A member of the committee that organizes Hong Kong’s annual candlelight vigil for the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown was arrested early Friday on the 32nd anniversary.

China President Xi Jinping said the country must improve the way it tells its "stories" to a global audience as it seeks to develop an international voice that reflects its status on the world stage, official news agency Xinhua reported.

Hidden in a South Korean mountain tunnel designed to withstand a nuclear blast, the seeds of nearly 5,000 wild plant species are stored for safekeeping against climate change, natural disaster and war.

China’s ruling Communist Party will ease birth limits to allow all couples to have three children instead of two to cope with the rapid rise in the average age of its population, a state news agency said Monday.

A Bangladeshi worker was killed after he was hit by lightning while working at a construction site on May 28 in Malaysian city of Johor Bahru.

Vietnam health minister Nguyen Thanh Long yesterday said the country has detected a new variant of the coronavirus, a mix of the Indian and UK Covid-19 variants that spreads quickly by air, online newspaper VnExpress reported.

The Philippines has suspended the deployment of workers to Saudi Arabia after it received reports that their employers and recruiters were making them pay for COVID-19 testing, quarantine and insurance upon arrival in the kingdom.

Four people have been arrested in Indonesia for allegedly stealing Covid-19 vaccines marked for prisoners and selling them to the public, authorities said yesterday.

Five medical workers in white protective gear battle to resuscitate a coronavirus patient in a quarantine centre on the edge of the Malaysian capital, but eventually fail.

More than 200 passengers were injured in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur yesterday when two metro trains collided in a tunnel, police said.

Twenty-one people were killed when extremely cold weather struck during an ultramarathon on Saturday in rugged Gansu province in northwestern China, state media reported on Sunday, sparking public outrage over the lack of contingency planning.

In less than a month, the Covid-19 cluster at Changi Airport has swelled to more than 100 people, including airport workers whose jobs did not require them to interact with passengers, family members of front-line staff and visitors.

A strong, shallow quake shook southwestern China near the border with Myanmar, killing at least three people and injuring more than two dozen as authorities rushed relief goods including tents to the area.

In December 2020, with coronavirus infections spreading rapidly across factories and workers’ dormitories in Malaysia, officials raided latex glove maker Brightway Holdings near Kuala Lumpur. They said they found workers living in shipping containers, under conditions so squalid that human resources minister M. Saravanan later likened them to “modern slavery.”

Companies in Singapore that have traditionally relied on migrant workers from India and Bangladesh are now looking further afield for labour, Channel News Asia has reported quoting several firms.

Tursunjan Mamat, a practicing Muslim in western China’s Xinjiang region, said he’s fasting for Ramadan but his daughters, ages 8 and 10, are not. Religious activity including fasting is not permitted for minors, he explained.

Over 200 press freedom violations linked to the pandemic were reported in the Asia-Pacific region, of which about half were from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal, stated a press release by International Press Institute (IPI).

Three Bangladeshi researchers have been included in the sixth edition of Asian Scientist 100 list.

China's foreign ministry on Tuesday said it had lodged solemn representations to Japan over its annual diplomacy report which expressed grave concerns on China's military capabilities and maritime activities.

All 53 crew aboard an Indonesian submarine that disappeared last week were killed, the military said yesterday as it confirmed the vessel had been found in pieces on the seafloor.