Month: May 2019

The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has published a framework designed to help US and foreign businesses develop a sanctions compliance programme (SCP).

Former South Korean president Park Geun-hye was predicted to have good ties with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but less so with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. And South Korea should have reached the semi-finals at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, instead of being eliminated in the group stages. Why? Because South Korea is “tree” and Brazil is “water” by nature, according to the traditional Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing, which uses the interaction of elements to explain and predict everything…

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Friday rejected allegations the city state’s new law to combat fake news is aimed at stifling free speech, following criticism from rights groups and tech giants.The legislation, approved by parliament last week, gives government ministers powers to order social media sites such as Facebook to put warnings next to posts authorities deem to be false, and in extreme cases get them taken down.If an action is judged to be malicious and damaging to…

Former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, one of the nation’s longest serving premiers, died on Thursday just days ahead of a federal election, the opposition Labor party said.Hawke, 89, served from 1983 to 1991 as the country’s 23rd prime minister.“With his passing, the labour movement salutes our greatest son … and Australians everywhere remember and honour a man who gave so much to the country and people he cared for so deeply,” Labor leader Bill Shorten said in a statement.Hawke was noted…

A Myanmar army general accused of masterminding genocide against the country’s Muslim Rohingya people has had his Twitter account suspended, following complaints about him using the social media platform for hate speech.Min Aung Hlaing, the Southeast Asian country’s top-ranking general, had his @sgminaunghlaing account taken offline this week.The move against the commander-in-chief, who claims his army did not use “excessive force” when about 700,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar in 2017, was hailed…

ANALYSIS: Organisations managing over $350 billion in assets have signed up to the new operating principles for impact management (12 page / 308KB PDF), drawn up by World Bank subsidiary the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Arvind Patel, a US citizen who owns a popular sweetshop in New Jersey, has spent US$1,000 travelling to the Indian states of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Assam this election season to campaign for incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The 53-year-old, who hails from Modi’s home state of Gujarat, knows that he cannot vote in the country’s marathon elections, which end on Sunday. No foreign citizen of Indian origin has that right.But that has not deterred him, or the hundreds of other like him,…

Pension trustees have not been allowed to justify pensions increases with rule changes that happened two years later. The Court of Appeal in the UK has ruled that trustees cannot use rule changes from 1993 to rectify mistakes made in 1991.

Somchai Sophonsookpaiboon does not remember much about his younger years, except that they were spent in an opium haze.It’s how all the men in his mountain village on the Thai-Myanmar border spent their time. Stateless, with little access to education, jobs or health care, their only options were trading opium or walking to the nearest town for odd jobs.Somchai’s life turned around after the late Princess Srinagarindra, grandmother of Thailand’s current king, set up a development project in…

The Hong Kong Competition Commission has published proposals for a cooperation and settlement policy aimed at encouraging companies involved in cartels to step forward and help with investigations.