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.

1737 - A cyclone causes 40 foot waves that are believed to have killed 300,000 in Kolkata, India.

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.

With record numbers of military flights near Taiwan over the last week, China has been showing a new intensity and military sophistication as it steps up its harassment of the island it claims as its own and asserts its territorial ambitions in the region.

Thanks to K-pop and the rise of blockbuster Korean films such as "Parasite", South Korean culture continues to gain popularity worldwide and the latest update in the Oxford English Dictionary proves it.

French clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years, a major investigation released yesterday found, and its authors said the Catholic Church had turned a blind eye to the ‘scourge’ for too long.

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.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has said he will prepare his defence against an International Criminal Court probe into his deadly drug war, after previously insisting he would not cooperate.

The son of late Philippines strongman Ferdinand Marcos declared yesterday he will run for president, ending speculation about his political ambitions but stirring anger among victims of his father’s brutal era of martial law.

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.

Girls have returned to some secondary schools in a northern province of Afghanistan, Taliban officials and teachers said yesterday, but they remain barred from classrooms in much of the country.

Japan’s new prime minister, Fumio Kishida, yesterday called a parliamentary election for October 31 and vowed to bolster the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, shortly after being formally confirmed by lawmakers in the top job.

The Assam Congress yesterday suspended its MLA, Sherman Ali Ahmed, days after he was arrested for making provocative statements on an eviction drive around 40 years ago. In a one-line statement, Congress said that it has suspended Ahmed with immediate effect for repeatedly violating party discipline.

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.

The Taliban said yesterday they had destroyed an Islamic State cell in the Afghan capital, hours after a suspected IS attack on a mosque killed five people.

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.”

Demonstrators torched a police vehicle in India yesterday as tensions boiled over after clashes involving protesting farmers killed at least nine people.