KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Malaysian police said on Tuesday they had opened an investigation into the disappearance this month of a Myanmar democracy activist and her family, who are U.N. refugee card holders. Human Rights Watch (HRW) this week said Thuzar Maung, 46, her husband and three children, were feared abducted “in a planned operation”…
By Soo-hyang Choi SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday called for an overhaul of the country’s disaster response system to better cope with climate change-induced crises, after days of torrential rain killed dozens of people in the country. More than 40 people have lost their lives and nine remain missing in…
By Ju-min Park and Hyun Young Yi SEOUL (Reuters) -A year after South Korea vowed to step up readiness for extreme weather driven by climate change, experts say not enough work has been done even as greater volumes of sudden and torrential rains are expected in coming decades. Forty or more people have lost their…
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Parties on both sides of a debate on whether to constitutionally recognise Australia’s Indigenous people released their official pamphlets on Tuesday, which will start being delivered to letterboxes across the country. Australians will be asked to vote in a referendum later this year on whether they support altering the constitution to include…
By Rachna Uppal ABU DHABI (Reuters) -Japan and the United Arab Emirates agreed to cooperate on technology and climate change during Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit, his second stop in the region focused on securing energy supplies and promoting green technology. Kishida met with Emirati President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu…
By Valerie Volcovici BEIJING (Reuters) – U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said it was “imperative that China and the United States make real progress” in the four months before U.N.-sponsored climate talks begin in Dubai, as waves of extreme heat and rainfall hit large parts of the globe. While Kerry met his counterpart Xie Zhenhua…
By Liangping Gao, Ellen Zhang and Kevin Yao BEIJING (Reuters) – China is entering an era of much slower economic growth, raising a daunting prospect: it may never get rich. Whether the world’s second-largest economy chugs ahead at 3-4% annually or flirts, as some economists expect, with Japan-like “lost decades” of stagnation, it looks set…
KYIV (Reuters) -Russia halted participation on Monday in the year-old U.N.-brokered deal that lets Ukraine export grain through the Black Sea, causing concern in poorer countries that price rises will put food out of reach. Hours earlier, a blast knocked out Russia’s bridge to Crimea in what Moscow called a strike by Ukrainian sea drones,…
By Valerie Volcovici, Timothy Gardner and Kate Abnett BEIJING (Reuters) – As China and the United States meet this week in Beijing, the world’s two biggest carbon polluters will be looking for ways to cooperate in both domestic policy and international trade in bringing down greenhouse gas emissions as they try to recalibrate ties amid…
By Anna Tong and Jeffrey Dastin Around a decade after virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa burst onto the scene, a new wave of AI helpers with greater autonomy is raising the stakes, powered by the latest version of the technology behind ChatGPT and its rivals. Experimental systems that run on GPT-4 or similar models…
