420 with CNW — German Plan to Legalize Cannabis Won’t Permit Imports

The governor of an Indonesian province bearing the brunt of weeks of raging forest fires has sought to douse anger over his trip to Singapore, as Jakarta “welcomed” help from its neighbours choked by transboundary haze to contain the crisis. East Kalimantan Governor Rudy Mas’ud, who was spotted having breakfast with his wife at the famous integrated resort Marina Bay Sands in a photo posted online on Sunday, said he travelled to the city state for a medical check-up. Rudy’s clarification came...

Malaysia has ruled out taking stronger measures against Indonesia over the worsening regional haze, even as widespread school closures and mounting public frustration fuel calls to punish those responsible for forest fires in the neighbouring country. “We need to safeguard the close relationship between the two countries. So, we are not going as far as sending a diplomatic note or taking legal action,” Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan told local media on Thursday. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said...

The Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC) opened the city’s first experimental hub for embodied artificial intelligence on Thursday with the participation of seven mainland and Hong Kong companies, including industry leaders Unitree Robotics and Galbot, as the city looks to carve out a role in the global robotics boom. Located at the HKPC Building in Kowloon Tong, the Embodied AI International Applications Hub, housed under the HKPC’s industrial AI and robotics centre, features simulated...

Indonesian officials, looking to alleviate poverty in their country and eyeing the rise of rural economies in China, are turning to Beijing for help that may include stoking the exports of a potentially lucrative durian crop. Indonesian Transmigration Minister Muhammad Iftitah Sulaiman Suryanagara began a seven-day visit to China on Monday, with Indonesia’s state-owned Antara news agency saying consultations with Beijing’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, companies and academic...

As the Philippines braces for months of drought and shortages in key resources due to the current El Nino season, questions are mounting over whether it could have prepared better to deal with a crisis that has been predicted well in advance. The government’s haphazard response to El Nino reflects its persistent track record of failing to do adequate disaster and infrastructure planning, according to climate and risk specialists. El Nino is a weather phenomenon that causes changes in winds and...

South Korea’s long-standing alliance with America is being tested by feuds spanning from investment deals to intelligence leaks, compromising Seoul’s ability to respond to North Korea. In a rare admission, Seoul’s top envoy to the US on Monday acknowledged an “issue” with Washington’s sharing of covert data. “There are limitations in our communication with the White House,” Kang Kyung-wha told lawmakers. “I find it somewhat frustrating.” That follows reports earlier this year that a South Korean...

A fleet of artificial intelligence agents operating on a Tencent Holdings cloud platform made thousands of attempts to circumvent security protections on Alibaba Group Holding’s mapping service, according to findings by third-party researchers. It is one of the first reported “rogue” AI events involving Chinese companies, following a string of recent high-profile incidents in the US, including from OpenAI and Anthropic, highlighting the risks of increasingly autonomous AI systems. Agents running...

North Korea’s apparent use of different launch methods to fire two types of cruise missiles from a tactical nuclear-capable submarine could complicate regional defence, while raising fresh questions about the operational readiness of its growing undersea arsenal, observers have said. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said on Thursday it had “test-fired two types of submarine-launched strategic cruise missiles” off its eastern coast. The tests “contributed to inspecting the...

Hong Kong investors are Asia’s most ambitious stock pickers, but they have much more subdued return expectations than regional peers swept up in enthusiasm over artificial intelligence, according to a survey by a global asset management firm. Some 95 per cent of Hong Kong respondents said they wanted to outperform the market, the highest proportion in Asia, where the average stood at 85 per cent, according to a survey conducted in August by Natixis Investment Managers. Hong Kong investors...

Talk of global decoupling from China has persisted for years, as has speculation that emerging economies such as India and Vietnam could soon replace it as the “world’s factory”. But for Indian hardware engineer Neeraj Arora, the growth of India’s electronics manufacturing industry has not eliminated the need to source components from China. Instead, it has changed the nature of those imports. A decade ago, Arora imported finished phone chargers from the world’s second-largest economy. Today,...

Dr. Anas Alhajji joins host Tushar Shetty to examine how the Hormuz crisis is reshaping global energy markets – and the overlooked impact of the loss of Russian and Kazakh supply.

The rise of seabed mining will add new complexity to the South China Sea disputes.