Author: viking

A Myanmar army general accused of masterminding genocide against the country’s Muslim Rohingya people has had his Twitter account suspended, following complaints about him using the social media platform for hate speech.Min Aung Hlaing, the Southeast Asian country’s top-ranking general, had his @sgminaunghlaing account taken offline this week.The move against the commander-in-chief, who claims his army did not use “excessive force” when about 700,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar in 2017, was hailed…

ANALYSIS: Organisations managing over $350 billion in assets have signed up to the new operating principles for impact management (12 page / 308KB PDF), drawn up by World Bank subsidiary the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Arvind Patel, a US citizen who owns a popular sweetshop in New Jersey, has spent US$1,000 travelling to the Indian states of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Assam this election season to campaign for incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The 53-year-old, who hails from Modi’s home state of Gujarat, knows that he cannot vote in the country’s marathon elections, which end on Sunday. No foreign citizen of Indian origin has that right.But that has not deterred him, or the hundreds of other like him,…

Pension trustees have not been allowed to justify pensions increases with rule changes that happened two years later. The Court of Appeal in the UK has ruled that trustees cannot use rule changes from 1993 to rectify mistakes made in 1991.

Somchai Sophonsookpaiboon does not remember much about his younger years, except that they were spent in an opium haze.It’s how all the men in his mountain village on the Thai-Myanmar border spent their time. Stateless, with little access to education, jobs or health care, their only options were trading opium or walking to the nearest town for odd jobs.Somchai’s life turned around after the late Princess Srinagarindra, grandmother of Thailand’s current king, set up a development project in…

The Hong Kong Competition Commission has published proposals for a cooperation and settlement policy aimed at encouraging companies involved in cartels to step forward and help with investigations.

Drinking and droning? It could soon cost you up to a year in jail in Japan, where an amendment to the country’s civil aeronautics law being debated in the Diet would make it illegal to operate unmanned aerial vehicles while under the influence of alcohol.According to the transport ministry, there were 79 incidents involving drones in the last financial year. None of them involved a drunk operator but tighter restrictions were nonetheless regarded as a necessary pre-emptive move.“There are lots…

The battle for the last four of 12 Senate seats contested in the Philippine midterm elections has come down to the wire, with just 6 per cent of votes – about 2.5 million nationwide – still to be counted.Unofficial counts on Tuesday suggested allies of President Rodrigo Duterte were clear winners in seven of the first eight seats, while in the remaining four, Senator Paulo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV appeared to be the only candidate from the main opposition Liberal Party in with a chance of…

A Court of Appeal ruling clarifies the meaning of “practical completion”, a common source of dispute between construction contractors and employers.

Bollywood actor Sunny Deol is the perfect fit for the type of hypermasculine patriotism that India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) likes to project.Heavy-set and barrel-chested with a rich baritone voice, the 62-year-old is known for portraying soldiers, spies and police officers on the silver screen.Such associations made him the ideal candidate for the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as it looked for someone to represent it in the sensitive border constituency of Gurdaspur in…