Month: January 2018

The UK would be expected to apply EU law “as if it were a member state” during any post-Brexit transition period, EU leaders have said.

Philippine officials on Wednesday welcomed comments by a US official noting what he described as its improving human rights record in the drugs war, but they denied Manila abetted the extrajudicial killing of suspects.
James A. Walsh, a senior US State Department drug official, said on Tuesday he was “cautiously optimistic” the rights record was improving, even though President Rodrigo Duterte is pressing on with a war on drugs in which law enforcers have killed nearly 4,000…

The White House has dropped its planned ambassador to South Korea one month after Seoul was notified of his appointment – because he privately expressed disagreement with the Trump administration’s North Korea policy in late December, sources say.
Victor Cha raised concerns with National Security Council officials over their consideration of a over a limited strike on the North aimed at sending a message without sparking a wider war – a risky concept known as a “bloody…

A fine served on an online broker shows that financial firms should not rely solely on group-wide controls and surveillance systems to pick up on suspicious transactions, an expert has said.

A woman accused of killing the North Korean leader’s estranged half-brother was hired for a prank television show by a suspect wanted by the Malaysian police just over a month earlier, her lawyer told a court on Tuesday.
Indonesian Siti Aisyah is accused with another woman, Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam, of killing Kim Jong-nam by smearing his face with VX, a banned chemical poison at Kuala Lumpur airport on February 13 last year.
Defence lawyers say the women thought they were playing…

A student activist who allegedly insulted the King of Thailand by sharing a news story on Facebook has fled the country to avoid arrest and a potential prison sentence of up to 15 years. Chanoknan Ruamsap has become the latest political dissident to flee Thailand, explaining on her Facebook page that she made a snap decision after learning she had been charged with insulting the monarchy because she shared a BBC article about the country’s new king. Lèse-majesté, or…

EU and UK officials negotiating the terms of trade between the jurisdictions post-Brexit should agree on a deal which will provide financial services firms with “mutual market access”, a UK parliamentary committee has said.

Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, met a suspected US intelligence agent in the northern Malaysian island resort of Langkawi just days before his mysterious demise, police revealed on Monday.
Fuelling speculation that Kim had ties with US intelligence, Wan Azirul Nizam also confirmed that a forensic report on Kim’s Dell laptop showed that some data was accessed by a USB pen drive several times on February 9, 2017, while he was in Langkawi….

CONFIDENCE IN cryptocurrency markets may have taken a major hit in recent weeks, but the same cannot be said of the value of the technology it relies on – the blockchain.
Bitcoin’s price plunged this week to less than US$11,000, from almost US$20,000 in mid-December, after South Korea announced that all anonymous accounts, foreigners without local banking services and minors would be banned from trading on exchanges from January 30.
But, particularly in Southeast Asia, much…

Indonesia’s battle to stem a deadly measles outbreak among malnourished children in Papua is doomed to be repeated unless the government helps lift the isolated region out of grinding poverty, observers say.
Some 800 children have fallen ill and as many as 100 others, mostly toddlers, are feared to have died in what Jakarta called an “extraordinary” outbreak that was first made public this month.
At an overwhelmed hospital in Agats, one of the worst-affected communities, rail-…