More than 1,000 Rohingya Muslims have arrived in Indonesia by boat this month. They have been fleeing Bangladesh's overcrowded refugee camps where conditions have worsened.

The European Union's attempts to bolster free speech in parts of Asia have taken another setback following protests from Muslim-majority countries in response to Quran burnings across northern Europe this year.

The Dutch government has decided to return some 478 highly valuable and culturally significant artworks, which had been looted during the Dutch colonial era.

Although youth gang wars affect all of Indonesia, Yogyakarta, a city of 400,000 inhabitants on the island of Java, has become the epicentre of a worrying new phenomenon. There, teenage boys clash in the streets at night. They travel on motorbike, armed with truncheons or rusty swords. Their victims are rival gang members, but sometimes also innocent passersby.

Due to excessive groundwater extraction, the Indonesian capital Jakarta and its 11 million inhabitants are sinking below sea level at a worrying pace. This phenomenon has prompted the Indonesian government to take a radical decision: to move the capital more than 1,500 kilometres away and create a new city from scratch on the island of Borneo, in one of the world's largest stretches of tropical rainforest.

Indonesia is trying to position itself as a new center for electronic vehicle production, and carmaking giants such as Volkswagen are eager to take advantage.