Comment on Chasing (and Finding) Cash Lost in China

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s new government started an ambitious $28 billion project Monday to feed nearly 90 million children and pregnant women to fight malnutrition and stunting although critics question whether the nationwide program is affordable. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Free Nutritious Meal program delivers on a campaign promise by President Prabowo Subianto, who was elected last year to lead the nation of more than 282 million people and Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean investigators left the official residence of impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol after a near-six-hour standoff on Friday during which he defied their attempt to detain him. It’s the latest confrontation in a political crisis that has paralyzed South Korean politics and seen two heads of state impeached in under a month. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The country’s anti-corruption agency said it withdrew its investigators after the presidential security service blocked them from entering Yoon’s residence for hours, due to concerns about their safety. The agency said its outnumbered investigators had several scuffles with presidential security forces and expressed “serious regret about the attitude of the suspect, who did not comply with the legal process.” It said detaining Yoon would be “virtually impossible” as long as he is protected by the presidential security service.

Ukraine on Wednesday halted Russian gas supplies to European customers through its pipeline network after a prewar transit deal expired at the end of 2024 and almost three years into Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor. Even as Russian troops and tanks moved into Ukraine in February 2022, Russian natural gas kept flowing through the country’s pipeline network — set up when Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union — to Europe, under a five-year agreement. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom earned money from the gas and Ukraine collected transit fees. Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, confirmed Kyiv had stopped the transit “in the interest of national security.” “This is a historic event.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircrafts operated by the country’s airlines, as they struggle to determine what caused a plane crash that killed 179 people a day earlier. Sunday’s crash, the country’s worst aviation disaster in decades, triggered an outpouring of national sympathy.

Moo Deng might seem to most people like just an adorable viral baby hippo, but to the government of Thailand, where she’s from, she’s a cultural ambassador and shining example of the country’s push to boost what it calls its “soft power.” The term soft power was coined at the height of the Cold War by American political scientist Joseph Nye, who used it to describe “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants” without the use of force, in contrast to the hard power “of ordering others to do what it wants.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But in the last year and a half, since the Pheu Thai party came to power in August 2023, Thailand has sought to redefine soft power instead as getting others to want what it has—with a particular emphasis on highlighting the country’s cultural prominence to attract tourists and foreign investment. Moo Deng isn’t alone.