NewsLite

BEIJING — China expressed support for Thailand and Cambodia in resolving their border dispute and offered to provide assistance based on the wishes of both nations, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a statement on Thursday (Aug 14).

Wang said China supports the Southeast Asian countries in strengthening dialogue, and hopes they rebuild mutual trust. He met his counterparts on the sidelines of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Foreign Ministers' Meeting in China's southwestern Yunnan province.

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The size of the compensation package and rehousing options will weigh heavily in their decision to sell their HDB flats back to the Government under the Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme (Vers), elderly residents living in older estates have said.

They were reacting to National Development Minister Chee Hong Tat’s remarks in an interview that his ministry aims to use the current term of Parliament to develop the policy framework for the scheme.

This includes identifying possible sites where the scheme will be first offered, ensuring that there are sufficient homes for those involved to relocate to, and working out a fair compensation package for residents whose flats are taken back early.

Once the policy parameters are in place, Vers will be progressively offered to a “few selected” sites likely from the first half of the next decade when the flats there are about 70 years old, Chee said.

MOSCOW — WhatsApp said Russia was trying to block its services because the social media messaging app owned by Meta Platforms offered people's right to secure communication, and vowed to continue trying to make encrypted services available in Russia.

Russia has started restricting some Telegram and WhatsApp calls, accusing the foreign-owned platforms of failing to share information with law enforcement in fraud and terrorism cases.

"WhatsApp is private, end-to-end encrypted, and defies government attempts to violate people's right to secure communication, which is why Russia is trying to block it from over 100 million Russian people," WhatsApp said in a statement.

"We will keep doing all we can to make end-to-end encrypted communication available to people everywhere, including in Russia."

AMSTERDAM — One person has died and five others were injured after a hot air balloon crash-landed late on Wednesday evening (Aug 13) in a meadow in Friesland, a province in the north of the Netherlands, local authorities said.

The balloon was carrying 34 passengers.

"The hot air balloon came down quickly around 9pm (3am on Thursday in Singapore time) and hit the ground hard", Friesland authorities said, adding that the police had launched an investigation into the accident.

A spokesperson for the Royal Netherlands Aeronautical Association said in local media reports that a sudden gust of wind had caused the balloon to strike the ground forcefully, making the basket bounce and leading to five people falling out.

A former secondary school teacher has been sentenced to jail for targeting three teenage girls and trying to engage in sexual activities with them on separate occasions in 2021.

The 33-year-old man, who was referred to as a "sexual predator" by prosecution, pleaded guilty to four charges under the Children and Young Persons Act on Aug 11 and was sentenced to nine months' jail.

The man cannot be named due to a gag order protecting the victims’ identities.

Responding to AsiaOne's queries the Ministry of Education stated that the man is no longer working as a teacher, and stopped working for the ministry in March 2022.

Singapore and India reaffirmed close ties and discussed areas to strengthen bilateral collaboration during the third India-Singapore Ministerial Roundtable (ISMR) on Wednesday (Aug 13) in New Delhi.

In a doorstop interview after the conclusion of the ISMR, DPM Gan said that Singapore's six-member delegation held productive talks with their Indian counterparts and detailed potential collaborations regarding sustainability, digitalisation, skills development, healthcare and medicine, advanced manufacturing, and connectivity.

In particular, DPM Gan highlighted interest from Singaporean companies to set up a semiconductor ecosystem between the two nations in hopes of strengthening their supply chains.

Citing the "very long and complex" supply chains where different semiconductor parts are often manufactured at separate locations, DPM Gan said that it is important for businesses to diversify their pipelines so that they are less susceptible to disruption, alluding to the external disruptions caused by US tariffs.

SINGAPORE — More older folk are staying in the workforce after Singapore raised the retirement age and re-employment age in 2022, noted a new study.

It found that after the minimum retirement age rose from 62 to 63 from July 1, 2022, the employment rate for those affected went up by 0.4 percentage points over seniors not covered by the policy change.

Similarly, the increase in the re-employment age from 67 to 68 also raised the employment rate for affected seniors by 0.7 percentage points, according to the study by Manpower Ministry senior economist Yuen Wing Shan and lead economist Samuel Huang.

The study tracked the employment outcomes of about 180,000 residents born between 1959 and 1961 to assess the impact of raising retirement age.

While director Don Aravind was inspired by his father's recounts of the 1986 Hotel New World tragedy, the real backstory of his short film One Last Song in the SG60 anthology Kopitiam Days was based on his observations in everyday life.

"My inspirations come from real-life events or people that I meet or talk to, because there's always a story that needs to be worth telling," the 42-year-old told AsiaOne in an interview recently.

Kopitiam Days , which is supported by Infocomm Media Development Authority and Singapore Film Commission, is an anthology of six shorts which features Singapore in the past, present and future. Each of the stories is independent, but the kopitiam Heap Seng Leong is a common place in all the characters' lives.

The film is produced by local director Eric Khoo, who is the film's creative director and executive producer, and Lim Teck, managing director of Clover Films.

Blake Lively has described the ongoing pressure she feels from what she calls a "smear campaign" by her former It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni and his team.

The 37-year-old actress made the admission during a deposition in New York City, according to a transcript released after a court order.

According to People, which obtained a section of the deposition, she was asked by an unnamed lawyer for Justin: "When did the smear campaign end?"

Blake replies: "It doesn't feel like it's ended."

MEXICO CITY — The US FBI said it had on Wednesday (Aug 13) returned to Mexico a stolen manuscript dating back five centuries to the Spanish conquest and signed by its leading military commander, Hernan Cortes.

Special Agent Jessica Dittmer, a member of the FBI's Art Crime Team in New York, said the document contains a detailed accounting of the logistics related to Cortes' journey to what eventually became New Spain — a territory that stretched from Central America to modern-day Washington state.

"This is an original manuscript page that was actually signed by Hernan Cortes," she said in a statement. "Pieces like this are considered protected cultural property and represent valuable moments in Mexico's history."

Cortes landed in Mexico with a small army in 1519, when he formed alliances with local groups that opposed the Aztec empire, which helped him capture the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan — modern-day Mexico City — just two years later.