Month: October 2018

If international agreement cannot be reached on how to tax digital companies the UK will “go it alone” and introduce its own digital services tax, UK chancellor Philip Hammond said in a speech to the Conservative party conference last week. 

If Cambodian government officials thought Meach Sovannara would stay quiet after they threw him in prison, they were wrong.
From behind the walls of Prey Sar – a crowded lock-up in Phnom Penh – Sovannara wrote a critical article this year about Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has ruled the Southeast Asian nation for decades in what human rights activists often describe as a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy.
Sovannara said he wrote the article by hand and had it…

The Indian actress whose public allegations of sexual harassment by a Bollywood star is sparking a string of similar #MeToo claims has filed a formal complaint, police said on Sunday.
Former Miss Universe contestant Tanushree Dutta first alleged in 2008 that multi-award-winning Nana Patekar behaved inappropriately towards her during the making of a romantic comedy the same year.
No action was taken at the time against Patekar and she made no formal complaint.
But emboldened by the global #MeToo…

The number of people believed missing from the quake and tsunami that struck Indonesia’s Palu city has soared to 5,000, an official said Sunday, an indication that far more may have perished in the twin disaster than the current toll.
Indonesia’s disaster agency say they have recovered 1,763 bodies so far from the 7.5-magnitude and subsequent tsunami that struck Sulawesi on September 28.
But there are fears that two of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods in Palu – Petobo and Balaroa -…

Malaysian police say eight suspected militants, including seven foreigners, have been arrested for allegedly spreading religious extremism that could threaten national security and fan terrorism in the region.
National police chief Mohamad Fuzi Harun said the suspects were connected with an Islamic religious school in Yemen that promoted teachings permitting the killings of non-Muslims and even Muslims who did not follow their ways and denounced democracy as un-Islamic.
Rosmah Mansor, wife of…

It’s lunchtime on a Tuesday and a hungry office worker has just pulled up beside Amoy Street Food Centre – a popular haunt in the Central Business District of Singapore. For the next five minutes he fumbles with a parking coupon, tearing tiny holes in the paper to indicate the date and time, as well as the duration he will be parking his car there. Up till about a year ago, this was a common sight in the 1,100 public car parks across the island, as were tiny round pieces of paper…

Schools, colleges and universities have been warned to budget for an increase in the employer contributions they must pay into the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) on behalf of their staff.

UK universities need to do more to avoid “failing sexual harassment victims”, according to a new report, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Catalyst fund.

A record 37,113 cases of suspected child abuse were reported across Japan in the first half of 2018, including 19 cases that ended in the death of a child, according to statistics released by the National Police Agency.
The first-half figure showed an increase for the seventh consecutive year and was up more than 22 per cent compared to the same period in 2017. It suggests the full-year figure will surpass the record 65,431 cases reported to authorities last year.
A total of 2,127 children were…

As campaigning begins for the Indonesian elections, new polls suggest a falling rupiah and rising racial and religious tensions are the key issues standing between President Joko Widodo and a second five-year term. But challenges are also mounting for Widodo following the double disaster of the 7.4-magnitude earthquake and the tsunami that hit Sulawesi last week, with a death toll that stands at more than 1,400 people and is expected to rise as search and rescue efforts continue. The six-…