Category: Asia
-
Marco Rubio’s visit to Uzbekistan says less about a shift towards Washington than about why doubly landlocked states collect partners. Central Asia’s strategy is to avoid choosing — and a third big power improves the terms offered by the first two.
-
Filipino households are buying solar panels at scale to escape some of Asia’s highest electricity prices, pushed higher by the war involving Iran. The boom is real. So are the objections about farmland, grid readiness and where the panels come from.
-
At the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, Kristalina Georgieva warned that low-income countries are caught between inflation, debt and the economic fallout of war. What a “spillover” means in practice, and the long-running argument about what the Fund should do about it.
-
Russia has detained Hokkaido Shimbun correspondent Yuki Imai in Sakhalin on espionage charges carrying up to twenty years. No evidence has been published, and Russian espionage trials are held largely in closed session.
-
Indian factory workers are being asked to wear head cameras so the footage can train robots to do their jobs. What’s being captured is tacit skill they could never have written into a manual — and it doesn’t exist unless somebody records it.
-
Ho Chi Minh City has postponed its low-emission zone by six months. In a city where millions earn their living on a motorcycle, the sequencing against metro expansion decides whether the scheme is a nudge or a loss of access.
-
Thai factories are suspending operations as orders fall and costs rise. Suspension keeps workers employed on partial pay — which means the distress never reaches the unemployment figures, and the quiet part is when a suspension stops being temporary.
-
Indonesia is cutting foreign worker permit processing to five days through a single online system. Immigration policy is usually discussed as rules about eligibility — but processing time quietly decides who can actually use them.
-
Almost all international internet traffic runs through seabed cables about the thickness of a garden hose. They break more than a hundred times a year. What decides whether anyone notices is redundancy — and the real bottleneck is the small, ageing fleet of repair ships.
-
China and the Philippines have exchanged accusations again over South China Sea claims. A 2016 tribunal ruled largely for Manila and China rejects it — and the confrontations use coast guards and fishing fleets precisely to stay below treaty thresholds.