ASEAN News

According to people familiar with the matter, Singapore’s Sea Ltd., the software start-up that has become the most profitable business in Southeast Asia, has acquired Indonesia’s PT Bank Kesejahteraan Ekonomi. After acquiring stakes from existing shareholders PT Danadipa Artha Indonesia and PT Koin Investama Nusantara through its subsidiary Turbo Cash Hong Kong Ltd., Sea acquired full ownership of the Jakarta-based …

SINGAPORE: Qualified staff members of Singapore Airlines (SIA) will begin receiving the COVID-19 vaccine at Changi Airport Terminal 4 on Wednesday (January 13) as part of a vaccination campaign for some aviation employees. Singapore-based staff members who are already on the rostered routine testing programme are available for the vaccine, a SIA spokesperson said on Tuesday. These include cabin crew, …

SINGAPORE – When tackling fake news, social media platforms are hindered by their commercial interests, the Singapore law minister said, stressing the need for the city-state law against online falsehoods, which critics say stifles free speech.K. Shanmugam, speaking on Thursday in an interview for broadcast at the Reuters Next conference on Tuesday, defended the new city-state law against Facebook’s concern …

The year 2020 was a difficult year for Southeast Asia, which faced several disasters caused by severe weather events, particularly in the Philippines and Vietnam, two Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in addition to coping with the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic (ASEAN). Highlighting the urgent need to improve regional cooperation against disaster danger, in his …

Singapore officials have recently admitted that data can also be obtained by the police from their COVID-19 contact tracing software. According to the BBC, Parliament was notified on January 4 that the data could be used for criminal investigations. The officials had previously specifically ruled out, however, that the data would be used for something other than virus monitoring. Singapore …

SINGAPORE: As of Tuesday night, in a sitting that spanned two days, Singapore‘s first public parliamentary Livestream collected more than 80,000 YouTube views. The proceedings were livestreamed on the YouTube channel of the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI). A search on YouTube for the Monday session at 11.45pm on Tuesday showed more than 50,700 views on the stream with …

On Monday morning, the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry reported that, based on advance projections, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by 5.8 percent year-on-year for the whole of 2020, compared to 0.7 percent growth in 2019. The economy of Singapore contracted by 3.8 percent year on year for the fourth quarter of 2020, an improvement from the …

SINGAPORE: The Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) said in a press release that Singapore will begin live streaming Parliament sessions from Monday’s (Jan 4) sitting. Members of the public will listen in to the original and translated versions of the proceedings on the YouTube channel of the Ministry in real-time.Minister of Communications and Information S Iswaran said at last …

SINGAPORE – In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, with leisure travel grinding to a halt, several workers in Singapore find themselves in the odd situation – perhaps for the first time – of not making full use of their annual leave.While in other years these unused holiday days would have been washed out, some companies have allowed …

SINGAPORE – On 1 January 2021, the minimum mandatory age for the purchase, use, possession, selling, and supply of tobacco products will be increased from the existing 20 years to 21. This is the third and final change to the minimum age requirement under the amendments to the Tobacco (Advertising and Sale Control) Act passed in November 2017 by Parliament.The …