Global Castor Oil Market Size (Million USD), Comparison (Units) and CAGR (%) by Regions (2012-2022)

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said the United Nations should scrub the World War II-era designation from its Charter. China and Russia have used the term recently to attack Japan.

The Philippine government is exploring nuclear power options to guard against global energy shocks. One proposal is to switch on a plant in Bataan that has been mothballed for 40 years.

The U.S. Embassy said a draft law allowing users to opt out of systems that choose what they can see in their feeds could amount to censorship.

A Malaysian tofu pudding seller has pledged to donate 10,000 ringgit (US$2,452) to help former prime minister Najib Razak cover his 50 million ringgit fine, describing the contribution as a personal payback for a lifeline extended to him 14 years ago. In a social media post, Sunny Seow, founder of the Sunnycoco brand, shared that his motivation stemmed from a pivotal moment in 2012 when he was serving a sentence in Perak state’s Manjung for past mistakes. During a visit by Najib to the area that...

The Philippine ⁠Senate, sitting as an impeachment ⁠court, on Wednesday lowered the number of votes needed to convict Vice-President Sara Duterte, reducing the threshold prosecutors must clear to secure a guilty verdict. The court ruled that only ‌senator-judges able to take part in the trial should be counted when determining the threshold for conviction. Four of the 24 senator-judges have been unable to take part in the proceedings and cannot vote. The decision means prosecutors now need 14...

Malaysians on social media are offering increasingly outlandish solutions to a months-long royal tussle in Negeri Sembilan state, from making rival claimants sleep on a bed of nettles for a week to putting the entire state through Islamic spiritual healing. The dispute has left Negeri Sembilan with two men claiming the throne, a state government at odds with the palace and no clear legal route to settle the fight. One social media user suggested reviving adat perpatih – the customary law of...

Shenzhen Camsense Technologies, a maker of spatial sensors for robotic vacuum cleaners, launched a Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) that aims to raise about HK$680 million (US$86.7 million), despite headwinds from Washington’s recent import ban on foreign-made vacuum robots. “The export and procurement for our existing client products remain normal, with potential disruption limited to new product development schedules,” Camsense co-founder Zhou Kun said about the ban’s impact. “We have...

Female prisoners in Myanmar are subjected to widespread torture, sexual violence and life-threatening medical neglect, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, underlining the chronic ill-treatment of thousands of detainees in the war-torn nation. Since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup, a protracted civil war ‌has gripped the impoverished Southeast Asian nation, devastating several regions and killing about 100,000 while displacing more than 3.5 million. In a report, the New...

Kuala Lumpur is making it easier and cheaper to bring international music stars to the city, hoping that a bigger concert calendar can help Malaysia capture more of Southeast Asia’s booming live-music economy. But as more global acts come to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian musicians are asking whether the concert boom is creating more opportunities for local artists too. Fuad Alhabshi of Malaysian rock band Kyoto Protocol said local bands once routinely benefited when major international acts came...

Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud business unit, is set to launch data centres in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, speeding up an overseas push as it seeks to win enterprise customers through its “full stack AI capabilities” spanning chips, cloud infrastructure and multimodal models. The first of these new data centres will open in the Netherlands in October. The cloud unit will also add to existing data centre capacity in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab...

Chinese Premier Li Qiang called for deeper integration of artificial intelligence and manufacturing during a visit to Shanghai, as Beijing seeks to expand advanced manufacturing and emerging industries amid intensifying global technology competition. “[We] should combine China’s strengths in manufacturing and digital technologies,” Li said during his visit to an AI application testing base in the city on Tuesday, Xinhua reported. He called for the creation of more manufacturing service...

Melaka on Wednesday officially called for a state election – the latest test for Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s government, which is already facing an internal feud and growing public frustration over failed reforms. The state assembly was dissolved effective from Wednesday following an official notification sent to the country’s Election Commission the previous day by Ibrahim Durum, the Melaka state assembly’s speaker. “A state election will be held within 60 days of the dissolution...