Vietnam will suspend all flights and public transport into and out of a city of 1.1 million people where the country's first coronavirus cases in months were recently detected, authorities said Monday.Until the weekend it appeared that the Southeast Asian country had managed to stub out the virus - and with lockdowns lifted since late April, domestic tourists had flocked back to the coastal city of Danang.But fresh restrictions on movement, including stopping buses and taxis within the c

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Monday drug offenders should be executed by lethal injection, in a fresh push for the death penalty as part of his anti-narcotics crackdown that has killed thousands. In a wide-ranging State of the Nation address, Duterte also admitted the government's response to the coronavirus epidemic had been "far from perfect" as the number of infections surged past 82,000, with nearly 2,000 deaths. Duterte had been expected to u

A Malaysian court will hand down its verdict in Najib Razak's first corruption trial on Tuesday, nearly 16 months after it began probing the former prime minister's role in the multi-billion-dollar 1MDB scandal.Najib and his inner circle are accused of plundering sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad in a mind-boggling fraud that stretched around the world.Stolen cash was allegedly used to bankroll Hollywood hit "The Wolf of Wall Street", starring Leonardo DiC

Sporting animal ears and stuffed hamster toys, hundreds of young protesters gathered Sunday at Bangkok's Democracy Monument to call for the government's dissolution, the latest subversive show of creativity from the kingdom's nascent pro-democracy movement.As dozens of police watched, the protesters sang a parody of the theme song for Hamtaro - a popular Japanese anime character that is a sparkly-eyed hamster - replacing the lyrics with the refrain "dissolve the parliament

Vietnam has detected its first locally-transmitted case of coronavirus in nearly 100 days, authorities said Saturday, in a country whose swift and full lockdown won praise for controlling the spread of the disease. "Patient 416" is a 57-year-old retired Vietnamese man in the southern city of Danang, and the first community transmission since 16 April. Local health officials have tested 105 people who had been in close contact with him, the Ministry of Health said o

Workers removed the United States (US) insignia from the consulate in the Chinese city of Chengdu on Saturday, a day after Beijing ordered its closure as relations deteriorated in a Cold War-style standoff.The Chengdu mission was told to shut in retaliation for the forced closure of Beijing's consulate in Houston, Texas, with both sides alleging the other had endangered national security.The deadline for the Americans to exit Chengdu remains unclear, but reporters saw a worker on a small

Malaysia reached a US$3.9 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs on Friday over the Wall Street titan's role in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal in exchange for the country ending all criminal proceedings against the bank. Billions of dollars were looted from sovereign wealth fund 1MDB in a fraud that allegedly involved former prime minister Najib Razak and his cronies. The cash plundered from state coffers bankrolled a global spending spree, and was spent

To date, ASEAN has over 200,000 coronavirus infections across all 10 member states, with more than 6,000 fatalities as a result of the deadly disease.

Limited democracy but high living standards and stability form a trade-off that most Singaporeans seem willing to live with - and some now suggest rival Asian finance hub Hong Kong can emulate the model as China tightens control.The two trading centres have long been compared but recent events have brought the issue into sharper contrast as Hong Kong faces a new era of curtailed civil liberties following China's imposition of a wide-ranging national security law.Supporters argue that aft

The number of coronavirus infections around the world passed 15 million on Wednesday with more than a quarter of those cases in the United States (US), where President Donald Trump warned that the pandemic was likely to get worse before it gets better.The US data makes grim reading with more than 140,000 fatalities and regular daily death tolls of more than 1,000, yet Trump repeated his claim late on Tuesday that the pandemic would somehow "disappear".Trump has been a critic of lock