Month: October 2021

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) bloc on Thursday said it had agreed with China to upgrade their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership, a day after reaching a similar deal with Australia.Australia’s clinching of the elevated partnership was a symbolic win for Canberra in getting ahead of Beijing in securing the first such deal with the Southeast Asia region, which has become a strategic battleground between China and the US.The announcement was made by Brunei’s…

New territoriality restrictions on the availability of research and development (R&D) tax reliefs may have unintended negative consequences for the life sciences sector, a tax expert has said.

Two Americans died and two became seriously ill from an obscure disease known as the ‘Vietnamese time bomb’ after being infected with a bacterium linked to an India-manufactured aromatherapy spray sold in Walmart. The first infections of burkholderia pseudomallei were detected on August 9 by a laboratory of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in America. Technicians found it in the aromatherapy spray used in the home of a person in Georgia who became ill in July and later…

Cryptocurrencies have a place in Singapore’s financial sector if these digital assets are regulated, according to the chairman of the nation’s central bank.“There may be a role for crypto in future finance that extends beyond pure speculation and illicit finance,” Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said on Wednesday at the Asia Financial Markets Forum.Stablecoins, for example, can have a role together with traditional payment systems, though these…

Local governments in Western Australia are set to sign up to an agreement to purchase power from renewable sources under a reportedly ‘Australian first’ renewables and carbon offset aggregation project.

The daughter of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno on Tuesday gave up Islam and embraced Hinduism, in a move that human rights and political observers held up as evidence of religious pluralism in the world’s most populous Muslim country.Some went a step further to say that Sukmawati Sukarnoputri’s religious conversion – which would be considered blasphemous in other Muslim-majority nations including Malaysia – could be interpreted as her opposition to the growth in political Islam in…

A year after a powerful storm sent an avalanche of volcanic rock and sand crashing down, burying her house, Filipino food vendor Florivic Baldoza still lives in an evacuation centre. As global warming brings increasingly extreme weather, she now fears “nowhere is safe”. Hundreds of families from poor villages around Mayon volcano in Albay province on the Philippines’ most populous island of Luzon are waiting for new homes after Typhoon Goni pounded the region last November. “That’s the…

The UK Treasury has opened a consultation into the shape and form of regulation for ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) products in a bid to reduce consumer harm.

A cloud of uncertainty hangs over the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) as the bloc’s leaders convene this week in unprecedented circumstances, with Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing excluded from the talks in a rebuke over the bloodshed following his February coup.Founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and expanded in the 1990s to include Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, Asean has never before excluded a national leader from its…

Singapore’s Health Ministry has issued a correction order to the website “Truth Warriors” over claims that Covid-19 vaccines are not effective.International evidence shows categorically that vaccines cut Covid-19 infection, as well as serious illness and mortality rates from the virus, the ministry said in a statement on Sunday. Truth Warriors, which says it is made up of a local community in Singapore, also claimed that ivermectin is a potential treatment for such illness.Vaccine hesitancy has…