Asian Games venues will be ready before Indonesia hosts the showpiece event in a month, organisers say, but the threat of terror attacks and endless traffic jams still looms over the regional Olympics.

For Southeast Asia’s biggest economies, 2018 wasn’t supposed to be like this.If a widening trade war wasn’t enough to contend with, a global wave of policy tightening, strong oil prices and domestic politics are also weighing on growth prospects for the region.

Indonesia has a major plastic waste problem on its hands. At the moment, the country is second only to China when it comes to dumping plastic waste into the world’s oceans. According to a Study by the University of Georgia, an estimated 3.22 million metric tons of plastic waste is tossed annually into the ocean surrounding Indonesia, while another 8.82 million metric tons of China’s plastic waste also makes its way into the ocean.

Southeast Asia’s central bankers are taking diverging policy stances even as their economies get slammed by the same headwinds.United States (US) dollar strength, higher oil prices, and global monetary policy tightening are adding pressure on key emerging markets to protect their currencies and curb outflows. Amid all that volatility, central banks still have their inflation targets to consider.

In May last year, two men were flogged 83 times in the Indonesian province of Aceh in front of a crowd of thousands. Their crime – being gay. The two men were apprehended a few months back for allegedly having same sex relations and a Sharia court later convicted them of sodomy. Aceh is the only Indonesian province to enforce strict Islamic law for criminal offences.

A pro-independence movement in Indonesia’s easternmost province of Papua is slowly simmering with recent attacks by armed assailants in the wake of gubernatorial elections in the country last Wednesday. Papua, was formerly a Dutch-controlled colony and had since been annexed by Indonesia in 1963. However, strong separationist sentiments still prevail on the Indonesian half of the island and the freshly concluded elections there served as a catalyst for this recent spate of violence.

Many are unaware of this, but Southeast Asia is home to 25 percent of the world’s geothermal generation capacity. Most, if not all of this geothermal capacity is located in the Philippines and Indonesia who are ranked as the second and third largest producers of geothermal energy in the world. Geothermal energy is produced by heat from the earth and is considered a form of renewable energy. It’s also considerably safer than most other energy sources.

Indonesia’s central bank is set to raise its benchmark interest rate for a third time since May in a bid to halt a deepening currency rout.Southeast Asia’s biggest economy is struggling to fire and inflation remains subdued, but Bank Indonesia’s (BI) focus is squarely on the rupiah. Indonesia has been among the hardest hit in Asia in a global emerging-market sell-off triggered by higher United States (US) interest rates and a stronger dollar.

Tomorrow, the world’s third-largest democracy, Indonesia will head to the polls. The regional elections – locally known as the Pemilihan Kepala Daerah or Pilkada for short – will take place in 171 regions throughout the country. Over 152 million voters across Indonesia will elect their governors, regents and mayors, for 17 provinces, 115 regencies and 39 cities.

Indonesia’s most populous province is set to go to the polls in what’s shaping up as a test of President Joko Widodo’s popularity and a potential springboard for his rivals ahead of next year’s presidential election.More than 30 million people are expected to vote in West Java’s gubernatorial election Wednesday in a contest between two former generals, the sitting deputy governor and the provincial capital’s popular mayor.