Across Southeast Asia, interest in German is on the rise as the German government taps increasing numbers of the region's skilled workers to tackle the country's severe labor shortages.
Southeast Asia is home to the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest in the world, making it a pivotal region for global efforts to address the biodiversity crisis and climate change. But intense development pressure and global consumption are transforming the region’s landscapes, fragmenting forests, degrading waterways...
Mina Setra remembers a time before oil palm plantations changed the landscape of her childhood home. Setra, an Indigenous Dayak Pompakng, grew up when forests surrounded her village in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. Setra and her brother would spend their days canoeing on a nearby river, she...
LOMBOK, Indonesia — Suhardi, 43, glides across a technicolor coral garden. Freediving down to the seafloor, he scoops up a handful of sand that he sprinkles over the reef. The reef becomes a blur of color as reef fish scurry from all four corners to see what delicacies can be found among the falling grains.
One of the world’s largest palm oil companies appears to have overseen a network of companies responsible for deforestation of tens of thousands of hectares, according to a new investigation published by The Gecko Project, a London-based investigative journalism organization. Indonesian conglomerate First Resources, like many...
POLEWALI MANDAR, Indonesia — Over the past three decades, the residents of Mampie village have watched their homes and farmland vanish from the west coast of Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island. A grove of orange trees collapsed into the sea some time ago. Buffalo no longer cool off in muddy sumps by the beach. “It’s gone,”...
JAKARTA — Indonesian fisheries authorities have welcomed as “better than nothing” a new policy by neighboring Singapore that should in theory help stem the smuggling of lobster larvae out of Indonesian waters. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) has since Oct. 1 required traders in the city-state who are reexporting live...
PHNOM PENH — A court in Cambodia has denied the requests of three activists from environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia to travel to Sweden to accept an international award. In a letter published Oct. 2 by Phnom Penh Municipal Court and posted publicly to Mother Nature Cambodia’s Facebook page, decrees the travel of the...
The Philippines seeks to bolster its ability to address threats while underlining the need to strengthen ties with allies while pursuing an independent foreign policy, under a six-year national security policy published on Tuesday.
Doublethink Lab and the China In The World network present the China Index, the first cross-regional project to objectively measure and visualize the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s overseas influence through comparable data....
Featuring a guest post from the author, Solidaritas, Kate Walton focused specifically on amplifying stories about women's rights, gender, and feminism in the Asia Pacific.
Fascinating field notes from genuinely one of the most contested and policed spaces of public expression and art, slash fanfiction. The Chinese example here is well-observed, but to a large extent it happens here in Southeast Asia as well to varying degrees (e.g. IP bans of known fandom-heavy spaces are common)
CNA looks at how the events have unfolded since Wednesday morning (Jul 12), when the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau first said Transport Minister S Iswaran was assisting with an investigation.
Some species are protected in Indonesia, but the black market for them persists. Collectors who pay thousands of dollars for a specimen say only they truly know the butterflies’ value. The programme Undercover Asia finds out what is at stake.
Japan has offered numerous apologies to Korea since the two countries normalized relations in 1965, but recent polls show most Koreans do not believe Japan is truly repentant over its past — so what has gone wrong, and what can be done better?...
A Twitter user highlighted striking similarities between the Filipino, Indonesian and Malaysian languages in a viral TikTok video. The video showed three