A notorious people smuggler named Hasan Ayoub appears to be back managing smuggling operations in Indonesia. His re-emergence demonstrates the power of reputation in a shadowy and lucrative business.

Cisarua is where people wait for the slow wheels of UN bureaucracy to turn, or for the sudden call from a smugglers’ agent: get ready, eat, we're leaving tonight. With his camera, Hazara refugee Barat Ali Batoor ...

Fear, corruption, boredom, smugglers, extortionists, Saudi sex tourists and temporary wives: such is life in the Indonesian resort town that has become limbo for asylum seekers.

Aung San Suu Kyi has made some new friends on her way from icon to politician: Burma’s former military men and crony capitalists are getting cosy. The country’s minorities, not so much.

Robotics in many parts of the world is driven by military aims. Pacifist Japan takes a different approach: This is a digital love story.

After another devastating bomb blast in Quetta, there is even more fear in the violent streets of Afghanistan. Australia is warning Hazaras not to risk seeking asylum there though.

The Global Mail investigates how Australian authorities are co-operating with corrupt local authorities who bend the law to keep would-be refugees trapped in a country that they desperately want to escape.

Not even the cops will venture across all the violent divisions between enemies in Pakistan’s blood-soaked megacity. Only the guys driving the make-shift ambulances do that. No gloves, either. One night in ...

Crunching the numbers on the Communist Party.

On a hill in the centre of Java, thousands of Muslims regularly turn up to a religious ritual with a surprising stipulation: to seek their fortunes, they must have sex with a stranger.

“I could see the death in front of me” — listen to the hair-raising reality of seeking asylum in Australia. Two ship-wrecked asylum seekers cheat death, make a daring escape, and now face the wrenching choices of a ...

A frenzied election in Jakarta makes it look like democracy is flourishing in Indonesia. Or maybe it’s a dry run for the return of authoritarianism.

A string of tiger killings in India is prompting one state to fight poachers with guns, cash and spies. But is this compromising human rights?

Sufi music is wildly popular in Pakistan — once you get past the armed guards. Why are the Muslim mystics so maligned by militants?

Bollywood film star Aamir Khan is shaking up India with a TV juggernaut that airs the dirty laundry of one billion people.

India is trying to ovecome water shortages by catching more of its annual rain. But here, even the simplest solutions can be hard to pull off.

In Mumbai, India’s most frenzied city, slum dwellers facing eviction are defending themselves with a locally made weapon: film.

A recent tense standoff in the South China Sea is a taste of a riskier future for Australia, wedged between China and America.

A viral Internet video in Indonesia is one sign of a public increasingly fed up with its embarrassing elite.

For a small band of foreign stuntmen, Thailand offers a high-stakes tradeoff: physical danger for a shot at celebrity.

The downfall of Bo Xilai is China’s biggest political crisis in a generation. But is it a coming of age for the country’s netizens?

In Thailand’s far south, a brutal and little-known conflict is killing hundreds of people every year. And it appears to be getting worse.

When someone is charged with insulting Thailand’s monarchy, they often go down without a fight. One woman is standing her ground.

Singapore used to be a strange little bubble of wealth, blandness and prurience in Asia. Has it now become a model for the world?

By-elections that brought Aung San Suu Kyi into parliament have delighted the world. But Myanmar’s political transformation is far from over.

Myanmar’s parliamentary poll has put Aung San Suu Kyi back into politics, as Westerners circle one of globalisation’s last frontiers.

East Timorese are desperately poor with a government swimming in cash. Is it buying its way out of poverty, or into economic disaster?

A truly independent future for East Timor depends on its upcoming election going smoothly.

In one corner of Bali, both the deaf and hearing speak the same silent language.

Chinese study centres are rapidly multiplying at schools and universities around the world, including Australia. They come Communist Party-approved.

The North Korean capital is going through a surprising (and slightly mysterious) boom.

On a tour introducing China’s future leader to the world, we all got a good look at Xi Jinping.

Australian Senator Nick Xenophon is on Malaysia's "watch list". Detained at the airport, he's going to be deported instead of meeting opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim — this backstory explains him.

As Indonesia’s wealth grows, so too does criticism of the nation’s ubiquitous corruption—and its “auto-pilot” president.

In remote territory beyond the reach of Myanmar’s generals, rebels create their own jarring sense of normality.

Announced on Thursday as a finalist for the Walkley award for international journalism, this February report is from behind the lines of a largely unacknowledged war in Myanmar's north.

Chongqing is China’s frantic boom city with an inward twist: a perplexing mixture of materialism and Mao.

An accident-prone childhood led to a surprising discovery: Buubuu was not clumsy, he was home to 109 ancestor spirits and marked to be a shaman.

A new draft mineral law would end the freewheeling approach of Monogolia's minerals industry. Aubrey Belford toured Monogolia's "Wolf Economy" back when people made their fortune, legally or otherwise.

With nowhere to point your moral compass, Indonesia presents a journalist with some tricky choices.