Month: January 2019

The now notorious incident in which Duke University biostatistics graduate students from China were told by their programme director that they should speak English “100 per cent of the time” while on departmental premises deservedly attracted condemnation in the United States higher-education community, and among Chinese in the US and China. As a professor of ethnic Chinese origin myself (I am Singaporean) with 35 years’ experience teaching at the University of Michigan…

Ways of using innovative legal structures to enable data to be put to use to solve some of society’s problems are to be explored in three new projects that have been backed by the UK government.

A shoot-out between police and armed gunmen killed nine people and injured 20 others in southwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, said police.
The firefight occurred after three gunmen entered police offices in the province of Balochistan, Loralai district, and threw hand grenades.
“Senior police officials were busy selecting candidates for different categories of civilian jobs when these terrorists entered the compound and hurled hand grenades,” said Balochistan police chief Mohsin Butt….

ANALYSIS: Businesses would benefit from more guidance on how competition law in the UK could deviate from the rest of Europe after Brexit.

Bangladesh will file a lawsuit in a court in the United States on Wednesday against a Philippine bank over its role in one of the world’s biggest cyber heists, said the governor of Bangladesh’s central bank.
In February 2016, unknown perpetrators used fraudulent orders on the SWIFT payments system to steal US$81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The money was sent to accounts at the Manila-based Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (…

More than two million Filipinos flocked to polling stations this month in a historic referendum that will determine the future of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. Residents of Muslim-majority regions are deciding on the establishment and precise composition of the so-called “Bangsamoro” (nation of Moros). As the first Filipino president from Mindanao, Rodrigo Duterte has staked his political legacy on the successful establishment of the new political entity….

Standing atop the stairs outside his university auditorium, 20-year-old activist Parit Chiwarak led a protest hundreds strong calling for an end to Thailand’s ruling military junta.
“The military is supposed to protect the country, not fight the people,” he told students gathered at Thammasat, one of Thailand’s most prestigious universities.
“We want elections,” they chanted, many of them waving fans emblazoned with hearts reading “Love Democracy…

Businesses planning to seal pre-Brexit merger deals that will have an impact on competition in the UK market should notify the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of those plans even if the transactions will initially be subject to the European Commission’s scrutiny only, the CMA has recommended.

Negotiators for the US and the Taliban insurgents have reached “agreements in principle” on key issues for a peace deal that would end 17 years of war in Afghanistan, the top US envoy said on Monday. The statement by US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad followed six days of talks last week with the Taliban in Qatar, where he urged the Islamic insurgent group to enter into direct negotiations with the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Ghani on Monday assured Afghans that their…

UK companies whose EU-based parent companies store personal data on their behalf may need to put new arrangements in place to enable them to access that data in the event of a ‘no deal’ Brexit, the data protection watchdog has said.