Asia News fra SCMP

A roof collapse at a tutoring centre under construction in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday killed at least 14 schoolchildren, police and rescue officials said. Eight other children were also injured and were being treated at a hospital, senior police official Faisal Kamran said, adding that the owner of the tutoring centre and another person have been arrested. Kamran said rescuers were continuing to search through the rubble after receiving reports that more children could be...

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr faced a stern challenge on Tuesday after the influential Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) religious movement staged a protest on Metro Manila’s busiest highway to demand that the presidential palace stop going after one of its members, Senator Rodante Marcoleta. The rally at Edsa – the highway where a 1986 people power uprising helped topple Marcos’ father, who was the country’s long-time dictator – has raised the stakes of a looming criminal case involving...

Indonesia’s former education minister Nadiem Makarim, one of the country’s best-known tech founders, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after a Jakarta court found him guilty of abusing his authority in a corruption case linked to US$87 million in state losses. The verdict against the Gojek co-founder could unsettle business sentiment and dampen foreign investment appetite in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, adding to concerns about legal certainty in cases involving government...

When people talk about the race for artificial intelligence, they usually focus on software. Headlines revolve around ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek or the latest breakthrough model. Governments announce AI strategies and investors pour billions into start-ups promising to transform everything from medicine to education. Nonetheless, the most consequential battle in the AI age may not be over algorithms at all. It may be over the machines. Behind every chatbot response and AI-generated image lies a...

Setting up a new regional chamber of commerce will “fulfil a long-felt need” to bridge the gap between the Greater Bay Area and Asean, with Hong Kong acting as a “natural connector”, the business group’s inaugural chairman has said. But given existing agreements and bilateral relations between the city and individual member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, analysts said the economic benefits introduced by the new chamber were likely to be more modest than dramatic. The Asean...

It has been nearly five years since then Workers’ Party (WP) MP Raeesah Khan uttered her first lie in Singapore’s parliament but its aftershocks continue to reverberate, as some political observers argue that public fatigue has set in. They say it would be in the interest of both the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) and the WP to avoid further drawing out the issue when there are more pressing matters to address for citizens. Mustafa Izzuddin, a senior international affairs analyst at...

For most of his adult life, Siranudh “Psi” Scott kept a dark secret. Allegedly abused by his older brother as a teenager, he buried the trauma, chose to remain silent and – outwardly at least – carried on as a scion of one of Thailand’s most powerful families. Then, last month, he shared a raw, emotionally exposed confession with his hundreds of thousands of social media followers. Psi, 29, publicly accused his brother Sunit of sexual abuse, eliciting a groundswell of public empathy, testimonies...

More Singapore residents aged below 40 had never married in 2025 than in 2020, government data released on Tuesday showed, with the sharpest increases among those aged 25 to 34. The findings come from the Department of Statistics’ General Household Survey, Singapore’s mid-decade national household survey conducted between the once-a-decade Population Census. The survey also found that women who had been married had fewer children on average than five years earlier; English strengthened its...

East Timor is seeking to turn closer ties between Asean and China’s Greater Bay Area into investment and technology opportunities, even as the bloc’s newest member faces a major challenge of building capacity to benefit from regional integration. While collaboration between the two regions could become a powerful engine of growth, policies had to ensure inclusive and sustainable advancement, East Timor’s Vice Prime Minister Francisco Kalbuadi Lay said at the South China Morning Post’s GBA-Asean...

Malaysia will deploy military veterans as full-time hostel wardens at a group of elite boarding schools from Wednesday, in a new push to curb bullying after a series of abuse cases stirred widespread public anger over student safety. The first 16 former Malaysian Armed Forces personnel will report for duty at eight Mara Junior Science Colleges, in a move reminiscent of Netflix’s hit K-drama Teach You a Lesson, where a Special Ops veteran takes on school bullies. Mara Junior Science Colleges are...