Smoke from fires across Indonesia is spreading across Southeast Asia, pushing air pollution to hazardous levels and highlighting ongoing challenges in land management, regional cooperation and climate resilience. A widening Indonesia wildfire crisis is sending haze across Southeast Asia, degrading air quality from Malaysia and Singapore to the Philippines and
MANILA, Philippines — A Philippine court ordered the arrest of Vice President Sara Duterte on Friday on three counts of grave threats, adding another legal challenge for a politician who is also facing an impeachment trial and has declared plans to run for president in 2028. The Quezon City Regional
China has crossed a significant energy milestone: solar power is now the country’s largest source of installed electricity-generating capacity, overtaking coal for the first time. China had 1,288 gigawatts of installed solar capacity at the end of July, narrowly exceeding its 1,285 GW coal fleet, according to National Energy Administration
A proposed blockchain-based system for equities and government debt would place Japan alongside Europe, Britain and the United States in the broader shift toward tokenized financial-market infrastructure. Japan is considering a significant overhaul of the infrastructure underpinning its financial markets, examining whether blockchain settlement could allow stock and Japanese government
Washington has dramatically widened its economic campaign against Tehran. For governments, the key question is how far the United States is prepared to push its Iran sanctions into China and other critical trading hubs. WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has opened a new phase of its campaign against Iran, threatening
A record foreign-currency mobilization has strengthened India’s external defenses. But persistent Indian rupee weakness shows how oil prices, capital flows and geopolitical risk continue to test one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies. India has mobilized roughly $73 billion in foreign currency in less than 11 weeks. Yet the Indian
The ICC sanctions targeting Judge Tomoko Akane brings the Trump administration’s escalating confrontation with the International Criminal Court directly into one of America’s most important alliances. TOKYO/THE HAGUE — The Trump administration’s campaign against the International Criminal Court has reached one of Washington’s closest allies after the United States imposed
ULAANBAATAR: UNCCD COP17 has opened in Mongolia with a more consequential mandate than its relatively low global profile suggests: turn land restoration and drought commitments into finance, resilience and implementation. Running from August 17 to 28 under the theme “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope.”, COP17 brings together the Convention’s 197 Parties
The United States is considering a sharper test of technological alignment in its competition with China, with a draft State Department proposal warning countries that participation in a U.S.-led AI cooperation framework could be incompatible with membership in a rival China-backed initiative. Reuters reported the proposal after reviewing a draft
JAKARTA — Indonesia is accelerating preparations to protect government systems, critical infrastructure and sensitive data from a cybersecurity threat that has not yet fully materialized: quantum computers powerful enough to compromise widely used forms of public-key encryption. The move places Southeast Asia’s largest economy within a widening international effort to
