A mountain of legal challenges lies ahead of Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak (pic) as authorities bring fresh charges against the former prime minister over the multibillion-ringgit 1Malaysia Develop­ment Bhd (1MDB) scandal.

Najib, who is already facing criminal breach of trust, bribery and money-laundering charges, is expected to face dozens more at the Kuala Lumpur Sessions Court today in connection with the deposit of RM2.6bil of 1MDB funds into his personal account.

This will be the third time that Najib is brought to court, the first being in July when he claimed trial to three charges of criminal breach of trust, and a fourth charge of receiving bribery of RM42mil.

Last month, Najib was slapped with three charges of money laundering.

It is learnt that at least four charges under the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Act will be brought against the former prime minister today.

Sources familiar with the case said Najib is also expected to face “nothing less” than 20 charges under the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001.

Highly placed sources in the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Com­mission (MACC) said that as at 6pm yesterday, prosecutors were still “counting the charges”.

“If the said amount is RM2.6bil, you can imagine the number of charges he will face,” a source told The Star.

Sixty-five-year-old Najb arrived at the MACC headquarters at 3pm after graft investigators asked him to be present to record his statement.

He came accompanied by lawyers, officers and his son Nor Ashman Razak.

An hour into the interrogation at 4.13pm, authorities decided to arrest him.

MACC deputy chief commissioner (operations) Datuk Seri Azam Baki confirmed Najib’s arrest and that he would be held for the night.

This is not the first time Najib has spent the night in MACC’s lockup – investigators also held him for a night when they first brought him to court back in July.

Asked why it was necessary to detain the former prime minister, the source said officers need to record his statement in preparation for the next day’s court proceedings.

“It will take some time, given the nature of the case. That’s why we have to detain him,” said the same source.

Before he is brought to court, Najib will be making a stop at Bukit Aman where the police will take his statement.

His children Nooryana Najwa and Nor Ashman had made poignant postings on their Instagram accounts about their father’s arrest.

Nooryana, who is in Boston, said on Instagram that it pained her that she was on the other side of the world and not with her father ­during this trying time.

“But you always insisted that ­giving up Harvard was out of the question, no matter how difficult the circumstances,” she wrote.

She also wrote: “Daddy, before I slept, I sent you this picture of me and Adam (her son) wishing you all the best for your MACC appointment. You didn’t read or reply my message and then Ashman called to say that they have arrested and detained you, again.”

Nooryana ended her posting by writing: “Praying for you and the rule of law in our country, Daddy.”

Nor Ashman wrote on Instagram: “As I sit here outside your place of detainment, I am filled with trepidation. I can’t imagine the kind of tribulation that you are facing in there.

“Praying that you are given a fair treatment and for Malaysia’s rule of law to be upheld. Can’t wait to bring you to your favourite yong tau foo place when you are released, Daddy.”

The conferenc will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong hotel on October 29.

China will join hands with Cambodia to further the two countries’ traditional friendship and promote their comprehensive strategic and co­operative partnership to a new height, President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday.

He made the remark when he and his wife, Peng Liyuan, visited Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihamoni and Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk, who are staying in Beijing for a rest.

Xi said the China-Cambodia friendship, forged and cultivated by the older generation of Chinese leaders and the late King Norodom Sihanouk, is increasingly booming with vitality.

With the Mid-Autumn Festival falling on Monday, Xi wished King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath a happy holiday and a long life with good health, saying they have made significant contributions to developing bilateral ties.

China treasures the special friendship with the Cambodian royal family, he said, noting that he has met with King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath every year since 2016 as if it were a gathering of family members.

Xi said he and the king have reached important consensus on inheriting and promoting China-Cambodia traditional friendship, which has pushed bilateral relations into its best period in history.

The high-level figures as well as people of the two countries should continue to visit each other frequently like relatives, he said.

The president also expressed his congratulations on the success of Cambodia’s general election, wishing the country greater progress in building the nation under the new government headed by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath thanked Xi and Peng for their friendly affection, saying their meetings always feel like they are among family members.

The Cambodian people are thankful for China’s firm support and precious assistance over the long term, and they appreciate the importance Xi attached to developing Cambodia-China relations, they said.

They hailed Xi’s visit to the country in 2016 as a historic one that elevated bilateral ties to a new height.

The Cambodian royal family will inherit the friendship with China forged by late King Norodom Sihanouk, and continue to actively promote new progress to be achieved in the comprehensive strategic cooperation between Cambodia and China, they added.

Guterres welcomed the announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a summit with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang.

“The commitments reflected in the joint statement include important military confidence-building measures and a commitment by the DPRK to dismantle missile engine testing infrastructure in the presence of experts from related countries,” Guterres said in a statement.

“Now it is time for concrete action.”

When North Korea dismantled a nuclear test site in May, Guterres complained that no international experts had been on hand to witness the closure.

North Korea also expressed readiness to close its Yongbyon nuclear plant, which is key to its weapons program, if Washington takes “corresponding measures.”

Guterres offered UN help to advance efforts to fully rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons and called for unity among global powers.

The breakthrough at the Pyongyang summit came amid preparations for next week’s annual gathering at the United Nations of world leaders, during which North Korea will loom large.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has invited North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong ho for talks in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting.

Pompeo said the talks in New York and meetings in Vienna will be the beginning of negotiations on the denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by 2021.

Pompeo will chair a Security Council meeting next week on North Korea to discuss US diplomatic efforts that have undergone a major shift in tone from last year.

At last year’s UN gathering, President Donald Trump threatened to totally destroy North Korea and derided Kim as “little rocket man.”

The Trump administration is facing calls from Russia and China to consider easing tough economic sanctions imposed on North Korea to create an incentive for Pyongyang to move forward.

The United States maintains that sanctions must remain in place until North Korea has fully dismantled its weapons programs.

“We are setting up a war room in Menlo Park for the Brazil and US elections,” Facebook elections and civic engagement director Samidh Chakrabarti said during a conference call.

“It is going to serve as a command center so we can make real-time decisions as needed.”

He declined to say when the “war room” — currently a conference room with a paper sign taped to the door — would be in operation.

Teams at Facebook have been honing responses to potential scenarios such as floods of bogus news or campaigns to trick people into falsely thinking they can cast ballots by text message, according to executives.

“Preventing election interference on Facebook has been one of the biggest cross-team efforts the company has seen,” Chakrabarti said.

The conference call was the latest briefing by Facebook regarding efforts to prevent the kinds of voter manipulation or outright deception that took place ahead of the 2016 election the brought US President Donald Trump to office.

Facebook is better prepared to defend against efforts to manipulate the platform to influence elections and has recently thwarted foreign influence campaigns targeting several countries, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said last week in a post on the social network.

“We’ve identified and removed fake accounts ahead of elections in France, Germany, Alabama, Mexico and Brazil,” Zuckerberg said.

‘Better prepared’ for attacks

“We’ve found and taken down foreign influence campaigns from Russia and Iran attempting to interfere in the US, UK, Middle East, and elsewhere — as well as groups in Mexico and Brazil that have been active in their own country.”

Zuckerberg repeated his admission that Facebook was ill-prepared for the vast influence efforts on social media in the 2016 US election but added that “today, Facebook is better prepared for these kinds of attacks.”

Facebook has started showing who is behind election-related online ads, and have shut down accounts involved in coordinated stealth influence campaigns.

With the help of artificial intelligence software, Facebook blocked nearly 1.3 billion fake accounts between March and October of last year, according to Chakrabarti.

“We are working hard to amplify the good and mitigate the bad,” news feed director Greg Marra said on the call.

As elections near, Facebook will also encourage civic involvement and voter registration, according to global politics and government outreach director Katie Harbath.

Facebook has partnered with non-profit organizations to bolster election integrity efforts outside the US and has been meeting with other technology companies to coordinate sharing information about election meddling efforts spanning social media platforms, according to Harbath.

Facebook said it has also started working with political campaigns to improve staff online security practices, such as requiring more than just a password to access an account.

    In her book, “Full Disclosure,” Daniels also provides a graphic description of Trump’s genitalia, including a reference to a toadstool-shaped character on the Mario Kart videogame, the British newspaper said.

The Guardian said it had obtained a copy of the book ahead of its publication on October 2, a month ahead of the key US midterm elections.

Trump has denied the affair but his lawyer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations linked to $130,000 in “hush money” he paid Daniels shortly before the November 2016 presidential election.

Daniels claims to have had a sexual liason with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006, around the time that the reality television star’s wife, Melania, had given birth to their son Barron.

In the book, she describes seeing Trump for the first time at the golf tournament.

“He had a red cap, a Trump crest as a placeholder for the MAGA slogan not one of us could see coming,” Daniels writes.

She said they had sex in Trump’s penthouse after one of his bodyguards invited her to have dinner with the real estate tycoon.

“It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion,” she writes.

In the book, Daniels also recounts her mounting disbelief in 2016 as Trump closes in on the Republican presidential nomination, The Guardian said.

“It will never happen, I would say,” Daniel writes. “He doesn’t even want to be president.”

Daniels said she remained in touch with Trump over the next year in the hope he would get her on his reality television show, The Apprentice.

She said Trump even suggested that he would allow her to cheat to remain on the show for more episodes.

“He was going to have me cheat, and it was 100 percent his idea,” the Guardian quoted her as saying in the book.

Michael Avenatti, Daniels’ lawyer, tweeted following the Guardian report that the “most important thing about (the book) is not the description of her sex with Mr. Trump.”

“It is instead her description of her life and role as a modern woman unafraid to speak truth to power,” Avenatti said.

Ngar Min Swe was sentenced for sedition on Tuesday, Yangon’s Western District Court spokesman Htay Aung told AFP.

“He was convicted… for writing abusive posts on Facebook against State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, making people get the wrong impression of her,” Htay Aung said.

Myanmar faces widespread condemnation for infringing on freedom of expression following the jailing earlier this month of two Reuters journalists who reported on the Rohingya crisis.

Ngar Min Swe worked as a columnist under the previous military-backed government. He has spent the years since Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party rose to power in 2016 penning screeds against her and the party.

He was arrested on July 12, the same day he posted about Suu Kyi receiving a kiss on the cheek from US President Barack Obama during his state visit in 2013.

This innocuous gesture of greeting came in for criticism from a conservative Myanmar public, especially supporters of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party — like Ngar Min Swe, who took to social media to make sexist inferences about the state counsellor.

    Allegations that Najib and his cronies looted huge sums from the investment vehicle were a major factor in the shock defeat of his long-ruling coalition in elections in May, at the hands of a reformist alliance headed by Mahathir Mohamad.

Mahathir, 93, in his second stint as premier after coming out of retirement to take on his ex-protege Najib, has reopened probes into 1MDB that were shut down by the former government, and vowed to bring Najib to justice.

Since losing power, Najib has already been arrested and hit with seven charges related to claims he pocketed some $10 million from a former unit of 1MDB.

However his arrest Wednesday was more significant as it related to a central allegation in the long-running scandal — that huge sums from the fund flowed into his bank accounts before a hotly contested election in 2013.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission said in a statement that it had detained Najib as part of its investigations into the fund and “the entry of 2.6 billion ringgit ($628 million) into his personal account”.

Najib will appear in court Thursday afternoon where he faces several charges related to abuse of power, the anti-corruption commission said.

James Chin, a Malaysia expert from the University of Tasmania, said Najib’s current arrest was “much more significant” than his previous one.

“I think the Malaysian people will be very, very happy. There were complaints that the government was not moving fast enough on 1MDB,” he told AFP.

– Rotten ruling elite –

When reports about the bank transfers surfaced in 2015, they represented a turning point in the 1MDB scandal and dramatically raised pressure on Najib and his inner circle.

The attorney-general later cleared Najib of any wrongdoing, saying the money was a personal donation from the Saudi royal family, and closed down domestic investigations.

But allegations related to wrongdoing at 1MDB continued to multiply and the leader lurched sharply to the right.

He sacked critics in government, jailed political opponents and introduced increasingly authoritarian laws that analysts said were aimed at silencing any criticism to his rule.

Analysts thought Najib’s Barisan Nasional coalition, which had ruled Malaysia uninterrupted since independence from Britain in 1957, could never be beaten. But Mahathir capitalised on anger at the 1MDB scandal, and disillusionment at race-based politics in the multi-ethnic country, to push them from power.

Najib, his family and cronies were accused of using money stolen from 1MDB to buy everything from high-end real estate in the United States to pricey artworks. He and his luxury-loving wife Rosman Mansor became figures of hatred.

The US Department of Justice, which is seeking to recover items allegedly bought with stolen 1MDB cash in America, estimates that $4.5 billion in total was looted from the fund.

Following Najib’s election loss, police seized a vast trove of items — including expensive handbags and jewellery — from properties linked to him with an estimated value of up to $273 million.

Investigations into 1MDB have been moving swiftly. Last month a luxury yacht allegedly bought by a playboy financier with a central role in the scandal was returned to Malaysia after being handed over by Indonesia, which impounded it following a DoJ request.

Visiting Vietnam in March, he enjoyed pho at a noodle house. In Beijing last year, he had breakfast local style: Chinese-style deep-fried doughnuts and soymilk at a local eatery.

Moon continues his so-called “local restaurant diplomacy”– an effort to connect with the people — in Pyongyang.

Inside Pyongyang`s Taedong River Seafood Restaurant, where South Korean President Moon Jae-in is set to have dinner on Wednesday evening. (Yonhap)

On Wednesday evening, Moon is set to dine at a seafood restaurant in the North Korean capital, popular among Pyongyang residents.

Cheong Wa Dae said it had specifically asked Pyongyang to pick a place that is popular among locals.

The restaurant, Taedong River Seafood Restaurant, is a new establishment that opened July 30. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly selected the site of the seafood restaurant, and even named it. Kim and his wife, Ri Sol-ju, also visited the restaurant before its official opening to encourage the staff.

The large restaurant, located near Pyongyang’s Taedong River, is a boat-shaped elongated structure. It features a large area with shallow pools where customers can net salmon, rainbow trout and crabs to be taken away or have them prepared at the restaurant.

Apparently one of the most-talked about restaurants in Pyongyang today, it welcomes both local and foreign customers. It is also a favorite place for work or family gatherings, as it offers separate rooms of different sizes for those who want to dine in private.

Moon is to dine in a room named “Bom-maji” — which roughly translates to “beginning of spring” — on Wednesday evening. Pyongyang residents who wish to dine in the same room will be able to do so, Cheong Wa Dae said.

It is unclear whether Moon’s North Korean counterpart, Kim, will be joining him for dinner.

Earlier Wednesday, Pyongyang agreed to take additional steps toward making the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons during the inter-Korean summit, in an apparent move to restart its denuclearization talks with the US.

Kim also pledged to visit Seoul “in the near future” on Wednesday.

If the trip takes place, Kim will be the first North Korean leader to visit Seoul since the peninsula was divided at the end of World War II in 1945.

The ASCCE will help develop the cybersecurity capabilities of ASEAN member states, and it will fulfill three principal functions, including cyber think-tank and training center, Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) center and cyber range training center.

Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information S Iswaran said the center will be launched in 2019

Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information S Iswaran said the center will be launched in 2019, as an extension of the ASEAN Cyber Capacity Programme (ACCP).

ALSO READ: S’pore calls for new partnerships to tackle security risks

He said in his speech at the ASEAN Ministerial Conference on Cybersecurity on Wednesday that all ASEAN member states, dialogue partners and relevant stakeholders including industry partners and international organizations are welcome to participate in the ASCCE.

“To date, Australia, Canada, the European Union, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (Britain) and the United States have indicated keen interest to work with us to develop and deliver programs under the ASCCE,” he added.

Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean announced the set-up of the ASCCE on Tuesday at the third Singapore International Cyber Week. He said through the ASCCE, ASEAN members can engage more closely with their international partners, in particular the ASEAN Dialogue Partners.

Teo also said the ASCCE will complement and strengthen existing cybersecurity cooperation initiatives, including the ASEAN-Japan Cybersecurity Capacity Building Centre in Thailand.

READ MORE: Southeast Asian cybersecurity center opens in Thailand