MELBOURNE (REUTERS) – Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city which has endured nearly nine months of lockdowns since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, saw people flocking to shops and gigs for the first time in months on Saturday (Oct 30) as public health curbs eased. The city of five million, which re-emerged from its sixth lockdown […]

BANGKOK – Countries in South-east Asia are racing to reopen their borders as the tourist season descends. First off the block was Thailand, which in July fashioned a sandbox scheme that allowed quarantine-free travel for fully vaccinated foreign visitors to the popular resort island of Phuket. The moderate success of the scheme, which the Thai […]

SINGAPORE – A local start-up has come up with a digital platform that makes transporting migrant workers safely in mini buses more convenient and affordable. By providing a pool of these vehicles that can be booked on-demand, Aespada Technologies chief executive Jean Christophe Lihopes to curb the decades-long practice of migrant workers being ferried on […]

KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia’s main opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan commended the country’s latest federal budget for incorporating its proposals but warned government spending could be unsustainable in the near future. PH economic committee chairman Tony Pua, who is from the Democratic Action Party (DAP), on Friday (Oct 29) said that the RM332 billion (S$108 billion) […]

KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia is planning an even larger recovery budget than it did for this year, with a 6 per cent deficit projected for 2022 set to lift its coronavirus-ravaged economy by between 5.5 per cent and 6.5 per cent. At more than RM332 billion (S$108 billion), Budget 2022 unveiled on Friday (Oct 29) will be the nation’s […]

SINGAPORE – Lower-wage workers earning up to $2,000 gross monthly should get a pay hike of $70 to $90, or a 4.5 per cent to 7.5 per cent raise if it is higher, to ensure that pay for such workers grow faster than those at the median wage level. This guidance on the rate of […]

SINGAPORE – Employers that have recovered or are recovering from the fallout of Covid-19 should prioritise restoring workers’ wage cuts and rolling back wage-related cost-saving measures such as temporary layoffs. The National Wages Council (NWC) also said on Friday (Oct 29) that businesses which are still struggling should consider non-wage cost-saving measures as far as […]

BEIJING – In a disappointment to climate experts, China made only modest improvements to its previous pledges in its updated climate commitments submitted to the United Nations on Thursday (Oct 28). The experts were expecting China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluter, to demonstrate greater ambition ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow next […]

SINGAPORE – From next year, clean energy companies will, for the first time, sponsor engineering students for the Energy-Industry Scholarship (EIS) here. This means that some of next year’s batch of scholarship recipients and future cohorts will be posted to clean energy companies after completing their studies at polytechnics or the Institute of Technical Education […]

SINGAPORE – One imported Covid-19 case in Singapore of the AY.4.2 Delta subvariant has been confirmed as at Tuesday (Oct 26), said the Ministry of Health on Thursday night. The subvariant is a mutation of the Covid-19 Delta variant. It is a combination of the AY.4 Delta variant and the S:Y145H spike mutation. The Health Ministry […]