A Senate committee in Australia published documents on Feb. 7 showing the salaries of senior executives at Australia Post, a government-owned corporation. Those executives had tried to stop it from doing so, and now it’s clear why: They make a bundle.
Last August, the British tabloid Daily Mail published a story that could have left readers with the impression that Melania Trump once worked as a prostitute. It retracted the story in September and issued an apology. That’s not good enough for her.
Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has probably had enough of Donald Trump issues for one week. First came the aftermath of an awkward phone call with the US president about a refugee deal, later described by Trump as ”the worst by far” of his calls with world leaders that day.
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte does not take kindly to being embarrassed—which he was after it came to light this month that members of his anti-drug police brutally murdered a South Korean businessman last October and tried to extort money from his wife. Duterte had to apologize on Jan. 26 for their behavior in public, and even send a representative to Seoul to do the same in person.
Many observers were already alarmed over the increasing power of Steve Bannon, US president Donald Trump’s top political adviser, in the White House. Then came the recently surfaced comments he made on the radio last March about war in the South China Sea being inevitable.
President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines has created incentives to kill and “an economy of murder,” according to a new report by Amnesty International. More than 7,000 drug-related killings have taken place in the nation since Duterte came to power seven months ago.
In 2012, the mayor of Seoul said he wanted to turn an old overpass into an elevated urban park, similar to New York’s iconic High Line. Park Won-soon described the project as a place where “nature and humans can live side by side.”
If Donald Trump’s choice for US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, is confirmed—and we’ll find out next week whether he is—he’ll face a potentially awkward situation off Vietnam’s coast in the South China Sea (among many others).
Singaporeans already have one of the best airports in the world. Now they have one of the best passports, too.
Indonesia has so many islands it doesn’t know what to do with them all. So it’s letting foreign investors get involved in naming and managing some of them.
It’s safe to assume that Beijing has not been happy with US actions in the South China Sea in recent years. Chinese leaders have used words like ”illegal” and “provocative” to describe US freedom-of-navigation operations in the contested Spratly archipelago. With international law and norms against them, however, they’ve had a weak argument.
Singapore’s shipping ports are already among the busiest and most efficient in the world. Now the city-state is exploring a new way to make them run even better: convoys of driverless trucks operating between terminals. The idea is that a lead truck will be driven by a human, with the follower vehicles being automated.
It started innocently enough, or so Beijing wanted the world to believe. In the mid-1990s, China built a small structure on stilts over a coral reef in the South China Sea, just 217 km (135 miles) from the coast of the Philippines’ Palawan island. At the time Beijing reassured Manila that the structure at Mischief Reef—a platform topped by four octagonal structures, with a Chinese flag waving overhead— was merely a fishermen’s shelter (paywall).
US president-elect Donald Trump recently delayed a press conference that was intended to explain how he will untangle himself from his sprawling business interests around the world. If he’s worried about appearances though, he might also want to check out the way Russian president Vladimir Putin looks at ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump’s recently announced pick for US secretary of state, the nation’s highest diplomatic post.
Over the weekend US president-elect Donald Trump declared that he did not want to be “bound by a ‘one China’ policy” and suggested that he might use the issue as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations with Beijing. The matter came to the fore after he broke decades of protocol on Dec. 2 by accepting a phone call from the president of Taiwan.
Earlier this year photographer Andy Yeung wowed us with pictures of his hometown Hong Kong as seen from a drone buzzing over dizzying concrete canyons. Now, he’s released another series, “Remember Hong Kong,” this time inspired by the 1995 Japanese sci-fi anime flick Ghost in the Shell. Its setting was based on the noisy, chaotic streets of Hong Kong, with their strange mix of the old and new. (A Hollywood adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson is due for release in March 2017.)
Donald Trump earned notoriety during the US presidential campaign for his Twitter rants against political opponents. Now that he’s on his way to the White House, he’s got bigger targets—like China.
On the night of Nov. 28 a charter plane hurled into a mountainside south of Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city. Of the 77 people aboard, all but six died. One of the survivors, flight technician Erwin Tumiri, believes that following normal airline safety protocols saved his life.
A fancy US presidential inauguration doesn’t come cheap. Fortunately for incoming presidents, plenty of companies and individuals have historically eagerly contributed to the effort through wildly overpriced luncheons, dinners, and other activities surrounding the big day. In the case of Donald Trump’s inauguration, they’ll cough up $1 million for the top package, which includes four tickets to a “leadership luncheon” with select congressional leaders and cabinet appointees.
Samsung Group isn’t exactly known for corporate transparency or a diverse, international set of leaders. The South Korean conglomerate consists of nearly 60 affiliates bound together by cross-shareholdings, and crown jewel Samsung Electronics has a board consisting of nine Korean men.
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has often been compared to US president-elect Donald Trump. Both leaders have quick tempers, a reputation for holding grudges, and launch headline-grabbing tirades against their opponents. Now there’s another point of comparison between the two leaders: their attitude towards women.
In February, Australian cinema notched a major victory when Mad Max: Fury Road took home six Oscars. Directed by Australian film director George Miller and shot in the Australian desert, it’s already considered one of the best action flicks of all time.
Like many Californians, Dex Torricke-Barton is unhappy about the outcome of the US presidential election. While he’s enjoyed a successful career in corporate communications working for Google, Facebook, and most recently SpaceX, he’s also kept in mind the struggles of his late father—a Burmese refugee.
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte made clear last week that he’d rather not travel halfway around the world to attend a two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. This year the annual meeting takes place Nov. 19-20 in Lima, Peru. Duterte said he dislikes long-haul flights.
