PALO ALTO, U.S.-- Twitter has moved the head of its Indian business back to the U.S. amid unabating tensions with the Indian government over new regulations and rows involving the social media company's handling of political content and misinformation.

Manish Maheshwari, who became head of Twitter India in 2019, will start a new role in the company's San Francisco headquarters as a senior director of revenue strategy and operations, focusing on the company's growth in emerging new markets

KUALA LUMPUR -- Embattled Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin on Friday publicly appealed to opposition lawmakers to help shore up his teetering government, promising to reward them accordingly.

In a televised address, Muhyiddin vowed not to succumb to pressure to resign, as doing so would jeopardize the country's fight against COVID-19 and economic recovery. But in a move tantamount to acknowledging that he no longer controls a majority, the prime minister asked for bipartisan support in a confidence vote now planned for Sept. 7.

Muhyiddin pledged

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Indonesia's Foreign Ministry apologized Thursday for the manhandling of a Nigerian diplomat and announced it had launched a formal investigation of the incident.

Nigeria earlier this week recalled its ambassador to Indonesia and summoned Indonesia's ambassador in Abuja for talks after a leaked video of Saturday's incident went viral on social media and prompted outrage.

The video shows three Indonesian immigration officials pinning the diplomat, whose name has not been released, into the back seat of a moving vehicle. One immigration

SHANGHAI -- School children here returning to class next month will be pleased to find that they will no longer need to remember the intricacies of English spelling. But all will not be fun and games: "The Communist Party leads all forms of work in China" may be one of the phrases of President Xi Jinping that they are required to commit to memory.

A new textbook on "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" will be required reading in Shanghai elementary, middle and high schools

HO CHI MINH CITY -- The Asian Development Bank and the UK-based insurer Prudential plan to announce an ambitious investment scheme to cut carbon emissions in Asia at the United Nations' COP26 climate conference in November.

The proposals will include a shortlist of existing coal-fired power plants across Asia to buy and retire well before the end of their life cycles and replace them with clean energy.

"We have not settled on a precise size [financially], but would expect the pilot to acquire several coal-

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK/NEW DELHI -- The Taliban have captured more cities in Afghanistan, including Kandahar -- the country's second-largest city and the Islamist militant group's birthplace -- forcing the Biden administration to confront the grim possibility that the capital Kabul could fall in the coming weeks.

Ahead of the full withdrawal of U.S. troops on Aug. 31, Denmark and Norway on Friday announced the closure of their embassies and evacuation of their staff, while Germany said it would reduce

GUANGZHOU -- Filling China's office towers has become a tall order.

The vacancy rate for premium office space in tech hub Shenzhen reached 26.4% in the April-June quarter, up 7.5 percentage points from the same period in 2019, according to real estate services group Savills. Current vacancy rates in Beijing and Shanghai, while not as bad as in Shenzhen, are 3 to 9 points higher than two years earlier.

Underlying these high vacancy rates is the brisk pace of

BERLIN -- Fifty years after the historic decision to suspend the dollar's convertibility to gold, unilaterally changing the global monetary system, digital currencies are about to revolutionize global finance all over again. Benoit Coeure, director of the Innovation Hub at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), said in an online interview with Nikkei that the involvement of central banks in the digital economy will be essential because of the risk of disruption if digital payments are left to the private sector alone. "Central bank money," Coeure

Stephen Nagy is a senior associate professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo. He is a visiting fellow at the Japan Institute for International Affairs.

Xi Jinping's ascent to the pinnacle of power within China and the Chinese Communist Party has brought with it a more assertive foreign policy in all directions.

Under his leadership, China has eschewed Deng Xiao Ping's wisdom of tao guang yang hui , to keep a low profile, and strayed far from China's decadeslong approach to foreign policy of allaying the security concerns