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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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

A 17-year-old artificial intelligence researcher formerly with Moonshot AI has announced his departure for the United States, sparking intense speculation about his next move amid heated competition for elite talent between Silicon Valley and China’s tech hubs. Nathan Chen Guangyu wrote on social media on Thursday that he had left the Beijing-based start-up after less than a year, describing his time there as “the best [year] of my life so far”. The announcement caught many industry observers by...

Salon manager Alice Pang says her 10-year-old daughter has likened the visibility inside her classroom in Singapore to Malaysia’s Genting Highlands, but while the mountain resort is often shrouded in fog caused by water particles, her child’s active imagination may have been triggered by worsening haze plaguing the city state. Pang told This Week in Asia that her daughter, whose classroom did not have air conditioning, was already suffering from bad sinus, and the haze had made her eyes...

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...