Opium cultivation in military-ruled Myanmar jumped 33 percent last year, reversing a six-year downward trend in the strife-torn country, a United Nations report said yesterday.

India showcased its military and its cultural diversity in a colourful parade yesterday at the revamped colonial avenue in New Delhi to mark Republic Day, the anniversary of the day the country’s secular Constitution came into effect in 1950.

More than 160 people have died from the cold in Afghanistan this month in the worst winter in more than a decade, authorities said yesterday, as residents described being unable to afford fuel to heat homes in temperatures well below freezing.

Eight people are dead, including six Chinese nationals, after a ship sank in waters off the coast of Japan, a Chinese diplomat told state media today.

Opium poppy production in Myanmar ramped up dramatically following the 2021 military coup, the UN's drugs office said Thursday, as political and economic turmoil drove farmers to cultivate the crop..The country's economy has been paralysed following the military power grab in February 2021

The United Nations is pushing the Taliban administration in Afghanistan for more exemptions to its ban on most female aid workers, top UN officials said on Wednesday, while also expressing concern that foreign women working for international organizations and embassies could next be targeted.

Indian students said they would show again a BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the government has dismissed as propaganda after a Tuesday campus screening was disrupted by a power cut and intimidation by opponents.

North Korea has ordered a five-day lockdown in the capital over “respiratory illness”, a report said yesterday, in what appears to be the first citywide restrictions since the country declared victory over Covid-19 in August 2022.

An aide to former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan was arrested on Wednesday for criticising election officials, police said, the

Asia's richest man Gautam Adani saw his net worth drop six billion dollars on Wednesday after a US investment firm accused him of "brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud".

India has invited Pakistan's foreign minister to a meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) that it is hosting in May, Indian media reported on Wednesday, signalling a possible thaw in relations between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Fourteen crew members were rescued today from a cargo ship that sank off south-western Japan during fierce winter winds, with planes and ships, including private vessels, searching for the remaining eight.

North Korea has ordered a five-day lockdown in the capital over "respiratory illness", a report said Wednesday, in what appears to be the first citywide restrictions since the country declared victory over Covid-19 in August 2022.

A top Indian university cut off power and internet supply on campus on Tuesday before a screening by its students' union of a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi that India has dismissed as propaganda, broadcaster NDTV reported.

Rescue workers pulled 12 people, including two children, out of the rubble after a residential apartment block collapsed in the northern Indian city of Lucknow, but more were feared trapped inside, a local police official has said.

The United Nations’ aid chief visited Kabul on Monday and raised concerns over women’s education and work with the Taliban administration’s acting minister of foreign affairs, an Afghan ministry statement said.

The national power grid was restored in Pakistan, the energy minister said yesterday, a day after a nationwide breakdown left most of the country’s 220 million people without electricity and caused tens of millions of dollars in industry losses.

The Export-Import Bank of China has offered Sri Lanka a two-year moratorium on its debt and said it will support the country’s efforts to secure a $2.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, according to a letter reviewed by Reuters.

A group of people from Myanmar have filed a criminal complaint in Germany accusing their country’s military of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, a rights organisation said yesterday.

A top Indian university has banned the screening of a BBC documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role during deadly 2002 sectarian riots, after his government attempted to block its spread online.