation”, Singapore is experimenting with cooling alternatives from chilled beams to “passive displacement” to curb its thirst for energy-guzzling air conditioning. The city state has the highest per-capita air conditioner ownership rate in Southeast Asia, with about 99 per cent of private residences equipped with cooling units. Singapore’s local building sector accounts for one-fifth of its emissions, while cooling itself accounts for 40 to 60 per cent of a...

For Singaporean flight attendant Chloe Tan Zi Ling, 35, the problem with paper straws is their impracticality. “It softens before we can finish the drink, so we have to gulp it down without a straw,” she said, adding that reusable metal alternatives left an unpleasant taste in her mouth. Her frustration reflects a wider debate over Asia’s shift away from plastic straws, with a recently released South Korean study finding that conventional plastic straws performed better than paper and other...

Bangkok’s firefighters do more snake catching than firefighting, and Pinyo Pukpinyo trains them. But he refuses to kill the snakes, and he’s running out of containers.

The rise of Korean terms in Japanese is a striking reversal from colonial times and a sign of the global appeal of South Korean culture.

For over three decades, Dolores Balladares Pelaez has lived and worked in Hong Kong without once returning to the Philippines for Undas, the annual two-day observance honouring the dead. This year, she is arranging prayers from afar for her late father and four siblings, but will once again miss the gathering back home. On Thursday morning, the 56-year-old domestic helper called her mother and niece in Laguna province to discuss hiring a prayer leader to visit the family home. Her sisters-in-law...

A little-known South Korean music act has climbed the charts with a viral hit that has caught listeners off guard – not just for its sudden popularity, but because its vocals were generated entirely by artificial intelligence. Meomuru’s single, “Have You Become the Adult You Dreamed Of?”, climbed to No 2 on Melon’s Top 100 – South Korea’s flagship streaming chart – earlier this week. The track’s popularity has turned Meomuru into one of the country’s most-talked-about acts. The song was created...

Southeast Asia’s electric vehicle boom risks leaving the region’s smaller companies behind, as Chinese automotive giants bypass local part-makers in favour of imported components and locked-in supplier networks. Local manufacturers across Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are facing a double squeeze: demand is weakening for parts used in petrol and diesel cars, collectively known as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, while steep barriers to entry also keep them out of EV supply...

The theft of billions of dollars from Binance within a matter of minutes, the biggest cryptocurrency heist in history, was orchestrated by North Korean hackers, the FBI said on Saturday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that this week’s attack was tied to “malicious cyber activity” by an entity known as TraderTraitor, the same actors behind a US$1.5 billion Bybit hack last year. The FBI asked cryptocurrency exchanges, blockchain analytics companies and others to block...

This week’s $6.3 billion hack of Binance is the largest to hit crypto, and would be the most that North Koreans have stolen in years of brazen cybercrime.

Residents say a proposed Chinese car plant in northern Spain will create new jobs. Others say it’s a long-term risk, distilling a debate about the costs and perks of ties to China.