Asian Legal Review

Malaysia plans to “close down” its embassy in Pyongyang, a Foreign Ministry source said on Friday, confirming reports that the ministry has recommended to the cabinet that the country’s embassy in China also be accredited to North Korea.
“Wisma Putra (the Foreign Ministry) will be putting up the recommendation for the cabinet to decide. We will have to wait until the cabinet has made a decision,” an aide to foreign minister Anifah Aman told Kyodo News on condition…

The government must change the law to liberate pensions data and enable savers to access all their information in one place online, an industry group has said.

ANALYSIS: Pension scheme trustees can be particularly vulnerable to cyber security attacks, and they can be high profile targets for scammers. There are some steps that they should take to reduce their risk.

SINGAPORE PRESS HOLDINGS is hoping that a slimmer employee base will save its struggling media business, but observers say retrenchments alone will not keep Southeast Asia’s biggest newspaper publisher and its regional peers in business, as digital disruption throttles circulation and advertisement revenue.  Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), publisher of The Straits Times English daily, announced this week it was urgently bringing forward previously announced plans to slash a tenth…

A UK businessman has been barred from repeating false statements he made about a rival company and one of its senior employees, and ordered not to process the personal data of that employee again.

Hollywood’s lighthearted spy blockbuster Kingsman: The Golden Circle has been banned in Cambodia because of a scene that portrays the country and one of its famous temples as a hotbed of crime, an official said on Friday.
The action-comedy sequel follows a fictional British spy organisation that joins forces with an American counterpart to search for a drug lord’s hideout, which turns out to be a jungle-ringed temple in Cambodia. Bok Borak, director of the Culture Ministry’s…

The horseshoe-shaped string of active volcanoes bounding the Pacific Ocean has lived up to its Ring of Fire name in the past month, sparking mass evacuations in Indonesia and Vanuatu and now setting parts of southwestern Japan on edge. The 450 or so volcanoes that make up the Pacific Ring of Fire are an outline of where the massive Pacific Plate is grinding against other plates that form the Earth’s crust, creating a 40,000km-long zone prone to frequent earthquakes and eruptions…

Wireless networks, sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) are the technologies that will impact most on how infrastructure services are delivered up until 2020, industry experts have said.

For the past 45 years, Manuel S. Abad and his family have rented the same house in La Loma, a densely packed barangay (neighbourhood) in Quezon City – part of the sprawling, 28 million-strong Metro Manila conurbation. The house is 60 square metres. The family of six share two bedrooms, making do with four bunk beds and some mattresses on the floor. Abad grew up sleeping in the same rooms, sharing the space with his four siblings and parents. For many Filipinos the decades following…

China has appointed one of its senior Southeast Asia hands as its new Malaysia envoy, This Week in Asia has learned, a development foreign policy observers say is yet another show of the fast-deepening partnership between the two countries.
Bai Tian, one of four deputy director generals in the Chinese foreign ministry’s Asian affairs department, will take over as ambassador to Malaysia from Huang Huikang, who has held the position since 2014.
Huang’s ambassadorial tenure coincided…