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Aid workers are ramping up efforts to vaccinate half a million children against diphtheria in and around Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
The respiratory disease has killed as many as 31 people and infected about 4,000 since it broke out in November in the camps, which house more than 655,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar military operations that began in August.
About 316,000 Rohingya children were vaccinated last month, according to a Sunday…

Malaysia is setting up a special court to tackle rising numbers of human-trafficking cases in a move welcomed by campaigners who hope it will deliver justice to victims.
The Southeast Asian nation relies heavily on foreign domestic workers as well as labourers from countries including Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nepal for jobs shunned by locals including work on plantations and in construction.
It has nearly two million registered migrant workers, according to government data, but rights groups…

Businesses are being burdened by increasingly lengthy UK tax investigations carried out by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, has said.

Two Japanese political parties have decided to form an alliance in the Diet, becoming the largest opposition force in both the lower and upper house, their senior officials said on Sunday.
Secretary generals of the Party of Hope and the Democratic Party, Motohisa Furukawa and Teruhiko Mashiko, said the parties are set to solidify the formal agreement on Monday.
They said the parties reached a compromise on how to deal with the contentious security legislation, over which the two parties had…

The Philippines raised the alert at its restive Mayon volcano by one notch early on Sunday, citing signs of rising magma that could lead to hazardous eruptions.
Residents were evacuated from two villages near the volcano, a tourist attraction in Albay province because of its near-perfect cone shape, following a “phreatic or steam-driven eruption” on Saturday, and there was a further eruption on Sunday.
Saturday’s eruption unleashed ash, rocks and sulphuric odour, and was…

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Latvian counterpart Maris Kucinski agreed on Saturday to cooperate in adding pressure on North Korea to give up its pursuit of nuclear and missile capabilities.
The two leaders also affirmed in their meeting in the Latvian capital Riga the need to promote economic ties by taking advantage of Latvia’s position as a logistics centre in the Baltic region, Japanese officials said.
As Abe called for a tough approach to Kim Jong-un’s government,…

A Singapore court on Saturday charged three men suspected of involvement in large-scale oil theft at Shell’s biggest refinery, days after bringing charges against 11 under an extensive probe by authorities in the city state.
The Singapore subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell first contacted the city state’s authorities in August 2017 about theft at its Pulau Bukom industrial site, just south of the country’s main island.
Police have seized millions of dollars in cash and a small…

Authorities on Friday put a Taiwanese man and related companies on the island’s blacklist for allegedly selling oil to North Korea in violation of UN sanctions on Pyongyang.
Chen Shih-hsien is suspected of chartering a Hong Kong-registered tanker that allegedly transferred 600 tonnes of oil to a North Korean vessel in mid-October in a ship-to-ship transfer banned by the UN Security Council.
South Korean authorities then seized the tanker Lighthouse Winmore in November, setting off an…

Wiltshire Council has granted retrospective planning permission to a 22 hectare solar farm which, once complete, will “make a significant and highly valued contribution towards Wiltshire’s renewable energy targets”.

Planned investment in new European ‘supercomputers’ will help support advancements in personalised medicine, combat the effects of climate change and support the digitisation of industry, the European Commission has said.