Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae has made it clear that the nuclear restart is part of the answer to Japan’s energy uncertainty, but questions remain about safety and accountability.

India and Japan are betting on Africa’s critical minerals as the two Asian powers explore joint investment to secure supplies and expand mining capabilities across Africa.

Despite China’s close ties with Russia, Chinese solar energy technology is giving Ukraine badly needed energy resilience.

The MDP’s constitutional reform program calls for splitting the executive into two separate offices: head of state and head of government.

Alibaba Group Holding is gearing up for its annual Singles’ Day shopping festival on major online marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, with the company expecting a record one million global brands to take part this year. Pre-sales for the event open on Thursday, followed by the formal sale next Tuesday. The company projects more than 70 million products to feature, also a record for the festival. Created by Alibaba in 2009, Singles’ Day has grown into the world’s largest online shopping festival. Also...

Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek apologised and promised compensation to users after its services suffered a nearly five-hour outage on Thursday. DeepSeek will issue users a full refund for any consumption between October 8 and October 14 in the form of credits, according to a notice posted on the Hangzhou-based start-up’s application programming interface (API) platform. DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot and API services for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models went offline on Thursday...

The incident shone a spotlight on China's growing repertoire for transnational repression targeting Taiwanese leaders.

Afghan women say that they respond to Taliban oppression in vastly different ways depending on their social, cultural, and personal contexts.

Canada and Singapore are among the countries that remain committed to strengthening trade ties with China, despite growing global fragmentation and a push by governments towards greater self-sufficiency, officials from both countries said on Wednesday at an economic forum in New Delhi. Canada’s minister of international trade Maninder Sidhu said China was the country’s second-largest trading partner and highlighted opportunities for cooperation in areas where the two economies had complementary...

OpenAI recently announced perhaps its biggest mathematics breakthrough yet: it released novel results on 377 high-profile open problems. Artificial intelligence (AI) casually solved these decades-old problems as a mere by-product of training. The community of mathematicians did not universally welcome this development, with University of Connecticut professor Alvaro Lozano-Robledo commenting: “I am not sure at this point what this (hostile?) takeover of the mathematical landscape is trying to...

A private jet hired from Malaysia – seemingly destined for the Philippines – but stopped on the tarmac by Laos’ drug police who found suitcases stuffed with 512kg of crystal methamphetamine, has returned the spotlight to the unrelenting flow of narcotics from the Mekong’s drug laboratories. Cyberscams have dominated headlines and authorities’ attention across Southeast Asia for over a year as the leading criminal enterprise worth tens of billions of dollars annually. But methamphetamine – in its...

It’s time for the OPCON transition process to move beyond military assessments into the realm of political responsibility.

Chinese artificial intelligence lab Z.ai’s latest flagship model, GLM-5.3, may be sophisticated enough to “fake” its way through safety tests, according to a new report published Thursday, sparking new fears about the ability of artificial intelligence systems to shape their own development. The model, launched in August, showed an ability to consider how its behaviour during safety evaluations might influence how future versions of itself would be trained, according to AI safety organisation...

Malaysia’s powerful Conference of Rulers and the government need to intervene and find a solution to the months-long royal stand-off in Negeri Sembilan and constitutional limbo over the status of the state’s ruler, according to political analysts. Negeri Sembilan’s royal house has been locked in a bitter deadlock since April over whether incumbent Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir or his proposed replacement, Tunku Nadzaruddin Tuanku Ja’afar, is the rightful ruler. The feud has taken down a state...

South Korea will continue supporting Ukraine “as a responsible member of the international community” despite a diplomatic dispute over the disclosure of two North Korean prisoners of war being repatriated to the South, a foreign ministry official said on Thursday. The official said Seoul would treat its help to Ukraine separately from the dispute, while continuing bilateral consultations to resolve outstanding issues. The remarks came after South Korean Ambassador to Ukraine Park Ki-chang was...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is in discussions regarding a potential role in Elon Musk’s proposed Terafab project in Texas, according to company chairman and CEO C.C. Wei, although he stressed that TSMC would retain operational control of any partner factory. The plant “has got to be run by TSMC”, Wei said during the third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has sent teams to Texas to assess expansion opportunities beyond its US hub in...

China and the United States are in regular talks about artificial intelligence (AI) as they seek to firm up plans for an incident “hotline” and develop a formalised dialogue process ahead of a presidential summit next month. The two sides aim to agree on a basic framework for addressing AI incidents before Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump meet on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen, the South China Morning...

Indian authorities have asked Bollywood actor ⁠Imran Khan to ⁠leave the country by ⁠the end of the month, saying he breached immigration laws after joining a protest against the election commission chief, local media reported on Thursday. Khan, 43, is a US ‌citizen, the Indian Express newspaper reported. Under Indian law, foreigners’ participation in political protests may be treated as a violation of immigration and visa rules. Khan was given until October 28 to leave the country, the Times of...

The long-delayed opening of the New Yalu River Bridge comes as the two countries expand trade despite international sanctions imposed on North Korea.

Every time Kristaen Albert returns home, he reaches for one of the dozen cans of oxygen on a table by the entrance of his house in Central Kalimantan. The air in his neighbourhood has turned dusty amber, with air quality far exceeding hazardous levels. “My breathing is noticeably heavier whenever I step outside. It’s hard to concentrate and stay focused, and it is really affecting my work,” Albert, a 31-year-old software engineer, told This Week in Asia. “Living in this haze is awful.” “The...

HSBC, Hong Kong’s biggest lender, said on Thursday it would double its artificial intelligence specialist team in the city to 300, a figure much larger than the workforce planned for its recently announced AI centre in Singapore. The announcement comes after Hong Kong’s regulators were reported to have raised concerns about the Singapore hub. The bank would double its AI specialist headcount in Hong Kong from 150 to 300 over the next two to three years, said David Liao Yi-chien, HSBC co-CEO for...

The roof of a school collapsed in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, killing a teacher and 32 students, mostly aged under 14, health officials said on Thursday, as residents and rescuers scrambled to pull children from the rubble. Twenty more students were taken to hospital after the collapse, which authorities blamed on “weak infrastructure”. Others in the densely populated neighbourhood described a close call. Resident Sohail said “everyone began screaming in panic” after his niece...

Nepal has weathered three disasters in six weeks, including the deadly August flash flood, making this year one of the deadliest in a country where monsoon rains already frequently wreak havoc. Experts warn that climate change is only making matters worse. The rock-ice avalanche near the Nepal-Tibet border that opened the floodgates in the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers on August 26 killed more than 1,450 people, with nearly 6,000 others still missing. It was followed by a massive landslide...

A South Korean manufacturing company owner accused of severely injuring a migrant worker by firing high-pressure air from an industrial air gun into his body has been sentenced to three years in prison. Judge Koo Na-young of the Suwon district court on Thursday sentenced the owner of a metal-cleaning company, a man in his 60s identified only as A, to three years in prison on charges of aggravated bodily injury and violations of the Labour Standards Act. The court dismissed the case against A’s...

Three weeks into his tenure as the Communist Party secretary of Anhui province, Li Lecheng carried out an on-site inspection at China’s home-grown memory chip giant ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) on Wednesday, pledging to grow integrated circuits (ICs) as an emerging pillar industry. During the visit to the company’s headquarters in the central province’s capital of Hefei, Li urged CXMT to further refine its product portfolio and actively expand into domestic and overseas markets. He...

A Chinese start-up has unveiled a prototype extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light-source machine – a component often described as the “heart” of advanced lithography systems – marking an early but critical step in Beijing’s drive for self-reliance in chipmaking equipment. At the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai, Langdao Silex displayed its self-developed EUV light-source system. Ninety per cent of the machine’s components were localised, with the vast majority of core parts developed...

A mild displacement of jobs across the Asia-Pacific region as companies expand their use of AI would trim five percentage points off growth in office space demand in the next few years, according to property consultancy CBRE. In a report released on Thursday it said 3.9 per cent of office jobs were vulnerable to artificial intelligence-driven displacement in developed markets in the region, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. However, only 1.7...

Tokyo summoned Russia’s ambassador after a Japanese reporter was arrested in Russia’s far east and accused of collecting military intelligence.

Lorelai Jacinto had worked as a domestic helper in Riyadh for two and a half years before she flew home to the Philippines on September 19, increasingly worried that the conflict in the Middle East was making it unsafe to stay. “When the conflict with Iran happened, I started feeling like it wasn’t safe there any more because I was right there in Riyadh myself, so the bombing, the missiles, were closer to us,” Jacinto told This Week in Asia. “I got worried, I got scared that maybe I wouldn’t be...

Pyongyang test-fired two types of cruise missile from a submarine, its state news agency said on Thursday, after weeks of friction with Seoul over a landmine explosion along their border. The missiles were fired into the East Sea, also known as the Sea of Japan, on Wednesday without “any adverse impact on the security of neighbouring countries”, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. Relations between Pyongyang and Seoul have been further strained since the landmine blast on...