Author: viking

A recent judgment by South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) underscores how critical it is for businesses to undertake proactive environmental compliance and governance, an expert has said.

More than 170,000 respiratory cases were recorded in regions affected by haze in Indonesia, a health ministry official said on Tuesday, as the country continues its battle to control fires that caused the toxic smog.
Blazes in Borneo, Sumatra and Papua have blanketed parts of the vast archipelago of more than 280 million people with haze, as well as neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore, sending air quality indices plummeting.
The toxic smog contains pollutants including PM 2.5, a fine particulate…

More than 200 Japanese companies still operating in Russia face growing uncertainty following Moscow’s seizure of three Western firms’ assets, amid deteriorating diplomatic relations.
The Kremlin announced on Friday that the assets of Swiss food giant Nestlé, French retailer Auchan and home improvement chain Lemana Pro had been transferred to Russian entity LEV Management under a decree signed a day earlier by President Vladimir Putin.
“These are unfriendly nations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry…

For UK banks and insurers subject to Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) rules on the management of climate-related financial risks, the supervisory conversation has moved beyond whether a firm understands the climate-related financial risk they face, to whether it can demonstrate, with credible evidence, that those risks are being identified, assessed, managed and governed in practice.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to meet US President Donald Trump in Washington this week, after the May talks in Beijing and before the November Apec summit in Shenzhen. This sequence of diplomacy will test if the commitment to building a “constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability” translates into practical arrangements.
The Washington meeting faces clear limits. Differences over trade, technology, industrial policy, Taiwan and regional security are deeply embedded in…

The Philippines’ rise to upper-middle-income status was supposed to mark a new phase for one of Southeast Asia’s most closely watched emerging economies.
Instead, analysts say the milestone has done little to shield the country from short-term pressures weighing on growth: sluggish public spending, delayed infrastructure, high living costs and the fallout from investigations into alleged irregularities in flood control projects.
Those strains have left the Philippines looking like a regional…

The prospect of United States, Chinese and Russian leaders meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Shenzhen this November has revived the Yalta analogy. Talk of a Trump-Xi-Putin summit – echoing the 1945 meeting that reshaped the world – surfaced during the first Trump term, and speculation returned last year with the 80th anniversary of the second world war.
No such meeting occurred. However, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted the two presidents back-to-back in…

For years, the race to build ever more powerful artificial intelligence followed a well-worn Silicon ⁠Valley principle: move fast and break things.
But in a series of cascading events over a 10-day stretch, the largest ⁠AI labs found themselves reeling as their own creations threatened to break humanity itself.
An Anthropic researcher quit the firm, warning that the pace of AI development poses an existential threat, possibly within a decade.
Another researcher at the firm said the odds of human…

A senior ally of Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim announced his resignation from cabinet on Saturday – a day after confidence in the prime minister’s administration took a severe hit when disgraced former leader Najib Razak was allowed to serve out his jail term under house arrest.
Anthony Loke, the secretary general of the Democratic Action Party (DAP), said that the party could not accept the decision to allow Najib to complete his sentence in the comfort of his own home.
The former prime minister is…

Online platforms could face significant new obligations to verify both the age of child users and the authority of parents seeking to manage their accounts under the European Commission’s proposed EU Kids Act.