Myanmar's military engaged in "extensive and systematic" preparations for a bloody crackdown on Rohingya Muslims, a rights group have said, in a damning new report that it says justifies a genocide investigation.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte pledged on Monday to press ahead with a war on drugs that has already killed thousands, and castigated critics of his signature initiative.Duterte opened his annual State of the Nation Address with a defence of the narcotics crackdown that is now in its third year and remains largely supported in the Philippines despite fierce international censure."Let me begin by putting it bluntly: the war against illegal drugs is far from over," he told hundr

Malaysia’s youth are likely to get more power after backing 93-year-old Mahathir Mohamad to topple a regime that ruled the Southeast Asian nation for six decades.Malaysia is "very serious" about reducing the voting age to 18 before the next elections due by 2023, Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq, 25, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the top 20 economies of the world on Sunday ended two days of talks in Buenos Aires. They began against a backdrop of concern with a burgeoning trade war that had risked spilling into currency markets.

Commercial fishing is a matter of national security. It is a source of employment and income for thousands of fishermen in Southeast Asia. The lucrative industry is also a large contributor to the gross domestic product (GDP) of many ASEAN nations. The extraction of this natural resource has been the cause of many international spats in recent history. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the South China Sea. The area is biologically diverse and is home to 3,365 species of fish.

Monsoon rains battered down on Manila this week as a tropical storm - the ninth this year - howled nearby. Schools, courts and the senate were shut for two days; roads were flooded; public transport was affected. It could have been worse.That the Philippine capital is one big ocean wave away from disaster isn’t news to climate scientists or economists.

State-actors were likely behind Singapore's biggest ever cyberattack to date, security experts say, citing the scale and sophistication of the hack.The city-state announced Friday that hackers had broken into a government database and stolen the health records of 1.5 million Singaporeans, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who was specifically targeted in the "unprecedented" attack.Singapore's health minister said the strike was "a deliberate, targeted, and well

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. But for those for whom this traditional family-building strategy doesn’t quite resolve itself, advances in the artificial reproductive field have made it possible to have genetically-linked children through surrogacy. Surrogacy refers to the arrangement in which women become pregnant and carry a baby to term for contracted parties who will then assume the role of parents.

It was a fun outing at sea for everyone and nothing seemed amiss. At around 4pm, the Phoenix departed for Phuket island with its 105 passengers. 10 minutes into the journey, the sky turned dark. Half an hour later, the boat started shaking violently as a monsoon storm – said to be the biggest storm in five years – hit the boat some seven kilometres from shore. The ferry started rocking violently as giant waves buffeted it. Then it started listing, tossing its passengers to the deck.

Seeking to close the gap on the entrenched wealth inequality in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte is pushing a controversial constitutional change to adopt a United States (US)-style federal structure.The president will ask lawmakers to back his plan to create 18 federal regions with powers to impose taxes and build economic zones.