Beijing / AFP Malaysia and China signed a defence deal and pledged closer cooperation in the South China Sea on Tuesday, signalling a potential strategic shift by Premier Najib Razak as his ties with the United States fray over a corruption scandal. Najib’s week-long trip marks another potential setback for Washington’s “pivot” towards Asia, two weeks after President Rodrigo Duterte …

  Moscow / AFP A Russian activist jailed for staging solo anti-government protests claimed in a letter published on Tuesday that he was beaten and threatened with rape and murder in prison. Ildar Dadin, a 34-year-old activist serving a two-and-a-half year sentence at a prison in Russia’s northwestern region of Karelia, was the first person to be imprisoned under a …

  Caracas /AFP Venezuela’s embattled government and opposition leaders agreed to hold talks to defuse a growing political crisis, but mistrust lingers after an attempt to recall the president was scuttled. With the mediation of the Vatican and the Union of South American Nations, the two sides agreed after hours-long talks which ended before dawn on an agenda that includes …

  Manila / AFP Philippine church leaders on Tuesday renewed calls for an end to killings linked to President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war as millions of people took part in traditional ceremonies to remember the dead. Duterte’s bloody campaign to rid the country of criminals has been a feature of this year’s All Saints’ Day, with some people using the …

  Although the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been widely given up for dead, the agreement has a chance to be approved in the lame-duck Congressional session following the presidential election. But the trade deal’s many opponents are not the only obstacle; proponents have not articulated an exciting vision of what the agreement could mean. Some of the best arguments for the …

  On the evening of Sept. 26, two interesting things happened. First, Hillary Clinton won a decisive debate victory over Donald Trump in the first presidential debate, as judged by prediction markets (and later, by polls). Second, financial markets abruptly experienced large, abnormal swings. Economists Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz have documented this extraordinary convergence in a new paper, titled …

  In July, Republican James Comey was the toast of the Democratic Party. That was after he announced that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for allowing e-mails with classified information to be stored on a private server. Party leaders praised the FBI director’s independence. Now, many of Clinton’s supporters argue, as Republicans did over the …

  One child in seven inhales toxic air which takes toll on brain. About 300 million children live in areas so polluted it can cause serious physical damage to them, warns a new UN study. Children are more vulnerable because their lungs, brains and immune systems are still developing. The pollutants easily find passage through their respiratory tracts. As kids …

  Of all of the scary economic data that routinely streams out of Japan, this statistic should terrify you: $800 million. That’s the total value of venture capital deals completed in Japan in 2015, according to accounting firm Ernst & Young. Compare that to $72 billion in the U.S. and $49 billion in China. Even tiny Israel managed $2.6 billion …

  World leaders have started to generate some real optimism with their efforts to address global climate change. What’s troubling, though, is how far we remain from getting carbon emissions under control — and how much wishful thinking is still required to believe we can do so. The Paris agreement on climate change has garnered the national signatories needed to …