A Reporter Returns to China to Find it Richer, but Also Highly Paranoid.

Scattered protests against sweeping revisions to India’s voter rolls broke out on Sunday in New Delhi. The police met earlier protests with an extraordinary show of force.

The leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party, an Indian youth movement, were detained by the police before they could lead protests over voting rights.

US President Donald Trump wants to banish the word “artificial” from artificial intelligence, saying it makes one of the world’s most consequential technologies sound “fake”. Across the Pacific, however, China’s name for the technology has long carried a different connotation – one that places humans, rather than artificiality, at its centre. Trump last week signed an executive order directing US federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence”, or AI, with “Super Intelligence”, or SI, in...

The leaders of India’s youth-led online “cockroach” movement were released on Sunday, their lawyer said, a day after they were detained to thwart a major protest against the chief election commissioner. The leaders pledged on Sunday to continue their campaign against the election commissioner, hours after they were released. Thousands of protesters were detained before Saturday’s planned demonstration in New Delhi, according to the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which called on supporters to keep...

Roziah Jelali has a tip or two on catching a turtle poacher: carrying a pair of binoculars and having patience in spades are key to doing the job well. The 36-year-old Malaysian volunteer ranger once spent three months in Sabah tracking a man whom she suspected of illegally capturing protected turtles. Once thriving off the azure seas of Omadal Island in the Malaysian state, many turtles had been hunted down, killed and sold for their meat, according to conservation experts. Recounting the 2023...

The denuclearisation of North Korea has become an “increasingly improbable” goal and the United States and its allies should move beyond it to devote their diplomatic efforts to talks on arms limitations and crisis communication, the director of the US-based North Korean analysis website 38 North said. Recalling the 20 years since North Korea carried out its first nuclear test on October 9, 2006, Jenny Town said in a written interview that “a pivotal moment” in Pyongyang’s weapons development...

The new runway in Ban Keun is currently used by only small jets. Neighboring nations are watching warily to see if Beijing expands it for larger aircraft.

Japanese semiconductor materials giant Sumitomo Bakelite plans to expand production of advanced chip packaging materials in China and Singapore, marking the second such announcement for its Chinese operations in less than four months as artificial intelligence drives demand for more sophisticated semiconductors. The Tokyo-based company said on Friday that it would add production lines for mould underfill (MUF) materials and compression-moulding granules at its facilities in Suzhou, eastern...

A Thai government proposal to charge export duties on durians, a major cash crop, could raise prices for the fruit in China – its primary market – along with the quality, analysts said. Thailand’s draft bill to establish a fund for research and “sustainable” development of the durian sector would include the collection of fees, the government’s public relations department said last month. Southeast Asian media outlets and agricultural publications have tipped the export duty to be as high as 2...

On Facebook, public hospitals in Malaysia’s Bornean states have been rolling out “Selamat Datang” [welcome] banner posts to embrace medical staff reporting for duty. Tawau Hospital on Sabah’s east coast recently published a group photograph welcoming newly arrived medical officers. Kinabatangan Hospital posted similar banners hailing arrivals across various departments, while in neighbouring Sarawak, Kapit Hospital accompanied its greeting with a portrait of a newly arrived doctor. But behind...

The dust has yet to settle in Malaysia’s Negeri Sembilan, where a royal row has led to the fall of a state government and left the public wondering who, exactly, is in charge. Observers warn that the months-long constitutional crisis could create ripple effects well beyond the state’s borders, testing the entire nation’s systems of monarchy and government. The dispute centres on which of two men: the incumbent, Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir, or his intended replacement, Tunku Nadzaruddin Tuanku...