Asia

    The world knows North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un as a ruthless dictator prone to testing ballistic missiles while playing a game of nuclear chicken with President Donald Trump. He’s so cold-blooded he had his uncle and half-brother, among others, assassinated. Kim’s as unpredictable as he is deadly. Witness his announcement Tuesday that North Korea would participate in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Experts said that Kim may be trying to do an end run around President Trump by reaching out to the South in the hope of breaking its ties with the U.S. Baby-faced evil genius and master strategist at 34? (His birthday was Monday.) Not to his old friends in Switzerland where Kim was a student in the late 1990s. To them he’s still just the kid who...

    Rohingyas, now living in Bangladesh, want to see certain positive developments including right to citizenship before returning to their homeland Myanmar. A majority of Rohingyas those interviewed indicated that before considering returning to Myanmar they would need to see some positive developments, in particular in relation to citizenship, security, and the possibility for them to enjoy their basic rights, says the UNHCR on Saturday, reports the UNB. Some Rohingyas have also asked for reassurances about UNHCR’s involvement in the process, being familiar with UNHCR’s role and assistance in past efforts to assist refugees to return to Myanmar. Some 655,000 people have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh since August 2017. There were more than 2,200 new arrivals between Dec...

    Leopards have killed at least three children in a series of attacks in rural India, according to media reports and wildlife experts. Two of the children were killed in a village in central India possibly by the same leopard while a 14-year-old boy died in the country’s north, near the edge of a wildlife conservation area. All three were killed on Sunday, the reports said. With thousands of leopards and more than 1.3 billion people, cat attacks occur dozens of times a year across India. By and large, the story of humans and leopards is a story of coexistence, said Pranav Chanchani, co-ordinator of the Tiger Conservation programme at WWF-India. He said there are many millions of people living close to the leopard population, but only a tiny percentage ever face an at...

  A share surge at Country Garden Holdings Co., China’s largest developer by sales, has sent Vice Chairman Yang Huiyan’s wealth up by $2.1 billion -- and that’s just in the first four trading days of the year. Yang, controlling shareholder of Country Garden, saw her fortune soar to $25.6 billion as of Jan. 5 to rank as the fifth-richest person in the nation, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s before Country Garden’s shares rose another 6.9 percent on Monday in Hong Kong trading, taking its year-to-date-gain to more than 16 percent. The 36-year-old Yang is China’s richest woman and the nation’s youngest billionaire, according to the Bloomberg index. In 2005, her father transferred his controlling stake to her “due to his intention to train Yang Huiyan as the...

    The rival Koreas agreed Friday to revive their first formal dialogue in more than two years next week to find ways to cooperate on the upcoming Winter Olympics in the South, a sign of easing animosities that followed a period of rising nuclear tension that saw fears of war on the Korean Peninsula. The announcement by Seoul’s Unification Ministry came hours after the United States said it has agreed to delay annual joint military exercises with South Korea until after the Winter Olympics. The exercises have been a major source of tension because North Korea considers them an invasion rehearsal, although South Korea and the United States have repeatedly said the drills are defensive in nature. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivers a New Year's speech at an undisclo...

    In its relentless pursuit of nuclear strength, North Korea's first land target may have actually been itself. The Diplomat reported Wednesday that an intermediate range ballistic missile launched by the regime last spring accidentally hit the city of Tokchon, which has a population of more than 200,000. The missile was launched from an airfield just over 40 miles north of North Korea's capital city of Pyongyang. An unnamed U.S. official explained to The Diplomat that due to an engine malfunction, the projectile made it only a minute into its test flight and traveled about 25 miles northeast before hitting the ground. The Diplomat cross-referenced the failed missile's approximate landing site with Google Earth and other satellite imaging to find that the suspected ...

    A doctor collapsed in front of her patient and tragically died after suffering a stroke at the end of an 18-hour shift. Respiratory illness specialist Zhao Bianxiang, 43, was found without a pulse after collapsing on 29th December. She was declared dead after 20 hours of rescue efforts. Wire She died from a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is caused by the rupturing of an aneurysm in the brain, the facility said. Zhao was deputy head of respiratory medicine at the Yuci District People's Hospital in Jinzhong City in north-western China's Shaanxi Province. The medic was said to have been visiting a patient and her daughter when she muttered the final words "how is your mum?" before collapsing at just after 12pm. She had started her shift the night before at 6pm and ...

    Kim Jong Un has used his New Year message to warn the US that he has a nuclear button on his desk that is always in reach. In his address, North Korea's leader said his country's nuclear forces are now a reality and not just a threat. Mr Kim also proclaimed that the isolated state achieved the historic feat of "completing" its nuclear forces in 2017. The speech, broadcast on North Korean television on Monday morning, suggests escalating tensions over the nation's weapons programme are not going to die down in the coming year. He reiterated that North Korea has developed the capability to strike all of the US mainland with its nuclear weapons, and claimed this meant that America would never be able to start a war against the country. Last week, the UN Security Counc...

    South Korea has seized a second vessel suspected of carrying oil to the impoverished North Korean regime and most of its crew members are thought to be nationals of China and Myanmar. The Panama-flagged vessel was reported to be transferring oil to a North Korean ship at sea in violation of UN regulations – just like the first vessel which was reportedly carrying out a similar transfer. The first one, a Hong Kong-registered vessel, had supplied as much as 600 tonnes of refined petroleum to a North Korean vessel in the East China Sea waters and was seized after that. In the latest development, the 5,100-tonne KOTI has been confiscated by South Korean authorities and kept in the western port of Pyeongtaek-Dangjin in Gyeonggi Province. Seoul's foreign ministry is yet ...

    Taiwan has been forced to destroy around 200,000 passports after designers accidentally used an image of Washington Dulles International Airport instead of its own Taoyuan International. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Mofa) admitted on Tuesday that it would need to recall 285 passports already issued and pulp the remainder. The error came to light after someone on Facebook noticed that the outline of an airport on the document’s pages, intended to be the airport that serves the capital, Taipei, was in fact Dulles International, DC’s bustling hub. The first person to spot the blunder captioned the photo as the “51st state of America”, before the image was widely shared on Weibo, a microblogging site in China. Mofa initially denied the allegation, adding that the ...