Udin Ahok was forced to make a choice that no one would ever want to make: save his wife or his mother and baby.The 46-year-old Indonesian had just gone to sleep on Saturday evening when – without warning – a wall of water smashed into his house in Way Muli village on the coast of Sumatra. Panicked, he fought to reach his sleeping 70-year-old mother and one-year-old son but then he saw his wife about to drown in the swirling waters.

An unpredictable chain of events and an inadequate early warning system combined to deadly effect with the tsunami that slammed into coastal areas of Indonesia killing nearly 300 people, disaster officials and experts said Monday.The killer wave struck tourist beaches and low-lying settlements on both sides of the Sunda Strait with devastating force on Saturday night, catching both residents and disaster monitors totally unaware.

The death toll from a tsunami triggered by suspected volcanic activity near the Sunda Strait in Indonesia has topped 200 as rescuers continue to search for dozens missing in the tourist region.More than 220 people, mostly tourists, are confirmed dead, at least 843 injured and dozens are missing in the two provinces hit by waves late on Saturday, according to Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman at the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.

Pregnant and scared, Yin hides in a house on the outskirts of Phnom Penh - one of an untold number of Cambodian surrogate mothers risking jail time for lucrative pay-outs from Chinese clients.The end of China's one-child policy has driven desperate couples too old to bring a baby to term to poorer countries in the Mekong region, where a "womb-for-rent" industry is brushing up against legal barriers.Cambodia banned commercial surrogacy in 2016 but still has brokers - and eligibl

Cambodian premier Hun Sen on Monday opened the country's largest hydropower scheme, swatting aside dire warnings about the environmental impact of the US$780 million project and its effect on local communities.Backed by Chinese funding, the impoverished Southeast Asian nation has embarked on a dam-building spree in recent years, as it tries to boost its energy capacity and jump-start its economy.But the 400-megawatt Lower Sesan 2 is one of several dams criticised by environmentalists for

Following the landmark electoral victory of the new Alliance of Hope (Pakatan Harapan) government in the 14th Malaysian general election on 9 May, 2018, the new cabinet has wasted no time in making changes.

While delegates from 200 countries come together to ramp up climate action and investors worldwide call for an end to banking on coal as part of the energy mix, the Trump administration followed through with its threat to host a fossil-fuel promotional side event at the United Nations Climate Summit (COP24), currently held in the Polish coal capital of Katowice.Amidst protests and jeering from climate campaigners, only Poland and Australia were represented at the event intended to “showcase w

Around the world, nearly US$1 trillion worth of food is wasted annually. This amounts to a third of the food produced annually by weight and a quarter by calories. Food loss and waste occur throughout the supply chain.

In the last three years, the absolute number of people affected by undernourishment or chronic food deprivation globally has been on an increasing trajectory. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that, with the reversal in trends, there were 821 hungry million people in 2017, up from around 804 million people in 2016.

“We can't afford to fail in Katowice,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks at the kick off of the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), last week, warning world leaders that climate change was running away from us, dragging with it a plethora of problems from rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures, as well as sea levels.