Leslie Cheung was known as the “Elvis of Hong Kong” and his legacy shows LGBT+ issues remain very much taboo in Chinese culture.

The week that was on The Interpreter.

Vietnam has long sought to calibrate its defence posture in the shadows of great power competition.

Publishing will be light on Friday and Monday.

Talk of new aid cuts raise new questions about what sort of serious alternative can be fashioned to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

A party for the youth of Indonesia has won over social media, but still faces plenty of obstacles to success.

A Timor Sea maritime boundary beyond the median line was never reasonable.

Trump ought to offer Kim a grand bargain: give up your ICBM program, and we will withdraw our troops from South Korea.

Australia will never be able to compete globally making T-shirts. But we can compete with high-end, world-beating defence equipment.

<p>Events are moving fast now and the Beijing trip means a Trump–Kim summit is increasingly likely.</p>

Links and stories from around the Pacific by The Interpreter team.

Trump’s propensity to walk away from promises will hang over the talks with Kim Jong-un.

Asia’s great river is under growing threat from hydropower.

Efforts to tackle radicalisation are being held back by a lack of knowledge and problems of official coordination.

Governments should not rely on assertion and bombast, which is what has happened in the Skripal case.

Rodrigo Duterte is still to resolve tensions between accommodating China and maintaining strong US ties.

Links and stories from the aid and development sector.

Companies should make a fair contribution to running the countries in which they create value and earn profits.

Tax exemption allows Indian states to exercise moral authority over cinema, and to promote select actors and producers.

The risk from large satellites hitting Earth are low, but not zero, and the world needs to do more to ensure the safe disposal of space infrastructure.

Sneaky and inept is how Australia is presented to the world by the actions of the national team.

The resignation of the ageing president last week shows the National League for Democracy needs leadership renewal.

Five steps for aid organisations to build and sustain the trust crucial to their work.

The week that was on The Interpreter.

It’s unclear whether Bolton’s hawkish views will transfer into reality in office.

The Chinese Communist Party has embraced happiness as an aspiration and a mission – not for the first time.

Facebook is unlikely to have been as surprised by the Cambridge Analytica revelations as Zuckerberg has claimed.

Sending the Liaoning through the Taiwan Strait may signal China’s displeasure, but in military terms is an irrelevance.

Even if independence is a spur for economic development, social and political difficulties still lie ahead.

Links and updates from across the migration and border policy field.

Richard McGregor talks to Dinny McMahon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, about his grass-roots tour of the underworld of Chinese finance.

If Japan caused headaches, a fight with China about activists at sea will be very awkward for Australia.

Links and stories from around the Pacific by The Interpreter team.

The most overcrowded refugee camp on the planet has more than twice the population of Canberra crammed into an area the size of beachside Victorian town Sorrento.

Clive Hamilton challenges Australians to recognise the true victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s actions.

The benefits for Pacific Islands police in professionalism and training was a largely unplanned by-product of the 14-year mission to Solomon Islands.

<p>Malaysia’s Prime Minister had an eye on an audience at home while striding an international stage in Sydney at the weekend.</p>

China will certainly respond to a forthcoming US investigation and exports penalties with sanctions of its own.

This is not the first time Jakarta has sought opportunities by mediating a peace process, but there are plenty of obstacles.

Each ephemeral piece of news is presented as a narrative of impending doom.

From missed media moments to remarkable bridges, Greg Earl on the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit.

Links and stories from the aid and development sector.

An independent agency to oversee China’s expanding aid program is a first step in the right direction.

When funding stops for the Manus Island refugees, so does the ability to care.

Little has changed since 2012 when a gang rape in Delhi sparked global outrage.

The week that was on The Interpreter.

<p>An indiscreet former foreign minister gave a&nbsp;valuable&nbsp;insight into the costs of membership.</p>

A new World Bank report allows stronger judgments about economic issues facing the region.

Moscow has little to sell besides gas, oil, and military hardware – and that drives Russian policy in the region.

China is merging departments in a bid to further enhance its cultural influence.