Author: viking

India has launched its first national register of sex offenders in a bid to stem crimes against women as the country reels from a series of high-profile rape cases.
The database will only be accessible by law enforcement agencies and not the public. According to a home ministry statement, 440,000 names have been registered, including those convicted of rape, gang rape, child sex crimes and sexual harassment. It will also provide their photos, addresses and fingerprints, without compromising…

Tax rulings granted by Luxembourg in favour of McDonald’s were not illegal state aid, the European Commission has concluded following an investigation.

Vietnam’s President Tran Dai Quang died on Friday at age 61 after a prolonged and serious illness, state media reported.
He passed away from a “serious illness despite devoted treatment by professors and doctors” both in Vietnam and abroad, the official Vietnam News Agency said.
In office as president since April 2016 after more than four decades at the powerful Ministry of Public Security, Tran had a reputation as a tough leader with little tolerance for dissent. Though he…

A 12-year-old girl was attacked by a shark in waters off Australia’s tropical northeast coast on Thursday, an ambulance official said, the second attack in the tourist region in as many days.
Rescuers were called to Cid Harbour at Whitsunday Island, near the Great Barrier Reef, on Thursday afternoon and found the girl with bad leg injuries, said Tracey Eastwick, the regional ambulance operations manager.
“The patient’s injuries today are again a shark attack bite to the…

A Thai appeal court has dropped royal insult charges against six people jailed for setting fire to portraits of Thai kings, it said, but they will still have to serve lengthy jail terms for damaging public property.
Thailand has tough lèse-majesté laws, with those found guilty of defaming, insulting or threatening members of the royal family facing up to 15 years in jail, but there have been no fresh prosecutions this year in what one rights lawyer said “appears to be a new…

The UK’s largest listed companies have been urged to go beyond “tick box compliance” when it comes to workforce diversity, before more demanding reporting requirements come into force next year.

Online ads in Singapore offering Indonesian maids for sale were Wednesday condemned as “unjust and demeaning”, in a rare flare-up of tensions between the neighbours over domestic helpers.
Singapore is home to almost 250,000 maids, mostly from poor parts of Indonesia or the Philippines, who head there to earn higher salaries than they can back home.
While Indonesia regularly protests about abuse and exploitation of helpers in Malaysia and parts of the Middle East, complaints about…

Malaysia’s government has come under renewed pressure to outlaw child marriages after another case of a child bride surfaced in a poor rural state, the second in weeks.
A 15-year-old girl became the second wife of a 44-year-old man in northeast Kelantan state, The New Straits Times newspaper reported.
It said the union was approved by the Islamic sharia court in July after her parents consented on the grounds of the family’s poverty. However, the case only became public knowledge…

UK-based manufacturers of motor vehicles and components used to make them will have to secure new approvals to sell their products in Europe, if Brexit takes place without a withdrawal agreement.

Hundreds of Philippine rescuers used shovels and their bare hands Tuesday to sift through a massive landslide, with dozens feared dead in the region worst-hit by Typhoon Mangkhut as the storm’s toll climbed to 74.
The typhoon, 2018’s most powerful, smashed homes and flooded key agricultural regions in the northern Philippines before battering Hong Kong and southern China with fierce winds and heavy rain. The violent storm killed four in China’s southern province of Guangdong…