1. Japan's labor shortage is forcing its conservative lawmakers to consider overhauling decades-old social welfare rules originally designed to encourage married women to spend more hours looking after the home.

2. Australia plans to significantly boost surveillance of Pacific Islands territorial waters, spending A$477 million ($310.72 million) on aerial patrols for illegal fishing fleets.

3. Foreign investors are invited for Indonesia's plan to build a $80 billion seawall hundreds of kilometres long to prevent floods along the north coast of its most populous island Java.

4. Middle East leaders and their Western allies have been warning that Islamic State could exploit the fall of the Assad regime to stage a comeback in Syria and Iraq.

5. Shares of planemaker Boeing fell 8% in premarket US trading after an Air India aircraft with 242 people crashed minutes after taking off from India's western city of Ahmedabad.