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Three people, including South Korean soldiers, were injured in a suspected mine blast inside the demilitarised zone (DMZ), South Korea’s Yonhap News TV reported on Monday. The DMZ, which has divided the peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean war ended with an armistice, is among the most heavily mined places in the world. “A soldier was seriously injured during an operation in the DMZ involving the 25th Infantry Division,” a military official said, referring to the buffer zone separating the two...

A fierce 30-minute bidding war for a rare Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama pumpkin bag – seized in Singapore’s S$3 billion (US$2.35 billion) money laundering case – sent its final price soaring on Sunday night. The limited-edition yellow monogram leather piece, which was a collaboration between the luxury fashion house and the Japanese artist who recently died at 97, eventually went under the hammer for an eye-watering S$87,000. A flurry of 42 last-minute bids pushed the closing price to more than...

Japan’s Environment Ministry is stepping up measures against longhorn beetles that are devouring cherry trees, with a request for 6.7 billion yen (US$43 million) to counter invasive species in the next financial year’s initial budget. According to the ministry, the requested amount, which is an increase of 11 times the initial budget of 600 million yen for the 2026 financial year, will be used to eradicate the red-necked longhorn beetle and strengthen measures to protect trees, including plum...

Tribal leader Petronila Munoz walked across the sweeping Philippine grasslands she has called home for generations, uncertain about its future, as a sprawling tech hub for a US-led initiative takes shape. With little information and no prior consultation, the indigenous chieftain said her Aeta Hungey tribe was uncertain how much of their land could be affected or what would become of the livelihood it provided. “There’s still no clarity,” Munoz said inside the tribe’s traditional meeting hall....

When Chinese artificial intelligence developers want to train their next-generation frontier models, they all face the same daunting wall: they cannot legally buy the world’s most powerful AI chips. However, the country’s tech giants and start-ups have still managed to quietly keep pace with global rivals. Their secret is an elusive workaround: moving heavy training workloads across borders through the cloud. By setting up proxy entities in foreign jurisdictions, domestic firms have for years...

Europe faces a fourth-quarter jet fuel deficit, even as it turns to far-flung suppliers including South Korea, which is set to boost its jet exports to Europe to a four-year high in September, according to analysts and shipping data. The continent has been importing more jet fuel from nations including Nigeria, the United States and Canada since the outbreak of the Iran war over half a year ago, which hit Middle Eastern supplies and cut off around half of Europe’s jet imports. Europe remains...

Chinese chipmaker Hygon Information Technology is set to release a new chip targeting physical-world applications including robotics, expanding from its current focus on data centres, according to Chinese media reports and company information. The product launch, slated for Tuesday, marks Hygon’s move into a new chip category powering machines that interact directly with their environments, as physical artificial intelligence becomes increasingly important. The new chip, an iteration of the...

The Philippines’ rise to upper-middle-income status was supposed to mark a new phase for one of Southeast Asia’s most closely watched emerging economies. Instead, analysts say the milestone has done little to shield the country from short-term pressures weighing on growth: sluggish public spending, delayed infrastructure, high living costs and the fallout from investigations into alleged irregularities in flood control projects. Those strains have left the Philippines looking like a regional...

In early July, China fired a test missile from a nuclear submarine into the South Pacific for the first time, a weapon capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Washington and Canberra were livid. The Pacific has long been the exclusive testing ground for such long-range missiles from the United States. How dare China! The reaction from Pacific island states was more measured. While leaders from Tuvalu, Palau and the Solomon Islands strongly criticised the test, the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum...

For more than five years, U Kyaw Moe Tun has refused to give up his United Nations post and a sandstone townhouse on the Upper East Side.

Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai is facing a trust crisis after developers discovered that its coding assistant tool, ZCode, was silently uploading local workspace data to external servers without explicit user consent. Even though the company, also known as Zhipu AI, apologised and patched the vulnerability, developers said the incident was likely to weaken its reputation, especially at a time when cybersecurity is becoming a central issue in the AI industry. The issue came to light...

The recent opening of a new road bridge between North Korea and Russia may look like a modest infrastructure project. In reality, the 1km stretch across the Tumen River carries implications far beyond the movement of vehicles between two border towns. For China, it is a reminder that its influence over North Korea is no longer as secure as it once appeared and that Russia may be increasingly capable of challenging Beijing’s interests on its northeastern periphery. The bridge, inaugurated on...