About 40 workers gathered outside two restaurants in Crayford, southeast London, and in Cambridge before attending a protest outside parliament.

Workers are demanding an hourly wage of #10 ($13, 11 euros), union recognition and an end to zero-hours contracts, under which employees are required to be available for work but have no guaranteed minimum hours.

“For far too long, workers in fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s have had to deal with poor working conditions, drastic cuts to employee hours, and even bullying in the workplace — viewed by many as a punishment for joining a union,” Ian Hodson, president of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, said in Cambridge.

Demonstrators participate in a protest over working conditions and the use of zero-hour contracts at British outlets of US burger chain, outside one of the chain’s outlets in central London on September 4, 2017.// AFP PHOTO

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the main opposition Labour party, lent his support, saying the demands “are just and should be met”.

McDonald’s highlighted that those on strike made up less than 0.01 per cent of its workforce and that 86 per cent of its workers had opted for flexible contracts.

“McDonald’s UK and its franchisees have delivered three pay rises since April 2016, this has increased the average hourly pay rate by 15 per cent,” it said in a statement.

The news comes on the week that the royal couple’s eldest child, four-year-old Prince George, begins school in London. They also have a daughter, two-year-old Princess Charlotte.

“Their royal highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very pleased to announce that the Duchess of Cambridge is expecting their third child,” the palace said in a statement.

William is second in line to the throne and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II, along with members of both families, was said to be “delighted” at the news.

The palace confirmed that “as with her previous two pregnancies, the Duchess is suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum”, a severe form of morning sickness.

“Her royal highness will no longer carry out her planned engagement at the Hornsey Road Children’s Centre in London today. The Duchess is being cared for at Kensington Palace,” it said.//AFP

    Nearly 90,000 Rohingya have flooded into Bangladesh in the past 10 days following an uptick in fighting between militants and Myanmar’s military in strife-torn western Rakhine state.

The impoverished region bordering Bangladesh has been a crucible of communal tensions between Muslims and Buddhists for years, with the Rohingya forced to live under apartheid-like restrictions on movement and citizenship.

The recent violence, which kicked off last October when a small Rohingya militant group ambushed border posts, is the worst Rakhine has witnessed in years with the UN saying Myanmar’s army may have committed ethnic cleansing in its response.

De facto leader Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner of Myanmar’s junta, has come under increasing fire over her perceived unwillingness to speak out against the treatment of the Rohingya or chastise the military.

She has made no public comment since the latest fighting broke out.

“Every time I see the news, my heart breaks at the suffering of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar,” Pakistani activist Yousafzai, who famously survived being shot in the head by the Taliban, said in a statement on Twitter.

“Over the last several years I have repeatedly condemned this tragic and shameful treatment. I am still waiting for my fellow Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do the same,” she added.

Pakistani politician and former cricketer Imran Khan added: “Shameful acceptance of Rohingyas genocide by Aung San Suu Kyi.”

– Muslim neighbours riled –

===========================

The growing crisis threatens Myanmar’s diplomatic relations, particularly with Muslim-majority countries in Southeast Asia where there is profound public anger over the treatment of the Rohingya.

Indonesia’s foreign minister Retno Marsudi met Myanmar’s army chief General Min Aung Hlaing in Naypyidaw on Monday in a bid to pressure the government to do more to alleviate the crisis.

“Once again, violence, this humanitarian crisis has to stop immediately,” Indonesian president Joko Widodo told reporters on Sunday as he announced Retno’s mission there.

Hours before Widodo spoke, a petrol bomb was thrown at Myanmar’s embassy in Jakarta while police there have previously dismantled two attempts by Islamist militants to bomb the compound.

Dozens demonstrated in front of the embassy on Monday, where armed police were deployed and the mission cordoned off behind barbed wire.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry released a statement saying it was “deeply concerned over reports of growing number of deaths and forced displacement of Rohingya Muslims” and urged Myanmar to investigate reports of atrocities against the community.

Muslim-majority Malaysia has also seen public protests since the latest round of Rakhine violence began.

“We urge for calm and restraint,” Prime Minister Najib Razak tweeted. “The dire situation facing our Rohingya brothers and sisters must be alleviated for good of Myanmar and region.”

Despite years of persecution, the Rohingya largely eschewed violence until October’s attacks by the little-known Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.

Analysts have long warned that Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya would lead to homegrown militancy as well as support from international jihadists.

Since the latest fighting broke out, Al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen has called for retaliatory attacks against Myanmar while the Afghan Taliban posted a statement on Facebook calling on Muslims to “use their abilities to help Myanmar’s oppressed Muslims”.

Defenders of Suu Kyi say she is severely limited in her ability to control Myanmar’s notoriously abusive military.

While her party won a landslide election in 2015, under Myanmar’s junta era constitution the army is effectively independent of any civilian oversight.

The Rohingya are also widely loathed by a huge section of Myanmar’s population, dismissed as Bangladeshi interlopers despite many tracing their lineage back generations.

That makes supporting them hugely unpopular.

But detractors say Suu Kyi is one of the few people in Myanmar with the mass appeal and moral authority to swim against the tide on the issue.//AFP

The CNS Hulun Lake, the first in the Type-901 class, which has a hull code of 965, was commissioned for service in the PLA Navy on Friday at Guangzhou Shipyard International Co under China State Shipbuilding Corp.

Vice-Admiral Shen Jinlong, commander of the PLA Navy, attended the commissioning ceremony and presented a military flag to the new ship.

The Navy said in a news release that the Hulun Lake is a new-generation, world-class comprehensive resupply ship developed by Chinese designers. With multiple resupply methods and large capacity, it can accompany and replenish a carrier battle group or a long-range task force, according to the news release.

With the new ship’s entry into service, China has demonstrated that it is fully capable of designing large resupply vessels and advanced marine replenishment equipment, the Navy said, adding the ship also marks a milestone in the Navy’s long-distance logistics support capability.

The Navy has yet to disclose the specifications of the new vessel, but Chinese military observers have said that it has a displacement of more than 45,000 metric tons－almost twice as much as the Type-903 class, the current pillar of the Navy’s replenishment force. Its maximum speed is about 25 knots, according to observers.

Before the Hulun Lake, the PLA Navy had 16 replenishment ships in active service. The largest is the 37,000-ton CNS Qinghai Lake, the only one in the Type-908 class, which was built in Ukraine as a merchant tanker before its purchase and refit by China in the early 1990s.

All previous types are slower than the new ship, making them incompatible with a faster-moving carrier battle group. In addition, their supply-carrying capacity is not big enough to support the needs of a carrier group.

The Chinese Navy has only one aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, a refitted Soviet-era ship. The Liaoning battle group has conducted several open-sea training exercises since the carrier was delivered to the Navy in late 2012. However, the group has been restrained in terms of long-range operational capability because of the absence of large, fast replenishment ships, military analysts said.

Work on the nation’s second aircraft carrier－the first designed domestically－is nearing completion. Like the Liaoning, the new carrier will have a displacement of around 50,000 tons. It will have a conventional propulsion system and will carry J-15 fighter jets. It will soon begin mooring trials to verify its overall design, the Navy said.

Li Jie, a senior researcher at the PLA Naval Military Studies Research Institute, said large replenishment ships are essential to a carrier battle group during long-distance missions.

“A large replenishment vessel can sail fast to keep pace with combat vessels and can carry virtually all kinds of ammunition, fuel and living necessities to support a prolonged operation at sea,” Li said. “By comparison, a smaller ship moves slower and can’t carry enough materiel for a carrier battle group. Ships such as those in the Type-901 class are especially important to navies that lack overseas bases.”

Du Wenlong, an equipment researcher at the PLA Academy of Military Science, said a Type-901 ship will enable a carrier battle group to engage an enemy in a series of naval battles without needing to return to its home port for resupply.

With about 150 days left to the first Winter Olympics to be held here, torchbearers for the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 are to be announced this month by the organizing committee, for which  Coca-Cola, the worldwide Olympic partner, helped gather.

As a presenting partner of the Olympic Torch Relay, Coca-Cola has been offering a unique experience to non-athlete participants of the event through the torch relay.

“We will try to deliver a one of a kind experience and memory for customers as the worldwide Olympic partner through various marketing campaigns besides the torch relay,” Coca-Cola said in a statement.

The Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 is the first Olympic Games held in Korea since the Olympic Summer Games Seoul 1988. It is also the country’s first Winter Olympics.

Ahead of the upcoming Winter Olympics, which marks Coca-Cola’s 90th anniversary as the sponsor of the global event, the company held a promotion recruiting torchbearers between March and May this year.

When the finalists are announced by the organizing committee, they will be participating in the relay along with Coca-Cola starting November, the company said.

Through Coca-Cola, about 24,000 torchbearers have participated in the Olympics over the 25 years between the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the company said.

The company’s sports marketing dates back to the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, when it handed out 1,000 boxes of the soft drink to US athletes free of charge.

South Korea will discuss with the United States deploying the “most powerful US tactical weapons” here, in response to North Korea’s sixth test of nuclear weapons, its chief security officer said Sunday.

Chung Eui-yong, President Moon Jae-in’s top security adviser, also said the country would push for the “strongest sanctions” against the defiant regime led by dictator Kim Jong-un in order to “completely” isolate it.

“President Moon Jae-in said the country would not allow North Korea to continue advancing its nuclear and missile technologies,” Chung said after an emergency meeting of the National Security Council.

The top security adviser did not elaborate, but the move comes amid a growing call here for nuclear rearmament.

The US withdrew its tactical nuclear weapons from the South in the early 1990s. President Moon has so far displayed commitment to upholding the principle of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.

At around 12:30 p.m. Sunday, Pyongyang conducted an underground nuclear test — its sixth and most powerful so far — creating an artificial quake of 5.7 magnitude, according to the South’s weather agency. The US, Chinese and Russian authorities put the seismic activity at a magnitude of 6.3. The North later claimed it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb to be delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile, which it recently claimed to have developed.

To beef up the South’s military capacity and the allies’ defense posture against the increasingly provocative North, the allies are likely to roll out this week four additional launchers for the US-led missile shield Terminal High Altitude Area Defense as well as US fighter jets.

Two batteries and a powerful X-band radar are already deployed and operational in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province. A typical THAAD battery consists of six launchers and a radar.

Before Sunday’s test, Seoul officials had revealed an ongoing discussion between the two sides for a possible rotational deployment of the US stealth jets F-22 and F-35B.

The allies are known to be discussing the deployment of US strategic assets on a quarterly basis at the US air base in Osan, Gyeonggi Province, or Kunsan Air Base in North Jeolla Province, they added.

The US has periodically sent strategic assets to South Korea, including B-1B bombers, as a show of force when North Korea’s provocative acts escalate.

“It is believed that the US is positive toward rotational deployment of F-22 and F-35B jets over Korea as it remains firm in countering North Korea’s provocations,” a government source said.

Chung said that he had two telephone conversations with his US counterpart H.R. McMaster before and after Seoul’s NSC meeting Sunday.

South Korea’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Jeong Kyeong-doo also spoke with his US counterpart Gen. Joseph Dunford in a phone conservation, during which they stressed the need for “effective military responses” to the provocation, aimed at demonstrating the allies’ force and resolve, according to Jeong’s office.

The incident occurred around 1.30pm at Block 336B, Anchorvale Crescent.

A neighbour spotted the girl on a ledge at the third-floor corridor, and took a video of it, Lianhe Wanbao reported on Monday.

The neighbour, Yusliena Zulkifli Smith, told Wanbao that she had been airing her laundry when she saw a woman squatting on the ledge along the corridor.

She said the woman was looking at the kitchen window of a unit on the second floor, and seemed to want to climb inside.

“I screamed and asked her what she was doing,” said Ms Yusliena. “She did not answer and instead placed her finger to her lips and asked me to keep quiet.”

Yusliena then rushed outside her home and went to the corridor to ask the woman what she was doing. The woman climbed back into the corridor and left, Ms Yusliena said.

She then called the police. Yusliena had posted a video of the incident on her Facebook page, but later took it down.

The police told The Straits Times on Monday that they were alerted to a case of intentional alarm at Block 336B, Anchorvale Crescent, on Sunday at 1.36pm.

“A 21-year-old woman was arrested in relation to the case,” said the police spokesman.

ST understands that she had wanted to go to her ex-boyfriend’s home, but he did not want her to, so she tried to climb down from the third floor to his home on the second floor. Police investigations are ongoing.