Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad raised the matter during his meeting with his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong on Monday.

“We raised some of the issues which in the past were regarded controversial. I state our stand on it and I think by and large he was quite accommodating.

“I think he listened to my views and I think he is much more open to discuss these things than before,” Dr Mahathir told Malaysian media here.

When asked if he was talking about the water issue, Dr Mahathir replied, “water and other issues.”

Asked if Singapore agreed for a revision, the Prime Minister said Singapore did not say that it did.

“But at least they appear to be willing to state their case and for us to state our case,” he said.

In June, Dr Mahathir said Malaysia would renegotiate the water supply agreement with Singapore, telling Bloomberg in an interview that the price of water sold is “ridiculous”.

Malaysia has always felt that the 1962 water agreement was lopsided while another agreement signed in 1961 lapsed in 2011.

The 1962 deal, which expires in 2061, gives Singapore 250 million gallons of raw water daily at three sen per 1,000 gallons. Malaysia buys back a portion of that, treated at 50 sen per 1,000 gallons.

Singapore has always maintained that Malaysia lost its right to review the price of raw water sold under the 1962 agreement in 1987.

Lim said this in response to Umno secretary-general Annuar Musa, who uploaded an image on his Twitter account of the Finance Minister with his eyes shut during a debate on Budget 2019.

“BN’s shadow finance minister is debating Budget 2019 and presenting the… alternative budget. The Minister of Finance is sleeping…,” Annuar said in the caption on Monday (Nov 12).

Lim denied this, saying he even managed to take down notes while resting his eyes and uploaded an image of the notes.

“My eyes were ‘kurang sihat’ (unwell) just like in the previous Parliament session, but I still attended to hear the Opposition representative (Rembau MP) Khairy Jamaluddin’s speech,” he tweeted.

In 2016, former Kedah mentri besar Ahmad Bashah Md Hanipah was also involved in a “sleeping” controversy, when a video of him with his eyes closed at a palace function went viral on social media.

Ahmad Bashah denied he was sleeping, saying that he had closed his eyes to “better appreciate the speech”.

Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader, has toured Asia in recent months beating the drum for her country’s economy, which the World Bank forecasts to grow at seven percent next year.

A tangle of investment laws, a weakening currency, high inflation, widespread corruption and conflict have chipped away at an economy that was hoped to take off following the start of civilian government in 2016 after decades of junta rule.

At the same time Suu Kyi’s image as an upholder of human rights, and that of her country, has been decimated by the Rohingya crisis.

Speaking at a business forum in Singapore ahead of a regional summit, she did not address the crisis which has sent hundreds of thousands of the Muslim minority into Bangladesh and extinguished optimism in some corners over Myanmar’s future.

Rumblings of the potential re-imposition of some western sanctions over the treatment of the Rohingya have also darkened the economic outlook for the country.

But Suu Kyi was at pains to say Myanmar was still open for business.

Myanmar is “Southeast Asia’s final frontier market… we have land, we have (a) good young working population, we have unexplored resources,” she said.

She warned investors not to expect an open season on the country’s abundant natural resources which include precious stones, vast tracts of arable land and waterways.

“We have to invest for the sake of social cohesion,” and not “purely for economic gain,” she said, referencing Myanmar’s resource-rich but conflict riddled borderlands.

Chinese mega-projects have come under fire inside Myanmar with accusations of land grabs, extractive practices and debt loading onto the government.

Protests against Chinese projects are common.

Last week Myanmar successfully scaled down a China-backed port project from $10 billion to $1.3 billion at the strategically important Kyaukphyu area of Rakhine state, where the Rohingya were driven from last year.

Suu Kyi said Myanmar needs the help of investors, in particular from Asia, to pull itself forwards after years of ulcerous junta rule and urged businesses to gamble on an “adventure” in the country.

Myanmar may face pressure over its handling of the Rohingya crisis later in the week as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit begins.

The fighter jet crashed some 250 kilometers (156 miles) east-southeast of Okinawa’s capital city Naha at around 11:45 am (0245 GMT), said Osamu Kosakai, spokesman for the ministry’s Okinawa defense bureau.

Its two crew members ejected and were rescued by a US military helicopter, he told AFP, adding the accident was “not life-threatening”.

The fighter jet crashed “due to engine trouble,” he said.

Japan’s coastguard “dispatched an aircraft to the waters to see if there is any debris or floating oil”, a coastguard spokesman told AFP.

Okinawa accounts for less than one percent of Japan’s total land area, but hosts more than half of the approximately 47,000 American military personnel stationed in Japan.

For decades, Okinawa residents have asked for some of the bases to be moved, with resentment growing after a string of accidents and crimes committed by US military personnel and base workers.

Pins and needles were found stuck into the fruit in September, leading supermarkets to pull boxes from shelves across Australia and New Zealand and forcing farmers to dump crops.

The sabotage and a rash of suspected hoaxes and copycat attacks also prompted the national government to raise criminal penalties for fruit tampering.

My Ut Trinh, 50, who worked at one of the strawberry farms where the tampered produce was grown, was arrested and charged with seven counts of contaminating goods by Queensland state police on Sunday.

She faced court on Monday and bail was denied after prosecutors said she could suffer retribution for her alleged actions, The Australian reported.

The court was told she was motivated by spite and revenge when she allegedly inserted the needles into the berries in early September, the newspaper added.

Earlier, police spoke of the challenges investigators faced as they tried to figure out the source of the contamination.

“This has probably been one of the most trying investigations that I’ve been part of,” Detective Superintendent Jon Wacker told reporters in Brisbane.

Wacker said Trinh, an Australian citizen, “was a supervisor at a farm”, with Queensland’s Courier Mail identifying her employer as the Berrylicious and Berry Obsession farm — one of the growers at the heart of the scare.

Wacker said investigators had “strong evidence” including DNA.

He said police collected 230 reports nationwide of strawberry contamination affecting 68 brands, most within his state, with the majority involving sewing needles.

Some cases were also found to be “a hoax or a false complaint”, Wacker added. Police had earlier questioned at least two minors over suspected hoaxes.

The Queensland Strawberry Growers Association welcomed the arrest, but noted the high number of unresolved cases, adding that the seven counts in Trinh’s chargesheet suggested that most of the 230 reports were either copycat actions or hoaxes.

“It was a crisis driven by social media and the only real victims were the strawberry growers, and to some extent other Australian fruit growers and exporters,” the association said in a statement.

According to Bernama,  the man identified as Teh, 26, said he was really scared and decided to stay put by sitting on his Honda Civic roof before rescuers came.

“I did not expect the trapped pool of water to be so dangerous as there was a lorry in front of me…suddenly water started seeping into my car so I quickly wound down my window and crawled out to safety.

“I was later saved by rescuers who arrived at the location,” he said when contacted by Bernama.

The incident caused severe damage to Teh’s one-year-old car after it was completely submerged in the tunnel.

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Meanwhile, Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department in a statement said the department received a distress call at 5.56pm and seven personnel from the Jalan Tun Razak station rushed to the location.

“Upon arriving at the scene, we found five vehicles trapped in the tunnel and firemen brought all victims to a safe location,” the statement said.

According to the statement, the rescue operations took about 10 minutes and the five men were unhurt.

Leaders including Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and US Vice President Mike Pence are meeting this week in the city-state against the backdrop of a months-long trade dispute between Beijing and Washington.

Some of those attending are expected to announce major progress on a massive China-backed trade deal that excludes the US, in a rebuke to President Donald Trump’s increasingly unilateralist approach to international commerce.

Trump is skipping the annual summit — which was regularly attended by his predecessor Barack Obama — in a sign of how far he has withdrawn from attempts to shape the global rules of trade and raising new questions about Washington’s commitment to Asia.

Addressing a business forum ahead of this week’s main meetings, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called for Southeast Asian companies to invest more in each others’ markets and be more open to foreign competition.

“The more integrated and open our markets are, and the more conducive our rules and business environments to foreign investment, the larger the pie will grow, and the more we will all benefit,” he said.

The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) “has great potential, but fully realising it depends on whether we choose to become more integrated, and work resolutely towards this goal in a world where multilateralism is fraying under political pressures”.

The US-China trade dispute has seen Trump slap higher tariffs on roughly half of Chinese imports, and Beijing retaliate with its own levies.

The standoff is having an impact far beyond the world’s top two economies, and leaders at the four days of meetings will be keen to voice their grievances to Pence, who is participating in Trump’s place, and Li.

Many of those attending are expected to send a message in support of free trade by announcing major progress on the China-backed deal, the 16-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

With the US having pulled out of rival pact the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the RCEP is now the world’s biggest trade deal.

The pact — which is less ambitious than the TPP in areas such as employment and environmental protection — groups the 10 ASEAN members plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Firefighters took advantage of a brief calm overnight to make headway against the multiple blazes, but conditions were hellish on Sunday, with winds forecast to gust as high as 60 miles (100 kilometers) an hour, and humidity low.

In fire zones north and south, acrid smoke blanketed the sky for miles, the sun barely visible. On the ground, cars caught in the blaze were reduced to mangled metal carcasses, while power lines were gnawed by the flames.

The largest inferno — the so-called “Camp Fire” in the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains — has destroyed 6,700 homes, business and other buildings in the town of Paradise, effectively wiping it off the map.

At least 25 people have lost their lives in and around the community of 27,000, according to an official count by authorities.

In Magalia, north of Paradise, workers from a local mortuary team recover a body on Sunday, which was put into a blue bag and loaded into a hearse.

And in the hills above the nearby Concow area, a recovery team discovered the body of another person near several cars on a dirt road running alongside a cannabis farm.

The blaze is now tied with the 1991 “Tunnel Fire” as the second-deadliest fire to hit the state. The deadliest was the “Griffith Park Fire” in 1933, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

At the southern end of the state, where the “Woolsey Fire” is threatening mansions and mobile homes alike in the coastal celebrity redoubt of Malibu, the death toll has been limited to two victims found in a vehicle on a private driveway.

Los Angeles County Fire chief Daryl Osby told reporters of his gratitude to firefighters “who’ve done all they could do save tens of thousands of people’s lives and thousands of people’s homes.”

‘ New abnormal ‘

Rescuers spent hours on Saturday collecting bodies around Paradise and placing them in a black hearse. Body parts were transported by bucket, while intact remains were carried in body bags.

At the Holly Hills Mobile Estate the mobile homes had been reduced to smoldering piles of debris. Yellow police tape delineated spots that were tagged “Doe C” and “Doe D,” a grim marker of the bodies that had recently been removed.

Locals fled the danger, but police told AFP some farmers returned to check on their cattle.

Fanned by strong winds, the “Camp Fire” has so far scorched 111,000 acres (45,000 hectares) and is 25 percent contained, Cal Fire said. So far, three of the more than 4,000 firefighters deployed have been injured.

They estimate they will need three weeks to fully contain the blaze.

Evacuation orders have been issued to more than 250,000 people across California, with authorities urging residents not to ignore warnings to flee.

“This is not the new normal, this is the new abnormal. And this new abnormal will continue, certainly in the next 10 to 15 to 20 years,” California Governor Jerry Brown told a news conference on Sunday.

“Unfortunately, the best science is telling us that the dryness, warmth, drought, all those things, they’re gonna intensify,” he said, referring to conditions conducive to fires.

‘Dangerously wrong’

Almost 6,000 miles away, President Donald Trump, in France for World War I commemorations, drew fierce criticism for an unsympathetic reaction to the devastation.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted, threatening to withdraw federal support.

Brian Rice, the head of the California Professional Firefighters, slammed the tweet as “ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines.”

He said the president’s claim that forest policies were mismanaged “is dangerously wrong.”

The tweet also drew political criticism. Republican Senator Cory Gardner told ABC News on Sunday: “I don’t think it’s appropriate to threaten funding.

“That’s not going to happen. Funding will be available. It always is available to our people wherever they are, whatever disaster they are facing.”

Malibu mansions in flames

In southern California, the “Woolsey Fire” engulfed parts of Thousand Oaks, where the community is still shell-shocked after a Marine Corps veteran shot dead 12 people in a country music bar on Wednesday.

It has consumed around 83,000 acres, destroyed at least 177 buildings and was ten percent contained, Cal Fire said Sunday.

The blaze reached the Paramount Ranch, destroying sets used for hundreds of productions including HBO’S sci-fi western “Westworld,” network officials said.

Keegan Gibbs, 33, was crushed to find his childhood Malibu home had been consumed by flames.

“Malibu is a really small community and gets a bad rap for being this kind of elitist, snobby place, and it’s exactly the opposite,” Gibbs told The Los Angeles Times.