Southeast Asian nations are discussing whether to exclude Myanmar’s junta chief from a summit due to slow progress on a plan to address turmoil after a coup in the country earlier this year, a top diplomat said yesterday.

Military tensions between China and Taiwan are at their highest in four decades, the island’s defence minister warned yesterday, adding Beijing would be in a position to launch a full-scale invasion in 2025.

Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in “undesirable social behaviour”, adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns.

Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa yesterday ordered a probe into his niece’s overseas wealth after she and her husband were alleged in the Pandora Papers to have millions of dollars stashed abroad.

Ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi will not call any defence witnesses at her incitement trial in a junta court, her lawyer said yesterday, as the military hit a detained US journalist with another criminal charge.

Malaysia late Monday summoned Beijings’s envoy to the Southeast Asian country in protest after Chinese vessels entered its maritime economic zone in the disputed South China Sea.

Taiwan falling to China would trigger “catastrophic” consequences for peace in Asia, President Tsai Ing-wen wrote in a piece for Foreign Affairs published yesterday, and if threatened Taiwan will do whatever it takes to defend itself.

Sri Lankan prosecutors yesterday indicted the alleged mastermind of the 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings along with 24 men they say were co-conspirators in the island’s worst single terror attack.

Myanmar’s detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday asked a judge to reduce the frequency of her court hearings due to strained health, her lawyer said, but assured the public there was no concern about her condition.

We are disappointed that the Myanmar authorities have not cooperated with the Special Envoy of the Asean on Myanmar. Unless there is progress, it would be difficult to have the Chairman of the SAC at the Asean Summit.”

Women in Afghanistan who object to what the Taliban have said and done since returning to power are finding it harder to protest, now that impromptu demonstrations have been banned and previous rallies were broken up by gunfire and beatings.

An explosion outside a mosque in the Afghan capital killed at least two people yesterday, senior Taliban officials said.

Afghanistan is facing a breakdown of its economic and social systems that risks turning into a humanitarian catastrophe, the European Union’s foreign policy chief said yesterday.

Bangladesh Naval Ship “Somudra Avijan” reached the southern Indian port of Visakhapatnam today on a five-day visit to the eastern Naval Command to commemorate the birth centenary of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and 50 years of Liberation of Bangladesh.

A bomb exploded in the entrance of a mosque in the Afghan capital on Sunday, leaving “number of civilians dead,” a Taliban spokesman said, in the first major attack on the city after the departure of U.S. forces.

A family of seven, including two children, died when their car fell into a river amid heavy rains in the suburbs of Pakistan’s capital early Saturday, police said.

Children are dying of starvation in Afghanistan, local and international sources said yesterday, following warnings that a million youngsters there could face life-threatening malnutrition by the end of the year.   

Afghan interpreters who worked for the Netherlands have been summoned to appear in court by the Taliban who have threatened their families, Dutch public television NOS reported on Friday. 

Myanmar is facing a “severe crisis” with the number of people needing aid tripling to three million in the eight months since the military launched a coup, the UN humanitarian coordinator to the country said has said.

Myanmar’s junta has said it was unlikely an Asean special envoy tasked with facilitating dialogue in the coup-hit country would be allowed to meet ousted pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.