Asia

by Amal JAYASINGHE Police stepped up security across Sri Lanka on Wednesday over fears of violence on the final day of campaigning for the fiercely contested presidential election, officials said. Elite police commandos reinforced police as the two frontrunners in Saturday’s vote Sajith Premadasa and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa held rival rallies in and around Colombo. “There […]

More than 50 people, mostly children, were injured by a man who broke into a kindergarten in southwest China and sprayed them with corrosive liquid, local authorities said Tuesday. The suspect, a 23-year-old surnamed Kong, entered the kindergarten by climbing a wall before spraying victims with sodium hydroxide, said local authorities in Kaiyuan city, Yunnan […]

Self-exiled Cambodia opposition leader Sam Rainsy had planned to rally with thousands of his supporters to march into Cambodia through the Thai border last Saturday, but his plan faltered after he was barred from flying to Bangkok from Paris. In an interview with Malaysiakini in Putrajaya he repeated his wish to organise a huge rally of Cambodian exiles […]

The ex-King of Malaysia is hitting back at his ex-wife, Russian Model Oksana Veovodina, 27, who says that her baby boy is his son. In an exclusive article the Daily Mail said the King called Veovodina ‘cruel and vindictive’. The British paper said the Kelantan Sultan, Muhammad V insists the pictures of the baby produced […]

A court in southern China sentenced a former politician from Japan to life imprisonment on Friday for attempting to smuggle drugs out of the country hidden in the soles of platform shoes. 76-year-old Takuma Sakuragi was caught at an airport in 2013 with 3.29 kilogrammes of methamphetamine hidden in the handle of his suitcase and […]

Indian police have arrested more than 500 people ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on a hotly disputed religious site in the holy city of Ayodhya, media reports said, with authorities fearing the verdict could trigger unrest. The decision on the future of the site claimed by both Hindus and Muslims is due by November […]

by Andrew BEATTY Australian firefighters warned they were in “uncharted territory” as they struggled to contain more than a dozen out-of-control bushfires across the east of the country on Friday. Around a hundred blazes pockmarked the New South Wales and Queensland countryside, around 17 of them remained dangerous and uncontained late Friday. “We have never […]

An Indian-origin British journalist critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lost his Indian overseas citizenship, a move campaigners said underlined the government’s hostility to a free press. The home ministry said Thursday that Aatish Taseer had “concealed the fact that his late father was of Pakistani origin” and was therefore ineligible for Overseas Citizenship […]

The vocal critic that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has named to a lead role in his deadly drug war called on Friday for revamping the crackdown and ending its “senseless” killing. Opposition leader Leni Robredo has regularly attacked Duterte’s internationally condemned initiative, prompting the president to appoint her this week to a post supervising it. […]

Beijing on Thursday criticised as “fictitious” a report by British politicians claiming there was “alarming evidence” of Chinese interference on university campuses. The report, which was released Tuesday, cited examples where Beijing-linked organisations appeared to suppress freedom of speech at institutions of higher education. One academic told lawmakers he saw Confucius Institute officials confiscating papers […]

More than 80 farmers have been arrested in northern India for starting fires that contributed to the recent pollution crisis in New Delhi and other cities, officials said Thursday. Each winter the post-harvest burning of crop stubble covers swaths of the region in toxic smog, which combines with car and factory emissions to turn Delhi […]

The wife of slain Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi revealed “a lot of information” about the jihadist group’s “inner workings” after she was captured last year, a Turkish official said. The official said that Baghdadi’s spouse identified herself as Rania Mahmoud but was in fact Asma Fawzi Muhammad Al-Qubaysi. She was said to be […]

The US Justice Department has charged three people, including two Saudis, with spying on Twitter users critical of the kingdom’s royal family. The trio worked to unmask the ownership details behind dissident Twitter accounts on behalf of someone prosecutors designated “Royal Family Member-1”, which The Washington Post reported was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the […]

by Tuwaedaniya MERINGING with Thanaporn PROMYAMYAI in Bangkok At least fifteen people were gunned down in an ambush by suspected Muslim militants in Thailand’s violence-wracked south, an army spokesman said on Wednesday, one of the bloodiest days in the 15-year insurgency. Thailand’s three southernmost provinces have been in the grip of a conflict that has […]

President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday that Iran would resume uranium enrichment at an underground plant south of Tehran in its latest step back from a troubled 2015 agreement with major powers. The suspension of all enrichment at the Fordow plant in the mountains near the Shiite holy city of Qom was one of the restrictions […]