Month: February 2018

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe welcomed on Monday the victory of a ruling party-backed candidate in a mayoral election on Okinawa, vowing to press ahead with a controversial plan to move a US Marines airbase on the southern island.
The candidate, Taketoyo Toguchi, backed by Abe’s ruling coalition, defeated incumbent Susumu Inamine, who opposed moving the US Marines’ Futenma airbase to his city of Nago in Okinawa’s north from a more populous part of the island.
The victory…

Airbus and Boeing have never had it so good in Asia.
The rapid growth of mainland Chinese carriers and the entry of many budget operators has meant billions of dollars in orders for the aircraft makers. At the Singapore Airshow starting on Monday, top officials from Airbus SE Chief Executive Officer Tom Enders to Boeing’s vice-president of marketing Randy Tinseth are due to outline their plans to capture that boom.
“There’s a huge market there,” said Rahul Kapoor, an…

Amid Indonesia’s latest bout of moral panic, that has seen its transgendered citizens rounded up by police and politicians calling for outright bans on sex outside marriage, there are signs that cooler heads may prevail – if only slightly.
The ranking member of a parliamentary committee, charged with overhauling the country’s voluminous criminal code, said most politicians were eager to avoid language that would make extramarital sex illegal. The provision is thought…

Myanmar officials have denied a report of five mass graves of Rohingya in a village in crisis-hit Rakhine, a border region gutted by a military crackdown on the Muslim minority.
Myanmar troops are accused of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya, nearly 700,000 of whom have fled to Bangladesh since last August.
Myanmar denies the allegation, saying it launched a proportionate crackdown on Rohingya rebels, but has blocked reporters and UN investigators from independently…

Singapore is officially in a political silly season – and elections are not even due until 2021. Speculation on who will replace Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong went into overdrive last week when the 65-year-old’s latest comments suggested the selection process within the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) was still going on and no obvious successor had emerged.  Tongues had already been wagging for months over the opacity of the so-called succession question…

ANALYSIS: Project companies should be putting contingency plans in place to deal with the compulsory liquidation of a contractor, as happened with Carillion.

ANALYSIS: Banks can be more confident about offering companies receivables finance after the UK’s Court of Appeal’s decision  (22-page / 411KB PDF) confirmed that restrictions on assignments in a company’s contracts should not be a barrier to receivables finance deals. 

Malaysia has barred controversial Bollywood film Padmaavat from being screened in theatres, the home ministry said on Friday, citing its negative portrayal of a Muslim ruler.
The film has already attracted protests in India, after groups critical of the project accused its director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, of distorting history by portraying the Muslim ruler as the “lover” of Queen Padmavati of the Hindu Rajput warrior clan.
Last month, India’s top court allowed the film to be…

Standards committed to by three gambling operators on the terms and conditions applied to “bonus promotions” set a benchmark that the rest of industry must also meet, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Gambling Commission have said.

The White House’s rejection of Victor Cha for the post of US ambassador to South Korea shows US President Donald Trump is leaning toward launching a “bloody nose” preventive strike against North Korea to force the reclusive country back to the negotiating table, analysts said. 
The Trump administration abandoned Cha – a former director for Asian affairs in the White House’s National Security Council and a top adviser for Korean affairs under former US…