The city-state voided the marriage last year, saying the operation made their partnership a same-sex union that is illegal under Singapore law.

Singapore is a modern and vibrant society in many ways but attitudes towards homosexuality are still conservative and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said the country is not yet ready for same-sex marriage.

The couple, Faith and Bryce Volta, married as man and woman in 2015, the Straits Times newspaper reported.

Faith, the husband, then underwent sex change surgery and updated her national identity card to read “female”, the paper said.

Six months later the government’s Registrar of Marriages met the couple to discuss the sex change and later informed them the marriage would be annulled.

The couple have now asked the High Court to review the decision taken by the registrar, confirmed lawyer Eugene Thuraisingam, whose law firm is representing them for free.

Authorities previously cited the country’s laws which state marriage is a union between a man and a woman as the reason for annulling the union.

Singapore maintains legislation dating back to British colonial rule making sex between men a criminal act, although it does not actively enforce the law.

Nevertheless support for gay rights is growing due to more relaxed views among the younger generation and the large expatriate community.

Last year, statistics showed this model was number one on the stolen cars list. A total of 654 cars were reported stolen.

General Insurance Association of Malaysia (PIAM) chief executive Mark Lim said the cars were definitely stolen for the parts.

“We believe the stolen vehicles were cannibalised and the parts sold as production of spare parts for this model has been stopped and the parts are difficult to obtain in the market,” he said in an interview with The Star.

A Proton spare parts dealer in Jalan Ipoh in Kuala Lumpur said many of the Wira’s interior items are no longer in production.

These include the dashboard, instrument panel, control panels, cushions, speedometer, handbrake lever, steering and other smaller items inside the car.

“The parts are scattered and difficult to find in the market. Even if they are available, the items could be the last few from the old stock.”

He said many Proton Wira spare parts were becoming more difficult to find as the items were no longer in production.

The industry, he said, had been told by Proton Wira spare parts manufacturers that the company planned to cease the production of parts for this model by the year’s end as it is no longer economically viable to make it.

The only option, he said, was to find the spare parts at the “potong-kereta” outlets. Proton Wira was produced between early 1993 and June 2009.

In its 16 years production, 952,216 units were sold. It has been estimated that at least 85% of the models are still on the road.

A second-hand car dealer, James Lim, said a Proton Wira in good condition could fetch between RM2,000 and RM4,500 each, depending on the year the car was manufactured and its model – either automatic or manual, hatchback or saloon.

“The value of the model offered by second-hand dealers is definitely much lower than the market price. Some dealers are only offering as much as RM1,000 for the model.”

He said many second-hand dealers were reluctant to trade this model as they found it difficult to dispose of the vehicles as buyers have to pay cash for the car.

“The model is too old, spare parts are difficult to find and banks have refused loans. Even many insurance companies would not want to insure the vehicles. If they do, Proton Wira car owners have to pay a higher premium and additional loading for it,” he said.

He said the model had been tagged as “high-risk cars for the second-hand market”.

However, a Sungai Besi junkyard operator, who only wanted to be identified as Lim, said the model still had value, either as scrap metal or second-hand parts.

A Proton Wira could fetch between RM5,000 and RM7,000 if the vehicle was cannibalised.

The gearbox and engine alone can fetch between RM1,000 and RM2,500 each, depending on its model and year the vehicle is ma­­nufactured.

“The speedometer and other gadgets on the dashboard can fetch good prices as many are no longer or easily available in the market,” he said.

The entire original seats, if in good condition, could be disposed of for RM200 a set.

The junkyard operator said Proton Wira spare parts were considered a hot item in the second-hand market as there are still many cars of this model on the road.

“It was one of the robust cars, where many of its parts and engines were directly imported from Japan, to be assembled locally when it was first introduced to the market.”

Alex Johnson, 44, and his wife Luna, 31, admitted that they had sex with Smit three weeks earlier and on the day she was found dead. Smit had fallen to her death from the balcony of an apartment in Jalan Dang Wangi.

The Johnsons also admitted in an interview with British tabloid Daily Mail that all three of them had been drinking heavily and that Ivana had been taking drugs.

The couple had met Smit at a nightclub in Kuala Lumpur in October last year, where they were introduced by a mutual acquaintance.

“She asked me to stand up and dance with her. We weren’t kissing, but we were doing sexy moves,” said Luna.

“She was beautiful, charming, confident. I was already melting,” added Luna.

The three of them even set up a WhatsApp group among themselves, which contained explicit flirting.

They had a threesome in a five-star hotel in November. On the day Smit was found dead, the three had been out all night partying before coming back in the wee hours of the morning.

The Johnsons’ daughter got up and Luna says she and Smit had breakfast with her.

“Ivana was hammered. I kept talking to her as I got my daughter ready for school. Ivana lay down while I took her there,” said Luna who went out for about 30 minutes.

Luna said she returned, her husband and Smit were on their bed, although Johnson was asleep.

After that, both Luna and Smit got intimate, before Luna went back to her bedroom where she lay down with her husband. When she came out of the room at about 10am, she found Smit  ‘wandering around, talking to herself and giggling.

“I was so tired after all this partying. At 10.15 I went back to the bedroom. When my head hit the pillow, I passed out,” said Luna.

Luna said she then woke at 1.25pm and saw that Ivana’s clothes, shoes, bag and phones were in the lounge/kitchen, but thought she had vanished for a photoshoot. The Johnsons were then woken up by the police at 5pm.

The Johnsons have maintained innocence in the matter, saying that there were footprints on the balcony and on to the top of the air-conditioning units.

Johnson said he has received numerous death threats since the murder claim was publicised, and claimed there was even an attempt to kidnap his five-year-old daughter:

“A man phoned our nanny, Maha, saying he was Luna’s father and would be picking her up from school. Luna’s father died before she was born.”

“We never intended to make the details of our marriage public. Now we fear our own lives are in danger, and we have no choice,” he said.

On Sunday, Smit’s family lawyer also told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that the teen had sex in the hours prior to the discovery of her body.

According to an online portal, he said this was based on “new information” that was corroborated by the findings from the second post-mortem conducted on Smit in the Netherlands.

Lawyer Sébas Diekstra added that pathologist Dr Frank van de Goot, who carried out the second autopsy, had previously detailed finding “male DNA” in Smit’s body and held the opinion that it likely occurred in the last hours of her life.

“In the Netherlands, you can be prosecuted if you commit sexual acts on someone who is unconscious or under reduced consciousness,” Diekstra told the daily.

De Telegraaf also reported that Smit family spokesman Fred Agenjo believed his niece was not in control of herself nor her actions in the hours before her death.

“There were huge amounts of drugs found in Ivana’s body. She was no longer competent.

“If anyone still had sex with an 18-year-old girl who was in that condition, that’s not good. They should stay away from someone under such circumstances,” he was quoted as saying.

The visit, described by many as a cultural charm offensive by the South, came as a diplomatic thaw quickens on the peninsula after months of tensions.

The 120-member group — 11 musical acts as well as dancers, technicians and martial artists — gave one concert on Sunday with another set for Tuesday.

Kim and his wife, a former singer herself, came to watch Sunday’s show, making him the first leader of the North to attend a concert by South Korean performers.

Kim shook hands and took photos with the stars backstage, saying inter-Korean cultural events should be held more often and suggesting another event in the South Korean capital this autumn, pool reports said.

The young couple were seen clapping their hands during the two-hour event — also attended by Kim’s powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, and ceremonial head of state Kim Yong Nam.

“Please tell (South Korean) President Moon Jae-in how great an event like this is… I am grateful for a gift like this (concert) to the people of Pyongyang,” Kim told visiting Seoul officials.

Kim also showed “great interest in the songs and lyrics (of South Korean singers) during the concert,” Do Jong-hwan, Seoul’s culture chief and the head of the delegation, told reporters.

The South’s taekwondo athletes also staged a performance before an audience of 2,300 in Pyongyang on Sunday ahead of a joint display of the Korean martial art with the North’s practitioners on Monday.

The ongoing rapprochement was triggered by the South’s Winter Olympics, to which the North’s leader Kim Jong Un sent athletes, cheerleaders and his sister as an envoy.

A North Korean art troupe staged two performances in the South in February to celebrate the Games.

Kim followed up by agreeing to a summit with Moon, and offering a face-to-face meet with US President Donald Trump. Kim also met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week during his first overseas trip.

The inter-Korean summit, the third after meetings in 2000 and 2007, will be held on April 27. No date has been set for the US-North Korean summit although it is expected before the end of May.

In another sign of eased tensions, an annual US-South Korean military exercise which got under way in the South Sunday will last for just one month compared to some two months normally.

This year’s drills feature fewer strategic weapons such as nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, Seoul’s military has said. Such deployments during past drills has frequently drawn an angry response from Pyongyang.

– ‘Let’s do our best’ –

Sunday’s concert to a packed audience at the elaborately decorated 1,500-seat East Pyongyang Grand Theatre ended with a standing ovation after a finale in which all the stars appeared on stage to sing a song about unification.

One of the most closely watched acts was Red Velvet, part of the South’s hugely popular K-pop phenomenon that has taken audiences in Asia and beyond by storm in recent decades.

Before the concert, even the leader Kim joked: “There was so much interest in whether I’d come to see Red Velvet or not.”

The five-member girlband — known for its signature K-pop mix of upbeat electronic music, stylish fashion and high-voltage choreography — performed two of their hits, “Bad Boy” and “Red Flavour”.

“The North’s audience applauded to our performance much louder than we expected and even sang along to our songs… it was a big relief,” band member Yeri told reporters.

“I told myself, ‘let’s do our best even if there’s no response (from the audience)… but they showed so much reaction,” added a member called Wendy.

Another member, Seulgi, appeared red-eyed as she bid farewell to the audience at the end of the concert, apparently overcome with emotion.

– ‘Maze of Love’ –

Despite the North’s isolation and strict curbs on unauthorised foreign culture, enforced with prison terms, K-pop and South Korean TV shows have become increasingly popular there thanks to flash drives smuggled across the border with China.

The emcee of Sunday’s concert was a popular member of K-pop band Girls’ Generation, Seohyun, who had performed with the visiting North Korean singers during their Seoul concert in February.

Legendary South Korean singer Cho Yong-pil, who held a solo sell-out concert in Pyongyang in 2005, was another star of the show.

Kim’s late father and longtime ruler, Kim Jong Il, was known to be a fan of the 68-year-old Cho.

Another famous singer, Choi Jin-hee, also performed for the fourth time in the North and sang “Maze of Love” — a hit in both Koreas and another of the late Kim’s favourites.

But not all onlookers were receptive to the K-pop offensive.

During the taekwondo event, a previously-enraptured audience turned stone-faced during a performance combining K-pop dance and Taekwondo routines to a hit song by the ultra-popular boyband BTS.

The stiffened crowd refused to respond to the athletes who asked them to clap their hands to “Fire” — an intense electro-dance score peppered with rapid-fire rap delivered in both Korean and English. //AFP

“Alhamdulillah (Praise be to God… baby Kerim is safe now,” Kerem Kinik, head of the Turkish Red Crescent tweeted.

The child, who was just five weeks old when he was injured, will “survive on behalf of all innocent children of Syria” and “remind us that we have a conscience as humanity,” he added.

President Recep Erdogan personally greeted little Karim Abdallah, now six months old, and surviving members of his family after their arrival in the Turkish border province of Hatay, according to Turkish media.

Karim lost his left eye in an air raid last October, in the opposition-held area of Eastern Ghouta, which also killed his mother.

The damage to his frontal lobe and left eye will likely leave him suffering long-term effects, said the brain surgeon who treated him and who identified himself as Abu Jamil.

“The frontal lobe plays an essential role in a human being’s comprehension, intelligence, and memory,” said the 50-year-old doctor who added that it could be “treatable with behavioural and cognitive therapy and cosmetic surgery, but not in Ghouta”.

A final deal appeared to have been reached Sunday for fighters and civilians to leave the last opposition-held area of Eastern Ghouta, paving the way for Syria’s regime to retake all of the one-time rebel enclave near Damascus.

More than 45,000 rebels and their families have been evacuated from Eastern Gouta since March 22 to be relocated in Idlib, according to Syrian authorities.

A world that heats up by 2C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) — long regarded as the temperature ceiling for a climate-safe planet — could see mass displacement due to rising seas, a drop in per capita income, regional shortages of food and fresh water, and the loss of animal and plant species at an accelerated speed.

Poor and emerging countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America will get hit hardest, according to the studies in the British Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions A.

“We are detecting large changes in climate impacts for a 2C world, and so should take steps to avoid this,” said lead editor Dann Mitchell, an assistant professor at the University of Bristol.

The 197-nation Paris climate treaty, inked in 2015, vows to halt warming at “well under” 2C compared to mid-19th century levels, and “pursue efforts” to cap the rise at 1.5C.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday said climate change was “the most systemic threat to humankind”.

Time to adapt

With only one degree of warming so far, Earth has seen a crescendo of droughts, heatwaves, and storms ramped up by rising seas.

Voluntary national pledges made under the Paris pact to cut CO2 emissions, if fulfilled, would yield a 3C world at best.

The treaty also requires that — by the end of the century — humanity stop adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than oceans and forests can absorb, a threshold known as “net zero emissions”.

“How fast we get to a 2C world” is critical, Mitchell told AFP.

“If it only takes a couple of decades, we will be in trouble because we won’t have time to adapt to the climate.”

Among the conclusions found in the new studies:

Economic growth

Researchers led by Felix Pretis, an economist at the University of Oxford, predict that two degrees of global warming will see GDP per person drop, on average, 13 percent by 2100, once costly climate change impacts are factored in.

A 2C world will also “show significant negative impact on the rates of economic growth,” Pretis told AFP. Under a 1.5C scenario, he added, growth projections “are near indistinguishable from current conditions.”

Rising seas

Under a 2C scenario, oceans rise about half a metre over the course of the 21th century, but well over a metre by 2300, another study found.

“When the planet warms, it takes the ocean hundreds, if not thousands, of years to fully respond,” lead author Rober Nicholls, a professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton, told AFP.

That’s bad news for 500 million people living in “highly vulnerable” low-lying deltas, mainly in Asia, along with some 400 million people in coastal cities, many of which are already sinking due over-construction or collapsing water tables.

Even in a 2C world, the number of people affected year by flooding could approach 200 million by 2300, the study calculated.

Food, water stress

Two degrees of warming would spare humanity much misery compared to our current trajectory, but would still lead to increased drought, flooding, heatwaves and the disruption of weather patterns.

Some regions will be hit worse than others, as will countries with rainfall-dependent agriculture, a team by Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the University of Exeter found.

The countries that show “the greatest increase in vulnerability to food insecurity when moving from the present-day climate to 2C global warming are Oman, India, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Brazil,” he told AFP.

1.5C vs. 2C

A draft “special report” by the UN climate science panel to be unveiled in October, obtained by AFP, concludes that “holding warming at 1.5C by the end of the 21st century (is) extremely unlikely.”

At current rates, the greenhouse gas emissions putting that goal out of reach will have been released within 10 to 15 years.

Meanwhile, CO2 emissions — after remaining stable for three years, raising hopes that they had peaked — rose by 1.4 percent in 2017, the International Energy Agency said this week.

But every tenth-of-a-degree counts, said Mitchell.

“Even if we can’t limit global temperature increase to 1.5C, but can limit it to 1.7C or 1.8C, this is still hugely more beneficial than just giving up,” he told AFP.

“We can still keep temperatures well below 2 degrees,” said Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford a co-author on several of the studies.

But doing so requires that “we start now and reduce emissions steadily to zero in the second have of the century,” he told AFP.

Laos has 53 hydropower plants with installed capacity of 7,082 megawatts (MW) that are able to generate 37,028 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity a year.

“Another 47 plants are under construction or about to start construction and all are expected to be functioning in 2020-2021. Then the country will comprise 100 hydropower plants with an installed capacity of 13,062MW and be able to generate 66,944 million kWh a year,” Energy and Mines Minister Dr Khammany Inthirath reported at the annual energy and mines sector meeting in Vientiane last week.

“However, around 85 per cent of the total will be exported,” he said

As development and the economy expands, Laos still needs more electricity for domestic supply especially in special and specific economic zones, the Laos-China railway project, mining and processing, energy construction projects and SMEs promotion as well as infrastructure development, rural development and communication projects.

In the next five years, the government expects the demand for electricity in the industrial sector to cover about 50-60 per cent of the total demand, Khammany said.

The government has also signed cooperation agreements for feasibility studies in electricity trading with neighbouring countries Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and China.

Laos has agreed to sell 9,000MW of electricity to Thailand, and is currently able to export 4,260MW and will supply 7,000MW in 2020 and 9,000MW by 2025, Khammany said.

The country’s feasibility study agreement for electricity trading with Vietnam is for about 5,000MW and at present the country exports around 250 MW annually which is expected to increase to 1,000MW in 2020, 3,000MW in 2025 and 5,000 by 2030, he noted.

The country also agreed to sell 100MW of electricity to Malaysia via Thailand and is now able to supply 100 per cent under a model project for other Asean countries which includes plans for sales to Singapore by 2020.

The government also agreed to assign electricity via 22kV and 115kV systems to Cambodia and Myanmar as well as continuing to develop transmission lines and stations in order to ensure domestic supply and exports, Khammany said.

“At present, 95 per cent of households around the country have access to electricity and 88 per cent of villages are using electricity,” he added.

The minister noted that the mines sector was also developing following effective green and sustainable policies.

Ore production from mining investment projects approved by the central government reached 10.4 trillion kip (about Bt39 billion) last year, an increase of 6 per cent compared to 2016.