These are the top stories making the front pages of major newspapers from across Southeast Asia today. Get up to speed with what’s happening in the fastest growing region in the world.

The Great Pacific garbage patch is a collection of plastic and floating trash with two enormous masses of ever-growing garbage. The patch consists of finger-sized bits of plastic – often microscopic particles, chemical sludge, wood pulp, and other debris trapped by the northern circulating currents of the Pacific Ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre. The plastic concentration is estimated to be 100 kilograms per square kilometre.

These are the top stories making the front pages of major newspapers from across Southeast Asia today. Get up to speed with what’s happening in the fastest growing region in the world.

News reports from several different ASEAN member countries have shown an obvious decline in tourism.

These are the top stories making the front pages of major newspapers from across Southeast Asia today. Get up to speed with what’s happening in the fastest growing region in the world.  Coronavirus outbreak is not an opportunity to score points against ChinaOn 1 Feb, Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States, gave a talk at a UC San Diego forum on China-US relations.

Over the past weeks, our newspapers and social media feeds have been dominated with devastating images of Australia’s bushlands burning to the ground. Forests on fire, soils drying, glaciers melting - these wake-up calls that climate change is having irreversible effects on nature and all living species now come on a near-constant basis.

The novel coronavirus isn’t the only thing spreading. It was recently reported that authorities in Thailand had arrested two people for posting "fake news" about the novel coronavirus as a senior official warned internet users last Thursday to “think twice” before sharing incorrect information about the disease.

These are the top stories making the front pages of major newspapers from across Southeast Asia today. Get up to speed with what’s happening in the fastest growing region in the world.

It is undeniable that plastic waste contributes to ecological devastation and issues in human health. In 2017, industrial ecologist, Roland Geyer, led a study on the ‘Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made’ and estimated that there are more than 8.3 billion metric tons (Mt) of plastics that have been produced since the 1950s.

From last year’s church bombings in southern Philippines which killed at least 20 and wounded scores more, to the decades-old persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya population which has seen a mass exodus of 1.2 million people fleeing for their lives, religious freedom isn’t exactly one of ASEAN’s strong points.With 650 million people spread across 10 countries, ASEAN’s diversity has long been one of its defining characteristics.