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Indians are voting in the seventh and final phase of national elections, wrapping up a six-week-long campaign season with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seeking re-election for another five years.
Nearly a 100 million people are eligible to vote on Sunday in 59 constituencies across seven states - including the politically-critical Uttar Pradesh in the north and West Bengal in the east. Sunday's voting also covers Modi's constituency of Varanasi, a temple town where he was elected in 2014. He spent Saturday night at Kedarnath, a temple of Hindu god Shiva nestled in the Himalayas in northern India.
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Over the last three decades, the top plastic waste exporters, including the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom, sent abroad plastic waste weighting about 168 million tonnes, most of it to China. In 2018, China said “enough is enough,” and announced a ban on imports of plastic waste, setting off a crisis in the global waste system. The majority of this plastic was then redirected into Southeast Asia, with Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia being flooded with waste, at great environmental and human cost.
By the fall of 2016, Kazakhstan appeared to have gained momentum in the international educational arena. For the first time, the country’s students earned an international top-10 by performance in math and science, according to the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Kazakh eighth-graders demonstrated ability and knowledge comparable to their peers from countries like Russia, Canada, and Ireland, ranking higher than England, the United States, and Australia, with the latter very disappointed by this fact.
The garden city of Singapore wants to be even more green. It also wants more homes in its central business district, and plans to move facilities underground to free up living space.
As part of the plan to rejuvenate Singapore’s central area, a variety of homes and amenities in areas such as downtown, Marina South and Rochor will be planned so more people can live near workplaces, the city-state’s Urban Redevelopment Authority unveiled in a draft master plan Wednesday. There will also be about 1,000 hectares more parks and park connectors, and it’s hoped that in future, more than 90 percent of households will be within walking distance of a park. After an intense debate, Singapore's parliament has passed a sweeping "anti-fake news" bill despite concerns raised by journalists, academics and global technology companies over free speech and abuse of power.
Legislators in the island-nation on Wednesday voted to grant government ministers broad powers such as the ability to demand corrections, order the removal of content, or block websites deemed to be propagating falsehoods contrary to the public interest. Penalties for not complying with orders include steep fines and jail time. Tourism has significant potential to contribute to Asia and the Pacific’s long-term growth prospects through infrastructure development and job creation. But governments should work to ensure the industry grows in a socially and environmentally sustainable way, according to participants at a high-level Asian Development Bank (ADB) seminar.
Climate change is not a distant or imaginary threat, but an undeniable reality. This is particularly true in Asia and the Pacific. At the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Board of Governors in Fiji, a panel of experts organized by the ADB Independent Evaluation Department discussed the urgency to manage natural resources and mitigate vulnerabilities as the only way to achieve sustainable development in Asia and the Pacific.
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