Month: February 2019

ANALYSIS: England, Wales and Scotland are experiencing a radical overhaul of the building fire safety regime following the recommendations of the Hackitt Review, but it is unclear when similar action will follow in Northern Ireland.

Alfiraa Dilshat and Rashida Abdughufur were picnicking in the small seaside town of Victor Harbor in late December when Abdughufur got a video call from her mother.
With Abdughufur living in Adelaide, a city in southern Australia, and her mother in the Xinjiang region of China, it was a rare chance for the two to connect. At first, Abdughufur said, she was excited because she hadn’t talked to her mother in a long time. Then came “disaster”. Abdughufur’s mother appeared…

Facebook has blacklisted four more of Myanmar’s ethnic rebel groups, the platform announced Tuesday as it struggles to control rampant hate speech, misinformation and incitement on its platform.
For years the social media giant has been lambasted for its slow and ineffectual response to incendiary posts, particularly against the country’s Rohingya Muslims.
The company has embarked on a huge PR campaign over the last year to prove it is taking action in a country with an estimated 20…

Businesses have been given an opportunity to shape potential changes to EU competition laws relevant to so-called ‘vertical agreements’.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court rebuked the powerful military and intelligence agencies on Wednesday, calling for them to uphold free speech and stay out of politics in a country ruled by the generals for nearly half its existence.
The unusually strong criticism was issued in a judgment criticising the role of the intelligence agencies in anti-blasphemy protests which paralysed the capital Islamabad for several weeks in 2017.
“If any personnel of the Armed Forces indulges in any form of…

The United States and its allies should strengthen their investments in Asia’s digital economy to counter China’s increasing presence in the region, experts from the US and Japan have said.
The comments, made during a discussion titled “China’s Digital Silk Road” at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Tuesday, were the latest sign of the growing vigilance against China’s overseas technology investments.
In 2015, China outlined…

Businesses liable for value-added tax (VAT) in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states will usually have to complete an apportionment exercise in order to correctly calculate the extent to which they are entitled to deduct the VAT they incur on their own purchases.

A Vietnamese blogger for Radio Free Asia has vanished after fleeing to Thailand, the news organisation said Tuesday, as rights activists voiced fear that he had been abducted.
Truong Duy Nhat – a weekly blogger for the Vietnamese service of Radio Free Asia, which aims to provide news to countries that lack press freedom – last made contact with editors on January 26, a day after he applied for refugee status with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangkok, the US-funded…

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published a package of consumer protection measures aimed at pension savers who draw down their savings on retirement, rather than purchasing an annuity.

Actress Angelina Jolie said on Tuesday that Myanmar must “show genuine commitment” to end violence that has driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims into neighbouring Bangladesh.
The superstar envoy for the UN refugee agency made the comments on the second day of emotional meetings with Rohingya, including rape survivors, in the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh, where some 740,000 refugees have fled since August 2017. There were already about 300,000 in camps before…