Simon Denyer

The State Department heightened its travel advisory for China on Thursday, urging citizens not to travel there due to the rapid spread of coronavirus. The announcement came hours after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a “public…

BEIJING — A top U.S. health official said Tuesday that he offered to send a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to China to help with the coronavirus outbreak. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar did not describe…

BEIJING — As officials grow increasingly fearful about their ability to contain the fast-spreading outbreak of a novel coronavirus, this metropolis recorded its first death on Monday, hundreds of foreign nationals prepared to flee the country, and…

TOKYO — It’s grossly unfair for rich countries to send their plastic waste to poor countries that are already struggling to cope with their own waste problems, and the practice needs to stop, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said…

TOKYO — The best ivory for carving a hanko, or a personal seal, comes from the center of the tusk. That is where the ivory is firm and flawless, says Hideki Arami, a third-generation hanko carver who has a small shop in Tokyo’s busy Shibuya…

BEIJING — When President Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in January, critics said he was leaving a vacuum at the heart of the Asia-Pacific region, ceding the United States’ role as regional economic leader. On Sunday,…

BEIJING — Just a week ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping sounded a triumphant note as he rang in the new year, touting the economy’s continued growth and financial reforms that have elevated the country’s currency among the world’s elite. In a…

That was the question posed by Columbia University Professor Arvind Panagariya this year. He argued that genetic differences, not poor nutrition, explain in large part why Indian children are often dramatically underweight and short for their age,…

The Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka might seem an unlikely cockpit for a game of global power politics, but that is exactly what it has become. Both India and the United States have tried to encourage Sri Lanka to respect human rights and promote…

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The defeat of one of the world’s largest and most lethal terrorist organizations — and the end of a three-decade civil war — should have heralded a bright new dawn for the tropical Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka. The economy is…

NEW DELHI — It was billed as a new assertiveness, when India’s usually meek Prime Minister Manmohan Singh supposedly looked his Chinese counterpart in the eye at a summit in Bali last weekend and defended his country’s “commercial” right to explore…

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Benazir Bhutto only entered politics after her father was executed by the military. On Thursday she was assassinated, a depressingly predictable end for a member of one of South Asia’s seemingly cursed political…