BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) – Beijing’s air quality deteriorated to the worst in a year-and-a-half on Wednesday (Nov 14), with the authorities forecasting it would be at least another day before conditions improve. Levels of the most-hazardous, tiny particulate matter – known as PM 2.5, which can lodge deep in a person’s lungs – soared to 288 […]
SINGAPORE – Fibre broadband users in the eastern part of Singapore had their Internet surfing disrupted on Wednesday (Nov 14) after a fibre cable cut affected services by all three major telcos and Internet service provider MyRepublic. Singtel, StarHub, M1 and MyRepublic posted on their Facebook pages that users in some areas like Tampines and […]
SINGAPORE – Asean is working closely with its partners to support the open, rules-based international order and multilateral system, and has recently concluded recommendations for a general review of the Asean-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Wednesday (Nov 14). He was referring to the agreement which is expected to provide […]
BERLIN (Reuters) – The German economy contracted for the first time since 2015 in the third quarter as global trade disputes swung the traditional export growth engine of Europe’s largest economy into reverse. Gross domestic product (GDP) in Europe’s biggest economy contracted by 0.2 percent quarter-on-quarter, the Federal Statistics Office said on Wednesday. That compared […]
A “black box” recorder from Lion Air flight JT 610 has been found by divers off the coast of Indonesia. The plane, carrying 189 people, crashed soon after taking off from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, on Monday. It plummeted into the Java Sea – no survivors have been found, nor has the body of the […]
Malaysia’s de facto Law Minister Liew Vui Keong told Parliament yesterday that the Cabinet has agreed to scrap the death penalty, including for murder, but Deputy Prime Minister Wan Azizah Wan Ismail appeared to hedge over the matter by telling reporters that the government would review abolishing it for murder. “We are reviewing it. The […]
PETALING JAYA (THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) – Rosmah Mansor, the wife of Malaysia’s former prime minister Najib Razak, and her former aide Rizal Mansor may be detained overnight on Wednesday (Nov 14) before being charged on Thursday (Nov 15). The two were requested to be present at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) headquarters in Putrajaya on […]
SINGAPORE – Buses plying the Bukit Merah area will have free Wi-Fi from February, transport operator SBS Transit announced on Wednesday (Nov 14). Some 300 buses which serve the 18 routes that are part of the Bukit Merah Bus Package run by SBS Transit will have the free service. This will be the first major […]
What’s in a name? For India’s cities and villages, seemingly plenty. More than 100 of them, including the most prominent, have been renamed since Independence – Bombay to Mumbai, Calcutta to Kolkata, Madras to Chennai. Names mangled by British rulers have been corrected, and colonial names rejected. Identity pride, cultural assertion, linguistic nationalism and plain […]
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the president from dissolving Parliament, raising the possibility that the former prime minister could reclaim the post after weeks of unnerving political drama. Sri Lanka has been in crisis since late last month, when President Maithripala Sirisena abruptly fired Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, accusing […]