Asian Legal Review

Blockchain technology has the potential to help renewable energy suppliers in Germany to overcome challenges to their business model by supporting growth in the ‘green’ energy market, a specialist in commercial transactions in the energy sector has said.

Philippine police will return to the front lines of President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, his spokesman said Tuesday, less than two months after they were demoted in response to rising opposition to the crackdown.
Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said the police were being brought back because drug crimes had risen in their absence, and there had been a “public clamour” for them to return.
He said Duterte signed an order on Tuesday directing the police to again join the…

Hunting Bandicoot rats in the rice fields – and then grilling them for sale as a rural delicacy – has become a regular income-earner during the last two months of the year for villagers in Thung Sa Liam district in Thailand’s Sukhothai province. The villagers hunt the nu phook (Bandicoot rats) in adjacent Thoen district of Lampang province at night and then grill them before selling them in villages and fresh markets. The nocturnal hunt-and-barbeque activities generate…

Online service providers in the EU will not face new obligations to make their copyrighted content available to customers to access when they are visiting other EU countries after proposed new EU laws were watered down.

Rahul Gandhi could be named head of India’s opposition Congress party within hours, a source said, shortly after he filed his candidacy for the role on Monday.
Speculation has been rife for months that the 47-year-old vice-president of the party would soon take over from his mother Sonia, who has led Congress for 19 years.
Elections for the post had been scheduled for December 16, but with hours to go before nominations close, no one else has yet come forward publicly as a candidate….

By Avila Geraldine A man was arrested when he went to the Kota Kinabalu Pos Malaysia headquarters to pick up a parcel containing a whopping RM356,860 (US$87,866) worth of ecstasy pills. The parcel, delivered from the Netherlands, came in the form of a piece of luggage in which more than 10,000 ecstasy pills were hidden. State Customs Department director Datuk Hamzah Sundang said the drugs were discovered when enforcement officers conducted a scan on the baggage. “We detected…

Tran Thi Dong, 90, first answered her country’s call-to-arms in 1943 as a Viet Minh recruit to fight the Vichy French and Japanese. It was her first taste of wartime service, the first of three victorious fights against foreign powers.
“They called for a movement, a patriotic movement, and the young like me were very eager to join the forces,” recalled Dong at a house in Hanoi.
A veteran of the second world war, the anti-colonial war against France and the war against America…

Vietnam last year abandoned plans to build the country’s first nuclear power plants with Japanese and Russian help due to heightened concern over nuclear energy in the wake of events such as the Fukushima nuclear disaster, according to former president Truong Tan Sang.
In an interview in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday, Sang, 68, said, “The situation in the world had changed. Because of the fluctuations of the world situation, the Vietnamese people were very worried, especially the…

With one month of its two-year UN Security Council term remaining, Japan took up the rotating presidency on Friday ahead of a series of meetings to discuss the situation in North Korea.
On December 15, a ministerial-level meeting is expected to be held on the North’s non-proliferation activities, which is to be presided over by Japan’s Foreign Minister Taro Kono, Japanese Ambassador to the United Nations Koro Bessho explained.
Among the high-ranking officials who are expected to…

Pope Francis wrapped up a high-stakes Asia tour on Saturday after meeting Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh in a highly symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Muslim minority fleeing violence in Myanmar.
The Catholic leader visited a hospital in Dhaka run by the order of Mother Teresa on the final day of a visit to Bangladesh and Myanmar that has been dominated by the plight of the Rohingya.
Pope Francis is known for championing the rights of refugees and has repeatedly expressed support for the…