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Through a qualitative analysis of three air disasters from Asia in recent years—MH370, MH17 and QZ8501—this article investigates the puzzle of how aviation disasters open up a sovereign state's domestic governance and foreign policy to international questioning within an anarchic international system. This enquiry thereby highlights the gaps in the global governance of aviation, particularly in the areas of safety and recovery in the wake of aviation disasters. Three linked literatures demonstrate this dynamic. First, aligned with the 'emotional turn' in international relations, we show that the portrayal of air disasters and grieving next of kin in global media highlights the politics of grief and trauma. Second, aviation disasters surface the politics of disaster diplomacy in the guise of 'security competition by proxy' in the recovery process. Third, we emphasize that these shortfalls in domestic governance and international cooperation demonstrated by the attention-grabbing spectacle of aviation disasters consequently underscore important knowledge, norms and compliance gaps in global aviation governance. Aviation disasters and their aftermath thus shine an international spotlight on the state's domestic governance and foreign policies in these three manners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens in the early hours of 8 March 2014, initial reactions suggesting that it was just another airliner disaster proved only partially correct. This article offers the interpretation that the multinational search effort for the missing Malaysian Boeing 777-200 airliner was revelatory of an abridged form of security competition among the mostly Pacific Rim states participating in both the post mortem and the search and rescue (SAR) operations. Although the Asia Pacific peace has been largely unbroken since the end of the Cold War, security competition among great powers, middle powers and weak states is still ongoing. In fact, this security competition is taking on proxy forms given the relative robustness of the overlapping architecture of Pacific Rim security regionalism in tamping down pressures for overt armed conflict to advance national security interests. MH370, following in the wake of the destruction wrought by natural disasters since the early 2000s, has provoked a competition in technological prowess in SAR operations, and more broadly, in quasi-civilian humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) capabilities amongst Pacific Rim states that have overlapping claims on the South China Sea and with interests in revising existing patterns of diplomatic order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been an essential component of human civilization because of its long global history of use in food and beverage fermentation. However, the diversity and evolutionary history of the domesticated populations of the yeast remain elusive. We show here that China/Far East Asia is likely the center of origin of the domesticated populations of the species. The domesticated populations form two major groups associated with solid- and liquid-state fermentation and appear to have originated from heterozygous ancestors, which were likely formed by outcrossing between diverse wild isolates primitively for adaptation to maltose-rich niches. We found consistent gene expansion and contraction in the whole domesticated population, as well as lineage-specific genome variations leading to adaptation to different environments. We show a nearly panoramic view of the diversity and life history of S. cerevisiae and provide new insights into the origin and evolution of the species.