Asian Legal Review

The proposal for South Korea and North Korea to present a unified front at the Winter Olympics has excited many – and angered many more. Meanwhile, the international community has raise an eyebrow at Kim Jong-un’s apparent peace offering.
Seoul announced the plan to march together under a pro-unification flag on Wednesday, as well as the proposal of a unified women’s ice hockey team.
That has resulted in a sharp uptick in petitions against the unified team on the website of…

UK universities would be expected to publish the ratio of vice-chancellor pay to median earnings, and be “prepared to justify” high figures, according to draft guidance on senior staff pay.

Philippine troops are trying to validate intelligence information that a Malaysian militant leader survived the defeat of an Islamic State-linked siege and is helping restart efforts to establish an extremist alliance, a military official said on Wednesday.
Brigadier General Cirilito Sobejana said troops were trying to validate reports that Amin Baco was wounded during the siege of southern Marawi city but managed to escape to Sulu province, where he is hiding with Abu Sayyaf militants.
Rebel…

The US military is conducting “very serious” training for a possible conflict with North Korea, a top Republican lawmaker confirmed on Tuesday, though he said he hoped such preparations would never be put to use.
Congressman Mac Thornberry, who chairs the powerful House Armed Services Committee that provides civilian oversight to the Pentagon, said the administration of President Donald Trump is closely studying its options – including armed conflict.
“The administration…

New gambling laws could be in force in Ireland before the end of this year, a government minister has said.

Norway’s US$1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, has excluded nine groups, including the UK’s military equipment maker BAE Systems, from its portfolio based on ethical grounds, the Norwegian central bank said on Tuesday.
The British defence group, along with the US firms Aecom, Fluor and Huntington Ingalls Industries have been banned for producing components to build nuclear weapons, the central bank said.
The fund has banned BAE Systems in the past but later…

Aid workers are ramping up efforts to vaccinate half a million children against diphtheria in and around Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
The respiratory disease has killed as many as 31 people and infected about 4,000 since it broke out in November in the camps, which house more than 655,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar military operations that began in August.
About 316,000 Rohingya children were vaccinated last month, according to a Sunday…

Malaysia is setting up a special court to tackle rising numbers of human-trafficking cases in a move welcomed by campaigners who hope it will deliver justice to victims.
The Southeast Asian nation relies heavily on foreign domestic workers as well as labourers from countries including Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nepal for jobs shunned by locals including work on plantations and in construction.
It has nearly two million registered migrant workers, according to government data, but rights groups…

Businesses are being burdened by increasingly lengthy UK tax investigations carried out by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, has said.

Two Japanese political parties have decided to form an alliance in the Diet, becoming the largest opposition force in both the lower and upper house, their senior officials said on Sunday.
Secretary generals of the Party of Hope and the Democratic Party, Motohisa Furukawa and Teruhiko Mashiko, said the parties are set to solidify the formal agreement on Monday.
They said the parties reached a compromise on how to deal with the contentious security legislation, over which the two parties had…