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Fair Finance Asia Calls on Banks to End Coal Financing in ASEAN and Strengthen Social Safeguards

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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Aug. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Fair Finance Asia (FFA) and Influencing Just Energy Transition in the ASEAN (I-JET) call on banks and investors to stop financing coal expansion and strengthen social safeguards.

In a new report, Phasing out Coal, Phasing in Justice: Roadmap for Financing a Responsible Regional Coal Phase-out in Asia, FFA and I-JET assess the transition landscape in Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, and Thailand, and in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), more broadly.

While ASEAN member states have introduced coal moratoriums, updated Nationally Determined Contributions, early-retirement plans for coal-fired power plants, green taxonomies, and carbon pricing, the report finds that these still fall short of a Paris-aligned 1.5°C pathway.

International coal finance restrictions have expanded, yet funding persists through corporate lending and upstream mining. Meanwhile, liquefied natural gas (LNG) is being positioned as a bridge fuel despite high costs, price volatility, stranded assets, and fossil fuel lock-in.

To achieve a credible, just phase-out, the report recommends:

No new coal development, including for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital demand.Time-bound, enforceable phase-out plans with zero unabated coal.Permanent retirement or conversion of all units, with site remediation.An end to coal financing, including for false solutions.Binding just transition commitments.

The report also calls for strong social safeguards:

Income support, reskilling, and decent green jobs for affected workers.Meaningful participation, free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), and secure land rights for Indigenous Peoples.Gender-responsive policies.Protection of civic space and environmental and human rights defenders.

Bernadette Victorio, Program Lead, Fair Finance Asia, said: “The test is not only whether coal-fired power plants close, but whether the energy transition reduces inequality by protecting the rights and amplifying the voices of workers, communities, women and Indigenous Peoples.”

Shubert Ciencia, Energy Justice and ASEAN Influencing Program Manager, Oxfam in Asia, said: “The ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) 2026-2030 signals ASEAN’s intent to accelerate decarbonization while maintaining energy security. Member states must now restrict investment in existing coal projects and prohibit new ones.”

Victoria Fanggidae, Executive Director, The PRAKARSA, said: “Climate commitments are meaningless if financial flows continue to support coal. Indonesian financial institutions must stop enabling coal expansion, redirect capital to renewable energy, and embed human rights and just transition principles in financing decisions.”

Genalyn Arcayera-Aquino, Economic Rights Program Manager, Initiatives for Dialogue and Empowerment through Alternative Legal Services (IDEALS), said: “Fossil fuel incentives without a clear phase-out plan create a chicken-and-egg problem: reliance on imported fuels keeps electricity costs high and delays a domestic renewable energy industry.”

Yuki Tanabe, Program Director, Japan Center for a Sustainable Environment and Society (JACSES), said: “Governments should drive early retirement of coal-fired power plants with stricter environmental regulations and higher taxes on coal generation.”

Read the report: bit.ly/4wsaWt7

Media contacts:

Kyle Cruz

Influencing and Campaigning Manager

Fair Finance Asia

kylejuliene.cruz@oxfam.org

Shubert Ciencia

Energy Justice and ASEAN Influencing Program Manager

Oxfam in Asia

shubert.ciencia@oxfam.org

About Fair Finance Asia

FFA is a regional network of Asian civil society organizations working to ensure that financial institutions’ funding decisions respect the social and environmental well-being of the communities where they operate. Learn more: fairfinanceasia.org

About Influencing Just Energy Transition in ASEAN

I-JET is a multi-country initiative advancing a gender-just and socially inclusive energy transition. Learn more: https://x.com/ijet_project

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SOURCE Fair Finance Asia

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UK digital pathology provider Source BioScience chooses Sectra to enable seamless pathology collaboration across the NHS

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LINKÖPING, Sweden, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — International medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra (STO: SECT B) has signed an agreement with Source BioScience UK Ltd (Source BioScience) in the UK to deliver its service for advanced share and collaborate workflows. As the first Sectra customer in this domain, Source BioScience will now be able to support NHS organisations that need to send pathology cases to external specialists. This lays the foundation for national telepathology networks in the UK, and for improved access to specialist pathologists.

The service, Sectra Image Exchange Portal (Sectra IEP), is a cloud-based, vendor-neutral platform for exchanging and collaborating around medical images. It is already used by more than 500 institutions, mainly within radiology. Recently, the service has undergone substantial modernisation which now makes it possible for healthcare providers to benefit from new advanced workflow functionality, for the service to be used by specialties other than radiology and for customers to move beyond image sharing to managing workflows between organisations.

“This milestone integration will give the NHS a seamless digital pathway to external specialists, with diagnoses delivered straight back into its own records – reducing turnaround times, easing consultant shortages and tackling reporting backlogs,” says Nick Bills, Healthcare Director at Source BioScience.

Source BioScience is a UK laboratory services provider specialising in histopathology and genomics. Its pathology business supports more than 85 NHS trusts alongside a network of private healthcare clinics, with histopathology delivered from laboratories in Nottingham, Chichester and Cambridge.

NHS pathology services are handling growing case volumes with a limited number of reporting consultants, and increasing subspecialisation means the pathologist best suited to a case is often at another organisation. Sending work to external capacity providers today typically relies on bespoke arrangements between individual laboratories, including the transportation of physical glass slides. This slows reporting times and creates administrative overhead for both the sending and receiving laboratories. With Sectra’s service, a case can be created as a job directly from a laboratory’s worklist, delegated to a receiving organisation, and the completed report returned to the referring organisation’s own records.

“IEP is the backbone of image sharing across the NHS. With our modernised platform, we are introducing advanced workflows between healthcare organisations, and extending that trusted national network into pathology. Connecting trusts directly with external specialists like Source BioScience means cases and completed reports move seamlessly across organisational boundaries. It is a step towards an NHS where expertise is always within reach, and where work moves between organisations as easily as it moves within them,” says Jane Rendall, Managing Director for Sectra UK and Ireland.

The three-year contract was signed in the second quarter of Sectra’s 2026/2027 fiscal year. Up to 60,000 cases are expected during the first year, scaling up in subsequent years.

Source BioScience Media Contact:
Klaudyna Johnstone, Commercial Director, klaudyna.johnstone@sourcebioscience.com 

CONTACT:

For further information, please contact: Dr. Torbjörn Kronander, CEO and President Sectra  AB, 46 (0) 705 23 52 27
Marie Ekström Trägårdh, Executive Vice President Sectra AB and President Sectra Imaging IT Solutions, 46 (0)708 23 56 10

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/sectra/r/uk-digital-pathology-provider-source-bioscience-chooses-sectra-to-enable-seamless-pathology-collabor,c4398521

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askelie® opens its Operational AI Platform to customers and partners

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New platform makes proven AI capabilities available for MSPs, software vendors and business users to configure and compose

LONDON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — askelie® today announced the launch of its Operational AI Platform, opening the proven technology behind its enterprise AI solutions to MSPs, software vendors and business users.

The platform enables customers and partners to configure and compose AI-powered solutions using proven, reusable askelie capabilities. Rather than building an AI foundation from scratch, organisations can combine existing capabilities to address real business needs — providing a practical route from AI ambition to business value, with faster time to value, lower cost and less risk.

“We’ve spent years using askelie to rapidly deliver enterprise-grade AI solutions. What we’re doing now is opening that capability up,” said Derek Kilroe, CEO and Founder, askelie. “For the first time, MSPs, software vendors and business users can take proven AI capabilities and configure and compose their own solutions for real business operations — without having to build the underlying AI platform themselves.”

Built around Understand • Decide • Act • Control, the platform brings together AI intelligence, data, knowledge, workflows, enterprise integrations, security and governance.

At launch, customers and partners can configure and compose existing capabilities to create and adapt AI-powered Assistants and Automations around specific business needs. The platform provides the foundation for increasingly sophisticated AI applications, including Digital Workers and Autonomous Applications.

“Customers shouldn’t have to assemble an AI technology stack before they can solve a business problem,” said Ian Halliday-Pegg, Chief Product Officer, askelie. “askelie brings the capabilities needed for operational AI together in a platform that can be combined and reused for different needs.”

The platform is designed to be practical, affordable and trusted. Proven, reusable capabilities reduce the need to build enterprise AI from scratch; model choice and consumption-based pricing help control costs; and security, governance, human oversight and auditability are built into the platform.

The platform also enables MSPs to configure and reuse AI-powered services across customers, while software vendors can extend existing products, enhance them with external data and context, and configure new AI-powered capabilities.

The askelie Operational AI Platform is available from 21 September 2026.

For more information, visit www.askelie.io

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SOURCE AskELIE Limited

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Huawei Upgrades Stellar AI WAN Solution to Drive All Intelligence Across Industries

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SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei unveiled its upgraded Stellar AI WAN Solution. Centered on ultimate computing efficiency and multi-dimensional security, this solution addresses cross-region computing challenges in efficiency, cost, and security, driving all intelligence across industries in the AI era.

Stellar AI WAN for Intelligent Connectivity

Amid the rapid expansion of AI computing power, deploying new compute infrastructure in the West has made remote invocation the new norm. However, traditional networks face three critical issues relating to cross-region computing.

Severe efficiency loss: Invoking computing power across 1,000 km can incur a 37% efficiency loss from a mere 0.073% packet loss.High on-premise costs: Local compute deployment costs from 1 million RMB per branch.Expensive private lines: Enterprises spend around 1.2 million RMB annually on 10G private lines.

To address this, Leon Wang, President of Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, introduced the Stellar AI WAN Solution, enabling lossless delivery of computing power over 1,000 km for a local-like remote computing experience. The XH computing-network appliance uses a unique layerwise model partitioning algorithm to run the initial and final layers of inference locally while offloading intermediate layers to remote infrastructure. With the network transmitting only high-dimensional vectors, raw data remains on-premises. The appliance requires just two xPUs to match a traditional 8-xPU setup, slashing xPU costs by 75%. The updated Starnet lossless algorithm cuts bandwidth idle time by over 80% and reduces required bandwidth fivefold, further lowering cross-region computing costs.

Stellar AI WAN for Security

As global security threats intensify, novel vectors like APTs and HNDL attacks continue to emerge. To address these, Huawei provides a three-layer defense for WANs.

Device layer: Intrinsic security boards detect and block intrusions in real time, tracing threats within minutes at over 95% accuracy.Link layer: Built-in QKD delivers robust quantum security without extra devices or fibers, slashing costs by over 60%. An adaptive noise suppression algorithm extends QKD transmission past 80 km.Network layer: APN6-based data fencing enables network-wide control over traffic paths, ensuring data travels exclusively within secure networks with intrinsic security and quantum encryption deployed.

Looking ahead, Huawei will continually upgrade the Stellar AI WAN Solution, deepening its computing-network synergy and multi-dimensional security. Together with partners, Huawei aims to reinforce the intelligent network foundation and accelerate all intelligence across enterprises.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/huawei-upgrades-stellar-ai-wan-solution-to-drive-all-intelligence-across-industries-302884354.html

SOURCE Huawei

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