YOGYAKARTA - She was once the face of abused maids in Hong Kong - imprisoned, starved and beaten so badly she lost control of her bodily functions.
But four years after her horrific ordeal made global headlines, Indonesian Erwiana Sulistyaningsih is a university graduate and fighting for the rights of domestic helpers in the southern Chinese city and beyond.
Erwiana completed a degree in economics this month - the culmination of a dream that brought her to Hong Kong in 2013 before her life was turned upside down.
TOKYO - A large, very strong typhoon churned towards Japan on Friday (Sept 28), with the weather agency warning the storm would rip through the nation over the weekend, bringing violent winds and torrential rain.
Typhoon Trami, packing gusts of a maximum 162kmh near its centre, was in the Pacific and spiralling slowly towards Japan's southern islands.
"As it is forecast to go across Japan at a high speed, we are urging people to be vigilant" in the days ahead, Ms Sakiko Nishioka from the meteorological agency told AFP.
TOKYO - Nintendo said on Thursday (Sep 27) that it has won a court battle against a popular go-kart operator that allows drivers to dress up as Super Mario and other game characters to zip through the streets of Japan.
Visitors to Tokyo and other major Japanese cities are often stunned to see convoys of karts driven by people - usually tourists - dressed up as Mario, Yoshi, Princess Peach and other popular Nintendo characters buzzing around busy streets.
Unlike many countries, Japan has no ban on people driving go-karts on public roads.
Pushed to the edge by her alcoholic husband, Yashodha did the unthinkable - she set herself on fire.
Like many women, Yashodha was raised in a traditional family and married off at a young age. Her husband’s alcoholism overwhelmed her, but not wanting to trouble her parents, she kept it to herself.
Lonely, emotionally burdened and seeing no way out, Yashoda reached for the kerosene one day and set herself alight.
The Chon Buri Provincial Court on Thursday handed down a 10-year jail term to an engineer who shot dead a teenage schoolboy in a high-profile road rage incident last year.
Suthep Poshsomboon was also fined Bt2,000 (S$84.40) and ordered to pay Bt340,000 compensation to the victim’s mother.
Footage of Vice President Jusuf Kalla dancing with his granddaughter Jamila on video-sharing application Tik Tok went viral on Wednesday.
In the 20-second clip, Jamila is seen filming herself dancing to Dutch rapper Dopebwoy's song "Cartier", when the vice president entered the room and joined her.
Dressed in pajamas, Kalla follows Jamila’s moves, waving his hands in the air.
HANOI - A court in Vietnam has jailed a Facebook user for 2-1/2 years over anti-government comments he posted on the social media website, police said on Thursday, as the Southeast Asian country continues its crackdown on dissent.
Despite sweeping economic reform and increasing openness to social change, Vietnam's ruling Communist Party retains tight media censorship and does not tolerate criticism.
Thursday's decision comes days after Vietnam jailed another Facebook user for two years and three months on the same charges.
BALI - The Bali administration is preparing a new regulation that will ban tourists from entering the main and most sacred parts of temples across the island after a series of incidents where boorish tourists desecrated Bali's holy sites.
Balinese Hindus were shocked when a photo of a foreigner sitting on top of a shrine at the Luhur Batukaru temple in Tabanan regency went viral on Instagram and spread to other social media platforms earlier this month.
NEW DELHI - India's top court on Thursday (Sept 27) ruled that adultery is no longer a crime, declaring a colonial-era law that punished the offence with jail time unconstitutional and discriminatory against women.
The more than century-old law prescribed that any man who slept with a married woman without her husband's permission had committed adultery, a crime carrying a five-year prison term.
"Thinking of adultery from a point of view of criminality is a retrograde step," unanimously declared the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court.
