Former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten criticizes Hong Kong’s two disqualified lawmakers, saying that taking any oath of office is “serious business” and those who take it lightly are making a mockery of democracy. “Taking an oath is a serious business. I’ve taken oaths on several occasions. I took an oath when I came to Hong Kong,” Patten said at a packed Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) lunch event titled, The World After Trump and Brexit.
Nearly US$60 billion passed through China’s biggest online casino before it was broken up by authorities, a court has heard. According, to the official Xinhua news agency, prosecutors said the illegal gambling operation was set up by a man surnamed Zhou in 2012 and that he moved it to Vietnam the following year to try to avoid detection by police. Players on the site exchanged real money into game coins to participate in dozens of gambling games from mahjong to poker, the Legal Daily newspaper reported last year.
India’s government is pushing state-owned steel, power and shipping firms to take over assets of private companies that have defaulted on loans, but faces resistance from them, leaving it scrambling to clear a US$135 billion pile of stressed loans from banks’ books. Over the past two years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has pushed banks to recognize non-performing assets, make adequate provisions for them and try to raise capital from outside to bolster their balance sheets.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday that Russia’s deployment of missile systems on islands in the western Pacific isles that are also claimed by Tokyo was “regrettable.” His comments came less than a month before Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to visit Japan for talks aimed at making progress on the decades-old territorial row. Moscow has already said it hopes the deployment will not damage efforts to settle the dispute.
Most people would not have heard of Dr Anandibai Joshi, Savitribai Phule and Dr Rakhmabai Raut, but they are among India’s women pioneers whose stories have not been told until now. They are being given a virtual platform in a Google Arts & Culture project entitled Women in India: Untold Stories, which boasts more than 1,800 works of art, photographs and videos sourced from 26 cultural institutions across India and features the stories of female pioneers — from the distant past to innovators of the modern age.