Plano Health Insurance: Curbs on Short-Term Health Plans to Bolster Obamacare

Nepal has weathered three disasters in six weeks, including the deadly August flash flood, making this year one of the deadliest in a country where monsoon rains already frequently wreak havoc. Experts warn that climate change is only making matters worse. The rock-ice avalanche near the Nepal-Tibet border that opened the floodgates in the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers on August 26 killed more than 1,450 people, with nearly 6,000 others still missing. It was followed by a massive landslide...

The collapse, in Peshawar, also killed a teacher and injured more than 40 people. The country’s prime minister urged rescuers to speed up the search for survivors.

A South Korean manufacturing company owner accused of severely injuring a migrant worker by firing high-pressure air from an industrial air gun into his body has been sentenced to three years in prison. Judge Koo Na-young of the Suwon district court on Thursday sentenced the owner of a metal-cleaning company, a man in his 60s identified only as A, to three years in prison on charges of aggravated bodily injury and violations of the Labour Standards Act. The court dismissed the case against A’s...

The long-delayed opening of the New Yalu River Bridge comes as the two countries expand trade despite international sanctions imposed on North Korea.

Three weeks into his tenure as the Communist Party secretary of Anhui province, Li Lecheng carried out an on-site inspection at China’s home-grown memory chip giant ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) on Wednesday, pledging to grow integrated circuits (ICs) as an emerging pillar industry. During the visit to the company’s headquarters in the central province’s capital of Hefei, Li urged CXMT to further refine its product portfolio and actively expand into domestic and overseas markets. He...

A Chinese start-up has unveiled a prototype extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light-source machine – a component often described as the “heart” of advanced lithography systems – marking an early but critical step in Beijing’s drive for self-reliance in chipmaking equipment. At the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai, Langdao Silex displayed its self-developed EUV light-source system. Ninety per cent of the machine’s components were localised, with the vast majority of core parts developed...

A mild displacement of jobs across the Asia-Pacific region as companies expand their use of AI would trim five percentage points off growth in office space demand in the next few years, according to property consultancy CBRE. In a report released on Thursday it said 3.9 per cent of office jobs were vulnerable to artificial intelligence-driven displacement in developed markets in the region, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. However, only 1.7...

Tokyo summoned Russia’s ambassador after a Japanese reporter was arrested in Russia’s far east and accused of collecting military intelligence.

Lorelai Jacinto had worked as a domestic helper in Riyadh for two and a half years before she flew home to the Philippines on September 19, increasingly worried that the conflict in the Middle East was making it unsafe to stay. “When the conflict with Iran happened, I started feeling like it wasn’t safe there any more because I was right there in Riyadh myself, so the bombing, the missiles, were closer to us,” Jacinto told This Week in Asia. “I got worried, I got scared that maybe I wouldn’t be...

Pyongyang test-fired two types of cruise missile from a submarine, its state news agency said on Thursday, after weeks of friction with Seoul over a landmine explosion along their border. The missiles were fired into the East Sea, also known as the Sea of Japan, on Wednesday without “any adverse impact on the security of neighbouring countries”, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. Relations between Pyongyang and Seoul have been further strained since the landmine blast on...

Faced with a fuel crisis beyond its control, Bangladesh’s government is spending the equivalent of hundreds of millions of US dollars each month to insulate its people from surging prices. But as growth slows and inflation rises, the new government’s reform plans are being tested before it has had much time to clean up the country’s troubled financial institutions or retool its young, abundant – but underemployed – workforce for the AI era. Prime Minister Tarique Rahman took office on February...

Malaysian property tycoon Lee Yeow Seng is making waves as one of the most aggressive buyers of commercial real estate in Singapore, and he is not done yet. His IOI Properties Group is in exclusive talks and due diligence to purchase two property assets – Chijmes, a retail venue inside a former Catholic convent in its civic district, and the nearby Capitol Kempinski hotel, CEO Lee said in an interview. He declined to disclose how much a final agreement will value the two assets at, citing...