Author: viking

The government’s main piece of legislation on withdrawal from the European Union has cleared its first hurdle in the House of Lords.

Two Indonesian men arrested for shooting an orangutan multiple times and then decapitating it before tossing the corpse into a river, have told investigators they acted in self-defence, police said on Thursday.
The suspects, both rubber plantation workers on the island of Borneo, admitted they killed the critically endangered male Bornean orangutan whose headless body was found last month.
Its hair was burned off its body which was riddled with at least 17 bullet wounds.
Pictures of the…

Riding a tsunami of moral conservatism and anti-gay prejudice, Indonesia’s Islamic political parties appear on the cusp of a major victory: outlawing all sex outside marriage.
Revisions to Indonesia’s criminal code being considered by Parliament would allow prison sentences of up to five years for sex between unmarried people. Those changes would also criminalise gay sex, the bugbear of Indonesia’s Islamic and secular political parties.
Rights groups and legal experts fear a…

The UK would be expected to apply EU law “as if it were a member state” during any post-Brexit transition period, EU leaders have said.

Philippine officials on Wednesday welcomed comments by a US official noting what he described as its improving human rights record in the drugs war, but they denied Manila abetted the extrajudicial killing of suspects.
James A. Walsh, a senior US State Department drug official, said on Tuesday he was “cautiously optimistic” the rights record was improving, even though President Rodrigo Duterte is pressing on with a war on drugs in which law enforcers have killed nearly 4,000…

The White House has dropped its planned ambassador to South Korea one month after Seoul was notified of his appointment – because he privately expressed disagreement with the Trump administration’s North Korea policy in late December, sources say.
Victor Cha raised concerns with National Security Council officials over their consideration of a over a limited strike on the North aimed at sending a message without sparking a wider war – a risky concept known as a “bloody…

A fine served on an online broker shows that financial firms should not rely solely on group-wide controls and surveillance systems to pick up on suspicious transactions, an expert has said.

A woman accused of killing the North Korean leader’s estranged half-brother was hired for a prank television show by a suspect wanted by the Malaysian police just over a month earlier, her lawyer told a court on Tuesday.
Indonesian Siti Aisyah is accused with another woman, Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam, of killing Kim Jong-nam by smearing his face with VX, a banned chemical poison at Kuala Lumpur airport on February 13 last year.
Defence lawyers say the women thought they were playing…

A student activist who allegedly insulted the King of Thailand by sharing a news story on Facebook has fled the country to avoid arrest and a potential prison sentence of up to 15 years. Chanoknan Ruamsap has become the latest political dissident to flee Thailand, explaining on her Facebook page that she made a snap decision after learning she had been charged with insulting the monarchy because she shared a BBC article about the country’s new king. Lèse-majesté, or…

EU and UK officials negotiating the terms of trade between the jurisdictions post-Brexit should agree on a deal which will provide financial services firms with “mutual market access”, a UK parliamentary committee has said.