For every 100 men in leadership positions at the managerial level and above globally, there are fewer than 40 women in positions of a similar level. In Asia Pacific, the ratio falls to around 25 women for every 100 men.

A "mafia" of recruitment agents is trapping Myanmar migrants to Thailand in debt bondage despite a 2017 law meant to fight exploitation in the kingdom's notoriously shadowy job market, activists and workers say.Migrant labour - much of it from Myanmar - has propped up Thailand's economy for years, with foreigners working everywhere from factories to fishing boats, part of a global chain to produce standard supermarket items such as frozen shrimps, ready meals and pet food.

Proclaimed as a ‘paradise on earth’ in the 1970s, the Philippine island of Boracay landed on the bucket lists of western tourists seeking sun, sea and surf. However, by the mid-1990s, tourist arrivals dropped due to degradation caused by a non-existent sewage system on the island. Despite the improvements in clean water, sewage treatment and waste management systems in the late 1990s, environmental issues persisted due to the noncompliance of the island’s business establishments.

Nearly 1,400 people are now known to have died in the quake-tsunami that smashed into Indonesia's Sulawesi island, with United Nations (UN) officials warning needs are "vast" for both desperate survivors and rescue teams still searching for victims.Almost 200,000 people want urgent help, the UN's humanitarian office said, among them tens of thousands of children, with an estimated 66,000 homes destroyed or damaged by the 7.5-magnitude quake and the tsunami it spawned.Survi

On a stretch of the Ayeyarwady river, also known as the Irrawaddy river, near Myanmar’s Mandalay, fishermen from six villages work hand-in-fin with 26 Irrawaddy dolphins in a unique collaboration. Taught to do so since childhood, the fishermen cooperatively fish the river with the assistance of the dolphins. The tradition, origin unknown, is said to have been in practice since the 1860s.

The world has been taking a beating from environmental abuse by industries, particularly where waste management is concerned. In a traditional economy, mainly dominated by a linear model of take-make-and-dispose, not much consideration is given to the material’s end-of-life. Resources or inputs are harvested from the environment, manufactured into materials, and channelled into the industrial process to make products.

Mass graves were being readied for hundreds of victims of an Indonesian quake and tsunami on Monday as authorities battled to stave off disease and reach desperate people still trapped under shattered buildings.

Nearly 400 people were killed when a powerful quake sent a tsunami barrelling into the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, officials said Saturday, as hospitals struggled to cope with hundreds of injured and rescuers scrambled to reach the stricken region.The national disaster agency put the official death toll so far at 384, all of them in the tsunami-struck city of Palu, but warned the toll was likely to rise.Some 540 people were badly injured, it added.In the city - home to around 350,000 peopl

Southeast Asia is home to some of the world’s fastest expanding economies, with a combined economy about the size of the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) or US$2.6 trillion. Armed with a younger, urbanised and more affluent consumer base, the region continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. In 2017, the regional gross merchandise value (GMV) of first-hand goods surpassed US$10 billion, up from US$5.5 billion in 2015.

For the more or less 10 million people living in Thailand’s capital city of Bangkok, flooding is a common and recurring phenomenon. This is partly due to the city’s geographic location at the southern end of the Chao Phraya River Basin, as well as its low-lying terrain of around 1.5 metres average elevation above mean sea level. The city normally experiences six months of rainy season every year from May to October. However, conditions are soon expected to worsen for much of Bangkok.