As the United Nations asked the world for US$160 million in response to catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also issued a broader warning about the human-caused climate emergency: “Let’s stop sleepwalking toward the destruction of our planet by climate change. Today, it’s Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country.”
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is defending a trip to mainland China made by party Vice-Chair Andrew Hsia which provoked criticism from within the opposition party itself as well as from the Taiwanese government.
South Korea’s new President Yoon Suk-Yeol is reinstating his nation’s “Kill Chain” strategy, which aims to deter an attack from North Korea by brandishing a highly aggressive military doctrine.
Cheetahs are returning to India for the first time in seventy years, arriving from South Africa and Namibia. Never before have these striking big cats been allowed to repopulate a region from which they had once disappeared.
Unemployed loner Tetsuya Yamagami hoped to use his homemade shotgun on Shinzo Abe not mainly to kill Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, but to take his revenge on the Unification Church, which he blamed for destroying his life and that of his family. Improbably, the assassination has become a wild political success.
News Item: video footage surfaced in 2020 of a Vietnamese “trainee” being physically abused by Japanese co-workers at a construction company in Okayama Prefecture, resulting in injuries including broken ribs and a broken tooth.
Israeli forces raided, ransacked, and shuttered the offices of top Palestinian civil society groups in the West Bank, a move the organizations denounced as retaliation for their efforts to end the decades-long occupation and hold Israel accountable for its ongoing war crimes.
Hours after India Housing Minister Hardeep Singh Puri announced that Rohingya refugees from Myanmar would be provided apartments in the Bakkarwala area of outer Delhi, the Home Ministry denied that any such policy had been decided. By the same evening, Puri reversed himself.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has outlined what appears to be a sincere effort to realign Japan’s position on nuclear weapons–from one that supports the maintenance of the US “nuclear umbrella” to one that aims for gradual global nuclear weapons disarmament.
The United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has assured the public that its temporary authorization of a controversial pesticide called thiamethoxam will follow strict guidelines to protect the environment from harm, but evidence is mounting that serious damage is being done.
