On Thursday, May 9, Hung Shih-cheng died from gunfire while hiding in the cabin of the Kuang Ta Hsing No. 28, a Taiwanese fishing vessel plying its trade in the South China Sea.

Chinese officials have certainly been busy.

Japan, China and South Korea agreed Monday to cooperate in the fight against cross-border air pollution, despite strained relations between the neighbors because of territorial disputes.

It doesn't take a new-media expert to say it — everybody knows that social media cut both ways. But Hernando Rojas should be credited for taking on the technological darling of the hour fearlessly. Speaking at a lecture organized by the Thai Journalists Association a few days ago, he basically said that few things inflame an ideological divide better than the social-connection tools at our disposal nowadays.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Monday it is “carefully” monitoring massive capital flows into Asia and urged the region's policymakers to guard against risks of overheating.

China's defense ministry made a thinly veiled attack on the United States on Tuesday for increasing tensions in the Asia-Pacific by ramping up its military presence and alliances in the region, days after the top U.S. diplomat visited Beijing.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets China's top leaders on Saturday in an effort to persuade them to exert pressure on North Korea to scale back its belligerent rhetoric and, eventually, return to nuclear talks.

I often hear the lament that we Filipinos are not as mindful as our neighbors appear to be of the impending closer integration of the Southeast Asian economies into the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), to culminate less than two years from now. I have heard none of our candidates for national office in the coming elections address the topic, for example, in the way it figures in public discussions within our neighboring countries. And yet, this move of the 10 nations that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) promises to have profound implications within and across their respective economies.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said Tuesday the region's emerging economies would pick up this year but warned that the recovery remained fragile due to the eurozone crisis and tensions in Asia.

Former Vice President Annette Lu has made a proposal for resolving the territorial dispute over an island group in the East China Sea, saying during a visit to New York on Sunday that all the claimants should agree not to develop the resources in the area.