Asia Pacific

South Korea's National Assembly Research Service is taking a long view of history and figures it doesn't have much future.

The Philippines is likely to achieve only 60% of its 35 Millenium Development Goals by the 2015 deadline, says the United Nations Development Programme.

China has 56 ethnic groups who among them speak 80 languages and dialects. Even the majority language, Mandarin, has eight dialects.

As befits a government still shedding its communist heritage, Vietnam has a long list of businesses in which neither locals nor foreigners are allowed to engage.

Warnings by several governments about Australia's poisonous or man-eating wildlife, tempestuous weather and – in some places – homophobic citizens are having a dramatic effect on the picture of tourism Down Under.

Government boosts drug trade For lack of many other ways of making significant amounts of money, North Korea’s young new leader is falling back on the tried-and-true family business of producing and trafficking heroin.

India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, is moving to dismantle one of the last reminders of founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's admiration for the Soviet Union's despotic leader Josef Stalin.

Natural resources continue to top the province's exports to the Far East, but opportunities in agriculture and education are growing

China's government has issued a list of “behavioural standards” it expects citizens to adhere to in order to try to reduce environmental damage.

In a further sign that the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are going to be hard pressed to be ready to form their planned economic community next year, the Indonesian financial authority says the country's stock exchange (I