Health

In his first statement on the floods in Pakistan, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said he was “saddened” to see the devastation and “hoped for an early restoration of normalcy”.

Coral bleaching was recently confirmed off Iriomote and Ishigaki islands in the Yaeyama Islands of Okinawa Prefecture, home to many coral reefs.

Some of Chongqing’s shopping malls adjusted their hours of operation — opening from 4 pm to 9 pm — on Monday because of a power shortage brought by the lingering heat wave.

Washington and its allies have drawn fire and a backlash recently for their alarming, hasty pace of boosting military muscle and even a nuclear arms race in the Asia-Pacific region as they advance exclusive defense blocs such as AUKUS and QUAD.

Time turns a page to mark a year since the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan through the colossal failure of the Biden administration’s botched military withdrawal. The threat that the Taliban now emanates to Asia and the world is not pristine but rather a neo-mandate of its former leadership.

K-pop superstar J-Hope of BTS made history on Sunday (Jul 31) as the closer at Chicago’s annual Lollapalooza weekend, becoming the first South Korean act to headline a major US music festival.

Many Afghans expressed shock or doubt on Tuesday (Aug 2) that Al-Qaeda’s chief had been killed in Kabul by a United States drone strike, saying they could not believe Ayman al-Zawahiri had been hiding in their midst.

Sri Lanka issued an urgent appeal on Monday (Aug 1) to tackle rapidly spreading malnutrition among children as its economic crisis leaves nine out of 10 people dependent on state handouts.

North Korea is on the path to “finally defuse” a crisis stemming from its first acknowledged outbreak of COVID-19, the state news agency said on Monday (Jul 18), while Asian neighbours battle a fresh wave of infections driven by Omicron subvariants.

Several large Chinese cities including Shanghai are rolling out new mass testing or extending lockdowns on millions of residents to counter new clusters of COVID-19 infections, with some measures being criticised on the Internet.