Author: viking

Grab, the Singapore-based on-demand services company that bought out Uber’s Southeast Asian business, is working toward opening its platform to third-party providers as part of its stated aim to build an “everyday app” for consumers.
The company may soon announce its first batch of external service providers, according to people familiar with the plan, who declined to be named because the information is private. Grab declined to comment.
Singapore’s Grab gets US$1…

One week before Sean Lee started his campus life, he pulled out of university. He preferred to pursue photography, a hobby he picked up right after junior college.
“I was not good at anything, and average at everything. I had to study very hard to get my grades, and even though I ran 12km every day, I couldn’t make the school cross-country team,” he said. “But I had a feeling that I’d be good at photography.”
For years, his instinct seemed more crazy than…

Cambodia’s strongman leader Hun Sen took a brief break from electioneering on Saturday to watch orangutans roller skate, kickbox and dance provocatively as he opened the first major zoo in the capital.
The premier – one of the world’s longest serving leaders – is seeking to prolong his 33-year grip on power in the national vote set for July 29 and has used the courts to cripple his opponents.
But he has also tried to cultivate a lighter side.
“Today we are all…

Tolerance and compassion may be the qualities most often associated with Buddhism. But Asia has been witnessing a spate of violence as new Buddhist movements emerge across the region based on the idea that the religion is under threat and needs protection. Fuelled by a particularly strong sense of Buddhist identity collated with national and ethnic anxieties, this form of Buddhism – based on a localised form of the religion – evokes a rhetoric of intolerance and discrimination that…

Sex toys, infidelity and penis size are generally hush-hush topics in conservative Cambodia, but not on a taboo-busting video blog called “A Dose of Cath” that unabashedly wrestles with the risqué, drawing both applause and abuse in the patriarchal country.
Hosted on Facebook, the show by a 23-year-old Cambodian woman tackles the finer points of sex education, women’s health and gender imbalances in a country where the #MeToo movement has barely registered.
A recent…

Influential industry guidance aimed at helping pension providers and trustees to recognise and tackle pension scams has been updated, to reflect legal and technological changes since it first came into force in 2015.

The application process for EU citizens who wish to obtain the right to remain in the UK after Brexit will be simpler than under the current ‘free movement’ rules, the UK government has claimed.

ANALYSIS: The much-anticipated NEC4 Alliance Contract has now been published, allowing parties to construction projects to collaborate more closely and equally share in that project’s risks and rewards.

A Japanese lawmaker said on Thursday he heckled a lung cancer patient during his parliamentary testimony on an antismoking bill because of his “feelings that smokers should not be overly discriminated against”.
Yoichi Anami, a House of Representatives member from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, jeered “Enough already” when Kazuo Hasegawa, who heads a group of lung cancer patients, was speaking to the lower house Committee on Health, Labor and…

Malaysia will reopen an investigation into the murder of a Mongolian model in 2006, the country’s police chief said on Thursday, in a case that could spell more trouble for former premier Najib Razak.
Two former police officers, who were serving as members of Najib’s personal security detail at the time of the murder, were sentenced to death for the crime.
Najib, who was defeated in an election last month after nearly a decade in power, has denied knowing the woman, but the question…