Southeast Asia News

Singer Mariah Carey holds hands with Santa Claus as she performs at the National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, attended by President Barack Obama and his family, at the Ellipse in Washington, Friday, Dec. 6, 2013.

Efforts to integrate the children of migrant worker from Burma into the country's higher education system are bearing fruit, with a threefold increase in the number of Burmese students in Thailand slated to take a 2014 matriculation exam that was administered for the first time earlier this year.

Singapore's first major riot in four decades is forcing the wealthy island to confront a stubborn but vexing question: how to treat low-paid foreign workers whose muscle underpins much of the economy but whose presence increasingly riles its citizens.

Cambodians wave the United Nations and Cambodian flags during a ceremony to mark the 65th anniversary of the International Human Rights Day in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 10 December 2013.

The Anna Maria Island Privateers, along with their Christmas sleigh, Santa Claus and their float/boat Skullway, join the fun hosted Dec. 6 by The Islander and The Feast Restaurant at the Island Shopping Center in Holmes Beach.

KUALA LUMPUR/ SINGAPORE - Malaysia's foreign affairs ministry has confirmed that one Malaysian has been detained for suspected involvement in Sunday's shock riot at Singapore's Little India.

An Indonesian court has jailed the disgraced former head of the country's biggest Islamic party for 16 years over a scandal in which bribe money was laundered as gifts for dozens of women, including an adult magazine model.

Singapore prosecutors will charge 24 Indian workers for taking part in the city-state's first riot in more than 40 years, police said Tuesday as the government called for calm and warned against stoking racial hatred.

Cambodia will resume international adoptions in 2014, more than four years after suspending them over concerns about child exploitation, an official said Wednesday.

Notorious Vee and Capt. Scott De Hooghe took Best in Parade honors. Marco Island's Christmas Boat Parade wound around the island Saturday evening, with spectators lining waterfront homes and public houses.

Cambodian Sam Vishna looks at a mixture of brown and white skulls that make up a map of Cambodia at Tuol Sleng Prison Museum in Phnom Penh in 1998.

Women line outside a Phnom Penh karaoke bar where sex is sold. There are many such establishments on the road to Svay Pak, on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital.

As part of a program of reforms to reopen a country tightly confined for half a century, Burma's government last week reopened Rangoon University to undergraduates.

A commuter train collided with a fuel tanker in the Indonesian capital Jakarta Monday, killing at least five people and injuring 80 others as a women-only carriage derailed and burst into flames.

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN: The final "missing link" along the 2,000km Pan Borneo Highway has been fitted in with the opening of a bridge spanning the border of Malaysia and Brunei.

Phan Nhu Thao, 26, Vietnam's representative in the second season of Asia's Next Top Model.

SINGAPORE: Singaporeans woke up to unfamiliar images of burned cars and littered streets on Monday after a fatal road accident triggered a riot by South Asian workers - the worst outbreak of violence in more than 40 years.

A former assistant engineer with the Republic of Singapore Air Force was jailed for nine weeks on Monday for commercial sex with an underaged escort, the 29th man to be convicted in a long-running online vice case involving 51 men.

The Democrat Party, Thailand's oldest and the main force behind the country's political opposition, announced Sunday that its members would resign from Parliament and join anti-government street demonstrations, deepening the political turmoil that has left five people dead and hundreds injured over the past two weeks.

Twenty-seven men from South Asia were arrested in connection with Sunday night's riot in Little India, which apparently started after a bus ran over and killed an Indian worker as he was crossing a road.