A senior ally of Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim announced his resignation from cabinet on Saturday – a day after confidence in the prime minister’s administration took a severe hit when disgraced former leader Najib Razak was allowed to serve out his jail term under house arrest. Anthony Loke, the secretary general of the Democratic Action Party (DAP), said that the party could not accept the decision to allow Najib to complete his sentence in the comfort of his own home. The former prime minister is...

Cloud seeding operations will be carried out in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya following worsening haze conditions in Malaysia, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. The agency said the operations would be scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. “However, the operations are subject to weather conditions and the availability of suitable clouds for the seeding process,” its director general, Meor Ismail Meor Akim, said in a statement on Saturday. The operations will be carried out...

Singapore Airlines was awarded the title of world’s best airline in the annual rankings by Skytrax, taking the top spot from Qatar Airways in a year that saw Middle Eastern carriers come under significant pressure from the ongoing war in Iran. The award, which is based on a survey of almost 25 million travellers, was announced in London on Friday, with a list dominated by Asian carriers. Only one European airline – Air France-KLM – made the top 10, and not a single US company, despite their...

An Australian accused of murdering a teenage girl in Thailand and abandoning her body in a suitcase pleaded not guilty in court on Friday, citing self-defence. Simon Peter Carman, 45, was arrested at a Bangkok airport in June as he prepared to take a flight back to Australia after the 17-year-old victim’s friend had reported her missing. The young woman’s body was found in a suitcase near a railway track in Pattaya, a seaside resort city south of the capital, Bangkok. Police said she died of...

Singapore Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing’s use of Mandarin and Chinese philosophy in his speech at a major security forum in Beijing has won him praise on Chinese social media, while shedding light on how cultural familiarity and language can be diplomatic tools for the city state. Videos of Chan at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum quoting ancient philosopher Mencius, or Mengzi in Mandarin, have gone viral on platforms such as Weixin and Baidu, with users hailing his command of the language and...

Thailand has moved to make weight-loss pens prescription-only, as a glut of the GLP-1 medicines – which mimic the hormones released once someone is full – floods the black market and influencers swarm TikTok to extol the quick wins of the simple injections. The Southeast Asian nation, which is never far behind wellness or aesthetic trends and has a notorious black market in counterfeit drugs, has seen the uptake of GLP-1 medicines skyrocket, doctors say, including the market-leading Ozempic...

Property agent Raymond Heng had suspected True Fitness was struggling, but he did not expect the gym he had visited for more than a decade to disappear overnight. The closure was not entirely surprising given the region’s fiercely competitive fitness industry, but its abruptness left Heng, 47, in disbelief after paying S$8,800 (US$6,900) for a lifetime membership in 2013. “I guessed that they might not have been doing that well since branches have been closing over the years, but I did not...

As Rodrigo Duterte’s crimes-against-humanity trial looms, an international tribunal faces the challenge of managing a sprawling prosecution case around the health of an 81-year-old former president of the Philippines, on top of shielding the proceedings from a highly charged media environment. Those pressures came into focus at an International Criminal Court (ICC) status conference on Wednesday, when Presiding Judge Joanna Korner urged prosecutors to trim their witness list and evidence ahead...

For years, stablecoins have carried a simple promise: move money globally with the speed of the internet, without the cost and delays of traditional banking rails. The harder question has always been whether they can move from crypto-native circles into regulated, everyday payments. Singapore-based dtcpay is betting that the answer lies not in bypassing the […] The post SBI joins dtcpay’s US$25M round to bridge Japan, SEA stablecoin corridors appeared first on e27.

Crunchbase’s first-half 2026 numbers looked like an industry-wide win: global venture funding hit US$510 billion, smashing the previous half-year record. Look closer and the picture curdles. OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed 43 per cent of every venture dollar deployed on the planet in six months, with Anthropic’s US$65-billion raise alone equal to nearly a third of […] The post Ecosystem Roundup: The AI funding boom has a Southeast Asia-sized blind spot appeared first on e27.