Southeast Asia News

The next challenge for Indonesia's president, after winning re-election in a likely landslide, will be assembling a government that is bold enough to take on persistent corruption, poverty and human rights violations seen to be holding back the young democracy.

Al-Qaida-linked militants in the southern Philippines freed an ailing Italian Red Cross worker Sunday from six months of jungle captivity, officials said.

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will meet with President Barack Obama at the White House on July 30.

TAIPEI: Taiwanese authorities say a BK-117 medical helicopter has crashed off the island's west coast killing one person and leaving another missing.

SOME of the estimated 74 asylum seekers who went missing in treacherous Indonesian waters en route to Australia have been found, but there are fears for others who remain missing.

Hundreds of supporters of Taiwan's former president Chen Shui-bian protested outside court yesterday during an appeal against his detention on graft charges.

PRESIDENT Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, heading for a sweeping re-election victory, is a retired four-star general who rose through the ranks of Indonesia's former dictatorship yet has recorded his own albums of romantic ballads.

INDONESIAN opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri's campaign team refused to concede defeat on Friday to an apparent landslide election win by incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

POLITICAL watchers and the financial markets alike were upbeat the day after Indonesian voters gave incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a strong mandate in Wednesday's presidential election.

A medical helicopter crashed into the sea off Taiwan's outlying island of Kinmen on its way from Taipei to Kinmen early Friday morning, the Kinmen Shangyi Airport authorities reported later that day.

COMMON PRACTICE : A hospital informant said the Philippine president had the implants repaired, had a groin cyst excised and some unwanted hair removed DPA , MANILA Friday, Jul 10, 2009, Page 6 A failed effort by a spokesman to cover up the real reasons behind last week s hospitalization of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has further ...

LAWYERS for a Darwin woman who will face trial next week accused of conspiring to assassinate East Timor's top political leaders have called on prosecutors to abandon their "hopelessly inadequate" case.

It will soon become a lot easier to travel between the mainland and Taiwan after regular direct flights get off the ground.

Indonesian presidential candidate and current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono shows his ink-stained finger after casting his ballot with his wife, Kristiani Herawati, at a polling station in Cibubur, on the outskirt of Jakarta.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Budget carrier AirAsia on Thursday launched a low-cost air courier service in Malaysia, expanding its business to boost revenue amid the global economic slump.

Sex workers in Taiwan have cautiously welcomed a government plan to legalize prostitution, but the scheme is being opposed by an alliance of women's groups who fear it will breed crime and violence.

A landslide caused by torrential rain killed about 30 people in northern Myanmar at the weekend when it swept away their homes, which were built on a mine dump, people in contact with the area said on Wednesday.

Myanmar's ruling junta wanted Ban Ki-moon to go into a grandiose drug museum through the back door to prevent the U.N. secretary-general from making a rock-star entrance.

WASHINGTON - An interesting conversation may be taking place in the beyond. Envision former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a brilliant, tormented architect of the Vietnam War, being greeted by a group of souls who died so very, very young in that war.

A 37-YEAR-old Malaysian man married to a 106-year-old woman has been arrested on drugs charges.