CNN – Asia/Pacific

By Eric Cheung, CNN Taiwan will extend the period of mandatory military service for all eligible men from four months to a year amid rising threats from China, President Tsai Ing-wen said at a news conference in Taipei on Tuesday. Four months of mandatory military training can “no longer suit the needs” of Taiwan’s defense,

By Rhea Mogul, CNN They battled hunger and dehydration after the engine of their rickety boat cut out, leaving them adrift in the Andaman Sea for weeks. Some grew so desperate, they drank seawater. Others prayed for rain, so they could briefly quench their thirst. Starving and without medicine, some reportedly succumbed to illness. Despite

By Carlotta Dotto, Brad Lendon and Jessie Yeung, CNN In 2020, North Korea conducted four missile tests. In 2021, it doubled that number. In 2022, the isolated nation fired more missiles than any other year on record, at one point launching 23 missiles in a single day. North Korea has fired more than 90 cruise

By Jake Kwon, Sophie Jeong, Ivana Kottasová and Jessie Yeung, CNN South Korea’s military scrambled fighter jets and attack helicopters on Monday after five North Korean drones crossed into its airspace, with one aircraft crashing, according to the country’s defense ministry. The ministry said South Korea’s military fired shots at the drones, which measured under

By Nectar Gan, Eric Cheung and Selina Wang, CNN Beijing will begin distributing Pfizer’s Covid-19 drug Paxlovid to the city’s community health centers in the coming days, state media reported Monday. The report comes as the city grapples with an unprecedented wave of infections that has severely strained its hospitals and emptied pharmacy shelves. The

By Rhea Mogul, CNN After spending more than a month adrift on a stricken boat without food or water, dozens of starving Rohingya have been rescued in Indonesia, the United Nations refugee agency said Sunday, offering a glimmer of hope for the persecuted group who fled their refugee camps last month in search of a

By Eric Cheung, Jessie Yeung and emiko jozuka, CNN China sent 47 aircraft across the median line of the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, its largest incursion into Taiwan’s air defense zone in recent months, as Beijing steps-up efforts to normalize aggressive military operations around the self-ruled island. The incursions were made by 42 J-10, J-11,

By Chris Liakos, Ehsan Popalzai, Sahar Akbarzai, Mohammed Tawfeeq and Ivana Kottasová, CNN At least half a dozen major foreign aid groups have said they are temporarily suspending their operations in Afghanistan after the Taliban barred female employees of non-governmental organizations from coming to work. “We cannot effectively reach children, women and men in desperate

By Kocha Olarn, CNN Thailand‘s navy said Sunday that the death toll from the sinking of one of its warships earlier in the week had risen to 18. The HTMS Sukhothai sank in severe weather early Monday, leaving dozens of its crew missing in stormy seas in the Gulf of Thailand. 11 officers remain missing,

By Xiaofei Xu, CNN China’s top health authority has announced that it has stopped publishing daily Covid-19 case numbers, as reports claimed that the true toll of the country’s ongoing outbreak is much worse than the official figures published by authorities. The National Health Commission (NHC) said Sunday that “relevant outbreak information” would instead be

By Hannah Ritchie and Artemis Moshtaghian, CNN For months, Leila has barely seen sunlight. “I miss being in the open air…I miss being able to walk freely,” she told CNN. “I miss my family, my room.” Her life now is largely confined to four walls, in a house that is not her own, with people

By Hannah Ritchie, Nectar Gan, Simone McCarthy, Selina Wang and Mengchen Zhang, CNN Almost 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation’s top health officials, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported Friday. If correct, the estimate — which

By Yoonjung Seo, Emiko Jozuka and Jessie Yeung, CNN North Korea launched two short-range ballistic missiles on Friday, according to South Korean officials, the latest in an unprecedented year of weapons testing. The missiles were fired from Pyongyang’s Sunan area at around 4:32 p.m. local time, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in

By Rhea Mogul, CNN The plight of nearly 200 Rohingya refugees adrift in the Indian Ocean for the past month is growing increasingly desperate, the United Nations’ refugee agency said Friday, as it repeated its call for countries in the region to help save them. Many passengers are feared dead and survivors are said to

By Jessie Yeung and Tetsu Sukegawa, CNN Several members of a QAnon group in Japan were sentenced by a Tokyo court on Thursday for breaking into multiple Covid vaccination centers, according to CNN affiliate TV Asahi. The five defendants were members of YamatoQ, an offshoot of the larger QAnon conspiracy theory that originated in the

By Selina Wang, Nectar Gan and CNN’s Beijing bureau For much of the pandemic, images of overflowing hospitals and busy funeral homes from the United States have featured heavily on China’s state-controlled television, where the deaths of over a million Americans from Covid is depicted as a gross failing of Western democracy. Now, as an