While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Dec 2, 2025
· The Straits TimesDeath toll from Asia floods tops 1,600 as military forces help survivors
The death toll from flooding and landslides across parts of Asia climbed past 1,600 on Dec 1, as hardest-hit Sri Lanka and Indonesia deployed the military to help survivors.
Separate weather systems brought torrential, extended rainfall to the entire island of Sri Lanka and large parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, southern Thailand and northern Malaysia last week.
Much of the region is now in its monsoon season, but climate change is producing more extreme rain events and turbocharging storms.
The World Health Organization said it was deploying rapid response teams and critical supplies to the region.
India’s capital accused of tampering with air quality readings
October arrives each year in India’s capital with its notorious toxic smog, blanketing the city’s skyline and sending its residents into coughing fits.
It is no different in 2025, but there is a new worrying development: Another “smog” is hovering over the veracity of New Delhi’s pollution readings, denting the credibility of its data and potentially impairing the fight against pollution
.The Delhi government has been accused of spraying water around air-quality monitoring stations to lower dire readings and even switching them off during key pollution periods – for example, when a litany of firecrackers increased the pollution load during Diwali in October.
Russia claims capture of key city of Pokrovsk in east Ukraine
Russia said on Dec 1 its forces had captured the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, a key military logistics hub, as well as the city of Vovchansk in the north-east.
The battlefield claims, announced by the Kremlin in a post on Telegram, ups the pressure on Kyiv as it seeks to bring the United States on side in fraught US-led negotiations aimed at ending the war.
Pokrovsk, a road and rail hub in the Donetsk region that had around 60,000 inhabitants before the war, has been the target of an intense Russian campaign in recent months.
Head of UK budget watchdog quits after early release of Reeves’ budget
The head of Britain’s fiscal watchdog resigned on Dec 1 after the agency last week inadvertently released key details of the government’s annual tax and spending budget before finance minister Rachel Reeves announced them in Parliament.
The resignation of Richard Hughes came shortly after the Office for Budget Responsibility said in a report that the lapse on Nov 26 appeared to have occurred with a similar fiscal report earlier in 2025.
Reuters, which was the first media organisation to publish details of the OBR’s report last week, also published details of its March budget update report when it became publicly accessible online ahead of its official publication time, while Ms Reeves was still making her speech to Parliament.
Luigi Mangione in court for hearings over US healthcare executive’s killing
Police spoke to Luigi Mangione in a McDonald’s restaurant for more than 30 minutes before arresting him for allegedly gunning down a UnitedHealthcare executive, according to videos played on Dec 1 during state court hearings over whether prosecutors can use his police statements at his murder trial.
The videos, as well as audio of an emergency call to police by a McDonald’s worker, have not previously been played publicly.
Mangione, 27, was arrested in December 2024 and charged with fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan.