NEW YORK -- U.S. President Joe Biden's administration, along with the governments of Japan and Australia, is reviving an infrastructure initiative that would provide emerging markets an alternative to China's Belt and Road initiative.

After a prolonged period of inactivity, the Blue Dot Network -- first announced during President Donald Trump's administration -- kicked off talks among stakeholders in Paris on Monday. The meeting and the launch of an executive consultation group was convened by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and

TOKYO -- A global internet outage on Tuesday shut down the websites of many major news outlets, from Nikkei to The New York Times, as well as Amazon and the British government.

The system failure, which began around 6:50 p.m. Tokyo time, was connected to a glitch at U.S.-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.

Fastly offers a service known as a content delivery network, which reduces loading times for websites by storing videos, photos and other data on so-

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. will work with countries in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the Group of Seven to address supply chain vulnerabilities for semiconductors and other strategic materials, according to a White House report published Tuesday.

American dependence on China for chips and other critical products has provoked mounting concern, especially as the countries compete globally. President Joe Biden aims to bolster domestic supply chains in cooperation with partners such as Quad members Japan, Australia and India, though it remains unclear whether Washington can secure enough funding for its

Jacques Attali is a writer and the president of Positive Planet. He served as a counselor to French President Francois Mitterrand and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

The current crisis has brought a large part of the world's travel industry to a halt, and the sector is slowly starting to wake up.

As in all sectors, many of those who work in it dream of a return to the world as it was: the same crowds, the same cheap plane fares, the same

YANGON/BANGKOK -- Myanmar's military on Feb. 1 detained State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint in the country's first coup since 1988, bringing an end to a decade of civilian rule.

The Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy had won a landslide in a general election in November . But the military has claimed the election was marred by fraud.

For all our coverage, visit our Myanmar Coup page.

Read our in-depth coverage:

-- '

HONG KONG -- Andy Wang, an IT engineer at a Shanghai-based gaming company, occasionally felt a pang of guilt about his job.

Most of his hours were spent on a piece of surveillance software called DiSanZhiYan, or "Third Eye." The system was installed on the laptop of every colleague at his company to track their screens in real time, recording their chats, their browsing activity and every document edit they made.

Working from their floor in a downtown high-rise, the startup's hundreds

Frederic Neumann is co-head of Asian Economics Research at HSBC.

Financial markets are in a tizzy. Inflation is rearing its head: commodity prices are near the stratosphere, everything from bicycle parts to semiconductors is in short supply and companies are reporting surging cost pressures. It is easy to paint a picture of runaway price gains for a while to come. But, for most of Asia, the inflation spike should prove transitory.

After the economic gyrations over the past year, with output slumping then soaring, it is not

YANGON/BANGKOK -- Myanmar's military on Feb. 1 detained State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint in the country's first coup since 1988, bringing an end to a decade of civilian rule.

The Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy had won a landslide in a general election in November . But the military has claimed the election was marred by fraud.

For all our coverage, visit our Myanmar Coup page.

Read our in-depth coverage:

-- International

MANILA -- The Philippine central bank has awarded two more digital banking licenses as regulators step up efforts to introduce fintech services in the Southeast Asian nation.

Sequoia India-backed Tonik Digital Bank and UNO Bank, which bills itself as Southeast Asia's "first full-spectrum digital bank," have secured licenses, Philippine central bank Gov. Benjamin Diokno announced on Tuesday. They join state-backed Overseas Filipino Bank, which got a license in March.

The three digital banks are set to compete with the country'