Surge in Demand for Electricity Causes China to Ramp Up Coal Production

Alibaba Group Holding’s two major domestic online marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, plan to greatly expand the use of artificial intelligence across merchants’ operations next year, a senior executive said, as the e-commerce giant doubles down on the technology to drive growth amid a challenging consumer landscape. “Starting next year, AI will comprehensively enter the internal enterprise workflows of merchants,” Liu Bo, president of Tmall, said at the company’s Singles’ Day media briefing on...

Sanae Takaichi said she has a busier schedule than her male predecessors, a nod to the disproportionate share of household tasks in Japan that fall to women.

The potential downgrade by MSCI, an influential index provider, adds to a deepening crisis of investor confidence in the economic policies of Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.

Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML is expanding into next-generation hybrid bonding, a technique that creates dense electrical connections by directly joining chips or silicon wafers, according to a new report. Major Chinese companies are also adopting the technology to improve chip performance. ASML submitted 27 patent families related to hybrid bonding tools between December 2022 and November 2024, according to a report published by semiconductor and AI supply chain research firm...

Police detained India’s ‘cockroach’ movement founder Abhijeet Dipke on Friday, live images ‌from his group showed, ahead of a protest called by him in capital New Delhi’s central business district, the latest rally to demand the resignation of India’s election chief. The youth-led ‘Cockroach Janta Party’ (CJP), opposition groups and student organisations have held almost daily protests this month demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation over a revision of voter lists...

Singapore has identified seven companies it says were involved in wildfires in Indonesia that are choking the city state with haze, and plans to issue notices requiring them to take preventive measures, the Business Times reported. The companies will receive notices under the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act requiring them to stop or refrain from burning and submit plans to prevent a recurrence, the newspaper reported, citing Sustainability and the Environment Minister Grace Fu at a Friday press...

A Malaysian ruler known for being reserved has publicly berated his chief minister over efforts to unseat him, telling the politician to “go away” and withdraw his claim that the monarch no longer holds the throne. Negeri Sembilan, south of Kuala Lumpur, has been caught in a dispute since April over who is its rightful ruler, bringing down one state government aligned with Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s ruling Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition and leaving its newly appointed chief minister without...

Digangana Mukherjee, a mother of a six-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, has banned television at her home in the Indian city of Mysore because she does not want her children to become addicted to watching content on screen. A year ago, when her son’s school started using a smart classroom board that streamed online content, she and her husband decided to enrol him in a school where teachers used chalk on a slate board, and the pace of lessons was slower. Now, she is happy that the Indian...

Chinese chip and tech firms have flagged as much as six-fold growth in unaudited third-quarter profits, as huge demand for home-grown processors and artificial intelligence infrastructure filters through links in the supply chain amid the country’s push for self-reliance. Shanghai-listed Yuanjie Semiconductor Technology expected its quarterly net profit to land between 403 million yuan and 453 million yuan, up 579 per cent to 660 per cent from a year earlier. The maker of laser chips for optical...

Indonesia has spent months trying to persuade investors that its economy is on the right course. A weakening rupiah, mounting budgetary pressures and a series of contentious policy decisions have made that task harder. Doubts about the management of Southeast Asia’s largest economy have now coalesced around its central bank, whose independence has come under intense scrutiny recently as President Prabowo Subianto seeks to steer economic policy. The appointment of Destry Damayanti – initially as...

Authorities in Thailand have uncovered an audacious scheme involving hundreds of metres of internet cable sent over the Thai border to keep a suspected Myanmar scam compound online, after finding two ramshackle village homes using enough daily bandwidth to power an entire village. Officers raided the homes in Nong Lu, a Thai border village in Kanchanaburi province, which is the gateway to the Three Pagodas Pass in Myanmar – now a notorious hub for cyber scammers. Many scam centre leaders have...

Okinawa Governor Genta Koja said on Friday he accepts the deployment of US military MV-22 Osprey transport aircraft at the Futenma air station, reversing the southern Japan prefecture’s long-standing opposition to their presence. Previous prefectural governments, under governors critical of US bases, had opposed the deployment of the tilt-rotor aircraft since before they were first stationed at the base in 2012, citing safety concerns. Koja assumed the post of Okinawa governor late last...