CBD Market Expected to Expand By 40% This Year

Poland’s delivery of Black Hawk helicopters to the Philippines has given Warsaw a foothold in Manila’s defence market as it seeks to expand exports from its growing defence industry, with analysts saying drones, air defence and potentially co-production could pave the way for a broader partnership. Polish deputy foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski said on Tuesday that Warsaw was keen to pursue further defence partnerships with the Philippines, as Poland poured US$50 billion into...

As technological developments augur an era of renewed space exploration, China is aiming to become a major player. In the second part of this two-part series, Wency Chen and Ben Jiang examine the country’s strategy and progress on reusable rockets – a field where the US has a tremendous lead. US commercial space firm SpaceX has been eager to tout its deployment of reusable first-stage rocket boosters, claiming to have flown more than 600 missions with the cost-cutting launch components. Despite...

The Himalayan disaster that tore through the China-Nepal border last month was a human calamity before it became a media story. A torrent of ice, rock, mud and debris swept through valleys, destroying key infrastructure, severing roads and communications, and leaving families desperate for news. In Gyirong county in the Tibet autonomous region, the disaster hit a major border crossing and created a rescue environment as physically difficult as any imaginable. The human toll extends beyond the...

Mistakes that led to the deaths of more than a hundred children “went beyond negligence,” investigators said. They also cited a separate strike the same day that killed a reported 22 civilians.

The conflict underscored the distance between world powers over the United States’ pressure campaign on Iran.

The war with Iran revealed just how much influence the world’s biggest oil importer has over prices and other countries’ supplies of jet fuel, gasoline and diesel.

A jury had split on whether Mohammad Sharifullah was to blame in a deadly bombing but found him guilty of aiding the terrorist group ISIS-K.

Ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, it is critical for Japan that the United States stays on the same page regarding the challenge from China.

With the United States announcing that it has deployed “on-orbit space control weapons,” the space arms race now appears to be fully underway.

A Malaysian woman has died while scuba diving after she was caught in strong currents in Bali, Indonesia. According to local media portal Bali News, the victim, Siti Nuraini Rusidi, 40, was on a diving trip with a divemaster, boat captain and several other divers when the incident occurred at 11.10am local time on Wednesday. The trip’s divemaster, Eugenius Franciso Ray, 33, had reportedly raised concerns over her health when he noticed her coughing when the group was at the first dive site at...

Both those making pessimistic predictions and those confidently rejecting them often rely on thin evidence.

Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has issued a withering rebuke to foreigners behaving badly in Thailand following a wave of scandals involving illegal businesses and landholdings including a cemetery, saying the cases have “gone too far” by breaching Thai law and hospitality. Facing mounting public backlash against illegal foreign ownership of swathes of the country enabled by endemic corruption, Anutin’s government has halved the visa-free entry period to 30 days for most countries and...

It is clear that US President Donald Trump is pushing hard for a fresh summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the coming months. To achieve that, he appears prepared to downgrade and jeopardise the US-South Korea alliance, as seen in his recent move to scale back joint military exercises. For Trump, this will be a purely bilateral exercise, with both Seoul and Beijing totally sidelined, let alone Moscow and Tokyo. Equally, there is now a general acceptance that the issue of...

When a cultural industry expands overseas, that usually means exporting content. China is increasingly exporting the infrastructure behind entertainment products.

Huawei Technologies on Thursday unveiled a new computing architecture that it says could make as many as 1 million processors work as a single computer, putting its UnifiedBus interconnect technology at the centre of an ambitious effort to rethink how large data centres are built. The Peerium Computing Architecture combines nested parallelism, unified memory addressing and peer-to-peer interconnect, with UnifiedBus serving as the high-speed fabric connecting processors, memory, storage and...

India and Vietnam could turn their competition for “China plus one” investments into a complementary partnership, analysts say, combining New Delhi’s scale and technology capabilities with Hanoi’s manufacturing agility and links to East Asian supply chains. Such a shift could deepen both nations’ roles in global production networks across high-value industries – from electronics and pharmaceuticals to renewable energy – while giving companies reliable alternatives as they diversify supply chains...

When Cindi suffered her first severe psychotic episode a decade ago, she could no longer tell where reality ended and her imagination began. “My reality and fantasy [were] all distorted. I had no idea what was real, what was not,” the 38-year-old, who asked to be identified only by her first name, told This Week in Asia. “It was so severe to the point that I couldn’t even recognise my own family members. My mother was there, my brother was there, but they didn’t feel like my mother or my...

Indonesia’s latest ferry disaster has exposed persistent weaknesses in maritime safety oversight, experts have said, with poor enforcement and inadequate supervision continuing to leave passengers vulnerable across the sprawling archipelago. The capsizing of the Virgo Transport 8 in the Java Sea on Sunday has intensified scrutiny of a system that analysts say too often comes under pressure only after deadly accidents, rather than preventing them. Six people have been confirmed dead and 129...

China’s leading memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is gaining ground among local smartphone vendors, with some of its high-end chips finding their way into flagship Chinese handsets as vendors push into the premium market. ZTE-backed Nubia’s NaviX Ultra that went on sale on Wednesday used LPDDR5X DRAM chips from CXMT, the companies announced earlier this month. The handset was dubbed the Nubia Doubao phone due to its integration of TikTok parent ByteDance’s Doubao artificial...

A diagnosed paedophile who sexually abused 11 girls over 33 years, with the acts ranging from molestation to rape, was sentenced by a Singapore court on Thursday to 21 years’ jail. The victims were as young as five, and included his daughter, granddaughters, nieces and students at an enrichment centre he ran with his wife. The judge noted that the jail term should not be crushing or amount to a life sentence for the 71-year-old man, who suffers from a rare blood cancer called myelofibrosis. At...

Authorities in Malaysia have seized several more Israel-bound shipments at one of the country’s biggest ports, according to people familiar with the matter, an apparently new level of scrutiny in a nation where anti-Israeli sentiment runs high. Three containers bound for Ashdod Port south of Tel Aviv were detained at Malaysia’s Tanjung Pelepas port in mid-August and to date had not been released as authorities investigate their contents, the people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be...

Philippine Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jnr has won a burst of online support among Filipinos who see him as one of Manila’s most outspoken senior officials against China, with some already asking whether it could give him enough political momentum to carry him into the 2028 elections. His latest boost came after a viral moment at the Seoul Defence Dialogue on September 8, where he read out a handwritten note reiterating Beijing’s rejection of the 2016 South China Sea arbitration ruling...

Russia is increasingly mobilising North Korean workers to build military drones for use against Ukraine in defiance of international sanctions, giving Pyongyang a key source of revenue to fund its unlawful weapons programmes, according to a report by the US and its allies. Up to 25,000 North Koreans were believed to be working in Russia’s drone industry, including at facilities in Alabuga, Tatarstan, where unmanned aerial vehicles were assembled, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team said...

Huawei Technologies said on Thursday that it would launch its next-generation artificial intelligence chip in the first quarter of 2027, moving the target launch forward by nine months as the firm aggressively expands its ecosystem amid China’s self-sufficiency push. David Wang Tao, rotating and acting chairman for Huawei, said on Thursday that the Ascend 960DT chip, an AI chip designed for model training, “with performance doubling”, would be “ready in the first quarter of 2027”, three quarters...

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has called for stricter regulations and sanctions against those who use slash and burn methods to clear land, as the country struggles to contain wildfires that have been raging for weeks. Indonesia is battling its most intense wildfires in 11 years, with “super El Nino” weather parching ‌the country’s forests and fields. The islands of Borneo and Sumatra have been the worst hit, with the hazardous haze causing a spike in respiratory illnesses. Transboundary...

This is the first time since the May 2025 military clashes that tension between the two sides has erupted into the open.

Brian Mast (R-FL) and John Moolenaar (R-MI) have requested probes into 28 people and entities allegedly connected to scam gangs in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.

Electronic payment providers need to be more diligent in vetting companies that use their platforms to protect people from fraud, the Philippine central bank said. The requirement came after Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas found thousands of illegal businesses on the payment platforms, including many online casinos masquerading as more ordinary companies like beauty salons and bakeries. “We want to protect consumers from online fraud, illegal activities and also from money launderers,” Deputy...

The North Korean leader’s financial and diplomatic leverage rests on the brutal exploitation of his own people, from coal miners to diplomats, at home and abroad.

The North Korean leader’s financial and diplomatic leverage rests on the brutal exploitation of his own people, from coal miners to diplomats, at home and abroad.