Author: viking

An Australian grandmother who said she was tricked into carrying drugs into Malaysia after falling for an online romance scam was on Thursday sentenced to death after an earlier acquittal was overturned, her lawyer said.
Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto was arrested in December 2014 while in transit at Kuala Lumpur airport with 1.1 kilos (2.4 pounds) of crystal methamphetamine stitched into the compartment of a backpack she was carrying.
The 54-year-old was cleared in December of trafficking after a…

Hundreds of people attended the funeral Wednesday of a Pakistani exchange student who was killed in the shooting at a Texas high school last week.
Sabika Sheikh, 17, died with seven other students and two teachers when a 17-year-old student opened fire at Santa Fe High School on Friday.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis was arrested and charged with capital murder and aggravated assault of a peace officer. He admitted to the shootings and told officers he targeted students he didn’t like, according to…

A Malaysian sovereign wealth fund at the centre of a major scandal that helped to topple the former government is insolvent and its chief is “utterly dishonest”, the new finance minister said Wednesday.
Ousted leader Najib Razak, his family and cronies are accused of looting billions of dollars from the fund, 1MDB, in a sophisticated fraud that stretched from the Cayman Islands to Switzerland.
Najib and 1MDB, which is the subject of money-laundering investigations in several…

The need for regulation of cryptocurrencies is to be assessed by a UK taskforce.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte told drug suspects on Tuesday that if they wanted to live longer, they should get arrested and then stay in jail.
In the latest threat he has made in his bloody anti-drug crackdown, Duterte did not identify the targets of his warning in a televised speech but referred to people who grew rich through illegal drugs in Cebu province.
“You know if I were you guys in Cebu, stay in jail. You want to live longer? Stay in jail,” Duterte said. “…

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has restored the summary judgment of a court in Jamaica in favour of a Jamaican bank in a case involving an unpaid debt.

Indonesian authorities raised the alert for the volatile Mount Merapi volcano on the densely populated island of Java and ordered people within 3 kilometres (2 miles) to evacuate.
Merapi has erupted four times since Monday, sending out a 3,500 metre (11,483 feet) column of volcanic material and dusting the surrounding region in ash.
Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the national disaster mitigation agency’s spokesman, said some 660 people living within the exclusion zone have evacuated since early…

Generic drug manufacturers should be able to manufacture medicines that are within the scope of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) for export to non-EU markets during the time that those SPCs apply, Mylan’s European president has said.

Lunchtime in Taipei’s Ximending district is a test of wills and patience as tourists and locals jostle at restaurants and street stalls to choose between steamed and fried dumplings, flat and thin noodles, stuffed pancakes, grills and desserts.
In this foodie haven, one item makes only an occasional appearance on menus and on plates – rice.
Once a staple of Taiwanese diets, rice consumption per person has fallen more than two-thirds in 50 years, according to the United Nations…

Clare Rewcastle Brown was harassed and vilified for years for waging a campaign to expose Malaysian corruption that helped topple the country’s long-ruling government.
The British investigative journalist is now back in the country of her birth after being blacklisted for years, and being treated like a celebrity in a sign of the whirlwind changes since the May 9 elections.
No one is more stunned than Rewcastle, who said she expects to see further startling revelations of corruption and…