Japan PM Takaichi defends skipping G7 online meeting

When Chinese coffee giant Luckin Coffee moved into the unit next to his neighbourhood cafe in Singapore, Folk Yard owner Chew Yit Shan grew nervous. Luckin launched with an aggressive promotional deal of S$1 (78 US cents) per cup, served in just two minutes. In the first few months following its arrival, Chew saw sales at his independent cafe drop by 15 per cent. But once the initial hype had died down and the promotions ended, Chew said regular patrons returned and coffee sales bounced...

Governments and financial institutions in Southeast Asia urgently need to find a way to safely and quickly share data if they hope to contain a surge in scams, as cybersecurity experts warn that artificial intelligence is enabling criminal operations in the region to expand their reach rapidly. Criminal enterprises stole as much as US$114 billion from victims across the Asia-Pacific in 2025, according to a United Nations report released in July, more than triple the amount from two years...

She spent some of her teenage years helping her mother at a sundry shop in Malaysia after school, and throughout that period kept a dream of achieving something higher alive. Now, 36-year-old Suriati Sukardi is a pilot, flying AirAsia’s commercial A320 and A321 Airbus aircraft. Before that, she had landed a job as the airline’s flight attendant and served the company for eight years since 2017 while continuing to eye and seek an opportunity to climb further in her career. In 2019, her prayers...

North Korea’s laying of landmines along its heavily fortified border with the South has laid bare how misaligned the two nations have become over their de facto land boundary, after three South Korean soldiers were wounded in an explosion last month. Seoul blames Pyongyang for the blast near the military demarcation line (MDL) on September 21, in which one soldier lost a foot. On Tuesday, its Foreign Ministry said in a statement it was preparing a response to force an apology for the blast,...

Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president “dangerous and deranged” after his remarks at a political rally, where Mr. Trump said the Iran war was necessary to “keep the world safe.”

Public anger is growing over an exercise that critics say undermines the world’s largest democracy, particularly disenfranchising Muslims under the Hindu nationalist government.

The Trump administration says all Iranian airlines are being “shut down.” So why is this jumbo jet still flying from Tehran to Southeast Asia?

An Nvidia-backed US start-up has unveiled an open-weight model to challenge China’s dominance in freely available artificial intelligence, releasing a system that early third-party testing suggests could be one of the most token-efficient open models in its class. Reflection AI on Monday debuted Beam, its first open-weight model built for coding, reasoning and agentic tasks. The US firm said Beam was “competitive” with GLM-5.2 from Z.ai – also known as Zhipu AI – and was “approaching” Alibaba...

The president said there were signs that such models were used in recent attacks on several banks involving customer data. Police are investigating.

Even as geopolitical frictions and market swings unsettle venture investors, Hong Kong-founded Hermitage Capital is sticking to a global strategy of backing frontier technology companies wherever they emerge. With a US$1.5 billion war chest that is 80 per cent in US dollars, with the remainder in renminbi, the private equity firm is ramping up investments across artificial intelligence, semiconductors and robotics, mainly in the US and China, capitalising on a market turnaround triggered by the...

US F-35 stealth fighters have joined Indian warplanes for military exercises near the Pakistan border in recent days, marking the first time America’s most advanced multirole combat aircraft has taken part in joint drills in India. The US jets’ participation in the drills “signals a degree of military confidence and interoperability that is difficult to manufacture through communiques”, Sushant Singh, a South Asian studies lecturer at Yale University and former Indian Army officer, told This...