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The production and sale of plastic bags that are less than 0.025mm thick will also be banned. The restaurant industry must reduce the use of single-use plastic items by 30%. Hotels have been told that they must not offer free single-use plastic items by 2025.

Thailand announced earlier this year that single-use plastic bags would be banned in major stores, with a complete ban across the entire country in 2021.

Indonesia's capital Jakarta also is banning single-use plastic bags in department stores, supermarkets and traditional markets by June 2020.

The Indonesian island of Bali has also banned single-use plastic.

Many people were not in their homes at the time of the landslide because it was afternoon, she said.

Deadly landslides are common in Indonesia, where deforestation and illegal small-scale gold mining operations often contribute to unstable soil conditions.

The first landslide struck the village hours after a Sriwijaya Air passenger jet crashed into the Java Sea upon takeoff from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, in heavy rains, killing all 62 aboard.

Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,500 islands that straddles the Equator, was once covered by vast rain forests. But over the last half-century, many of the forests have been burned and logged to clear the way for palm plantations and other farmland.

“The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar.

Adding to the sense of bewilderment, Mr. Trump has refused to embrace an indispensable principle of democracy, dodging questions about whether he will commit to a peaceful transition of power after the November election should he lose.

“It reminds me of Belarus, when a person cannot admit defeat and looks for any means to prove that he couldn’t lose,” said Kiryl Kalbasnikau, a 29-year-old opposition activist and actor. “This would be a warning sign for any democracy.”

“We used to look to the U.S. for democratic governance inspiration,” said Eduardo Bohórquez, the director of Transparency International Mexico. “Sadly, this is not the case anymore.”

“The world sees the dismantling of social cohesion within American society and the mess in managing Covid,” said Yenny Wahid, an Indonesian politician and activist. “There is a vacuum of leadership that needs to be filled, but America is not fulfilling that leadership role.

Ms. Wahid, whose father was president of Indonesia after the country emerged from decades of strongman rule, said she worried that Mr. Trump’s dismissive attitude toward democratic principles could legitimize authoritarians.

“Trump inspired many dictators, many leaders who are interested in dictatorship, to copy his style, and he emboldened them,” she said.

“They now know what it’s like in other countries: violating norms, international trade and its own institutions,” said Eunice Rendon, an expert on migration and security and the director of Migrant Agenda, a nonprofit organization in Mexico. “The most powerful country in the world all of a sudden looks vulnerable.”

In Cambodia, which reports being largely spared by the virus so far, there is a measure of schadenfreude toward the United States. Prime Minister Hun Sen has survived as Asia’s longest serving leader by cracking down on dissent and cozying up to China.

“He has many nuclear weapons,” Sok Eysan, a spokesman for Mr. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, said of Mr. Trump. “But he is careless with a disease that can’t be seen.”

The videos promoted narratives that Chinese technology was superior to America’s, that the United States was doomed to economic collapse, and that China and Russia were responsible geopolitical players. Some of the clips fawned over Chinese companies like Huawei and denigrated American companies like Apple.

Content from at least 30 channels in the network drew nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers since last year, along with occasional ads from Western companies

Disinformation — such as the false claim that some Southeast Asian nations had adopted the Chinese yuan as their own currency — was common. The videos were often able to quickly react to current events

he coordinated campaign might be “one of the most successful influence operations related to China ever witnessed on social media.”

Historically, its influence operations have focused on defending the Communist Party government and its policies on issues like the persecution of Uyghurs or the fate of Taiwan

Efforts to push pro-China messaging have proliferated in recent years, but have featured largely low-quality content that attracted limited engagement or failed to sustain meaningful audiences

“This campaign actually leverages artificial intelligence, which gives it the ability to create persuasive threat content at scale at a very limited cost compared to previous campaigns we’ve seen,”

YouTube said in a statement that its teams work around the clock to protect its community, adding that “we have invested heavily in robust systems to proactively detect coordinated influence operations.” The company said it welcomed research efforts and that it had shut down several of the channels mentioned in the report for violating the platform’s policies.

China began targeting the United States more directly amid the mass pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and continuing with the Covid-19 pandemic, echoing longstanding Russian efforts to discredit American leadership and influence at home and aboard.

Over the summer, researchers at Microsoft and other companies unearthed evidence of inauthentic accounts that China employed to falsely accuse the United States of using energy weapons to ignite the deadly wildfires in Hawaii in August.

Meta announced last month that it removed 4,789 Facebook accounts from China that were impersonating Americans to debate political issues, warning that the campaign appeared to be laying the groundwork for interference in the 2024 presidential elections.

It was the fifth network with ties to China that Meta had detected this year, the most of any other country.

The advent of artificial technology seems to have drawn special interest from Beijing. Ms. Keast of the Australian institute said that disinformation peddlers were increasingly using easily accessible video editing and A.I. programs to create large volumes of convincing content.

She said that the network of pro-China YouTube channels most likely fed English-language scripts into readily available online text-to-video software or other programs that require no technical expertise and can produce clips within minutes. Such programs often allow users to select A.I.-generated voice narration and customize the gender, accent and tone of voice.

In 39 of the videos, Ms. Keast found at least 10 artificially generated avatars advertised by a British A.I. company

she also discovered what may be the first example in an influence operation of a digital avatar created by a Chinese company — a woman in a red dress named Yanni.

The scale of the pro-China network is probably even larger, according to the report. Similar channels appeared to target Indonesian and French people. Three separate channels posted videos about chip production that used similar thumbnail images and the same title translated into English, French and Spanish.

The result is that less energy is being produced overall, and Germany is loath to buy it from France—where power is much cleaner, because it’s mostly nuclear.

So who absorbed the adjustment? Easy: industry, the old backbone of the German manufacturing state, which has been closing production facilities in significant numbers.

This does not, of course, reduce the overall atmospheric pollution generated in the world, as the old clients of German firms turn to alternatives in other locations that are, almost always, fueled with high carbon sources. The Indonesian, Brazilian, Indian and Chinese companies that will now manufacture the products that German workers used to make are largely run on fossil fuels.

Part of the problem is that there are inherent technical limitations to how high a country can drive wind and solar in its energy mix. State of the art lithium-ion batteries can only store energy in the range of megawatts, up to the low gigawatts. In order to store electricity to survive a German winter with next to no sunlight and long low-wind periods, the country would need to increase its storage capacity by orders of magnitude.

There are only three presently known energy sources that can be used at scale to balance a natural grid: hydroelectricity, nuclear and fossil fuels

hey decided to simply make do with less power: economic degrowth in action. Of course, people depended on those power sources for jobs: good, well-paid, stable union jobs that guys without university degrees could get. The government closed down the factories—can they really be surprised some of these people now want to vote for the far right?

Germany didn’t adopt degrowth by choice, but through a series of blunders. The comic edge of its misfortunes is that so many of them occurred because of miscalculation or just sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the Greens and Social Democrats. First, a few months before becoming a Russian energy lobbyist in 2005, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder insisted on putting Russian natural gas at the core of Germany’s energy grid, continuing a Social Democratic tradition of entwining Germany’s future with Russia’s. Then, a Green Party with its roots in 1970s anti-nuclear weapons activism carried this atavistic policy into the 21st century when it entered government, insisting that Germany decommission the backbone of its zero-emission energy matrix. Then the war in Ukraine happened, and the pipelines were cut. Oooops. Guess who’s digging for coal now?