Patrick Suckling, Australia’s Ambassador for the Environment, said last Friday that Thailand and Australia were collaborating on ways to mitigate climate change and other environmental issues. Suckling was in Bangkok on a three-day visit to discuss the cooperation between the two nation on climate change and their approach to sustainability and broader environmental issues with Thai government agencies, the business sector and civil society organisations.

Suckling and his team met Natural Resources and Environment Minister General Surasak Karnjanarat, who said the problems of marine plastic debris and severe flooding and drought caused by the changing climate were the main discussion topics.

“Climate change makes pro-environment actions more important than ever, because communities across the world are facing threats and challenges of climate change. It is no different in Australia,” Suckling said.

“A big issue such as climate change is not something only one country can fix, but it has to be done through global actions. The Paris Agreement is a historic agreement where the world decided to come together to address the risks posed by climate change.”

He said they were collaborating with Thailand to support the country’s progress in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement.

They were now working on the development of Greenhouse Gas Measurement Reporting and Verification system to enhance the accuracy of greenhouse gas emission measurements.

“We are also working with other partners from around the world, |from country-to-country levels to partnerships with international |organisations, to support their ability to build climate resilience and |help them pursue their greenhouse |gas reduction targets,” he said.

Suckling said these constructive exchanges can empower nations to improve their efforts to implement the Paris Agreement.

Under the greenhouse gas reduction targets in the Paris Agreement, Thailand has pledged to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emission by 25 per cent by 2030, while Australia has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 per cent by 2030.

Its Embassy in Bangkok said in a press release that a new three-year post-study open work visa for bachelor-level and postgraduate students would provide a streamlined path for international students to pursue poststudy work opportunities in New Zealand.

Education New Zealand’s chief executive Grant McPherson, said: “We want international students coming to New Zealand to be motivated by a great education and a great experience. Generous post-study pathways to residence remain available for those with the skills and qualifications New Zealand needs.”

The changes support a newly launched International Education Strategy 20182030, strengthening New Zealand’s position as a world-leading international education destination.

“The International Education Strategy has three goals: delivering an excellent education and student experience; achieving sustainable growth; and developing global citizens.

“It’s grounded in a high performing, sustainable education system that equips students with the skills needed to meet the challenges of the 21st century,” said McPherson.

New Zealand has been ranked as the best education system in the world in preparing students for the future, by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Educating for the Future Index.

Other announcements included a refreshed Education New Zealand Recognised Agency programme.

“About half of the international students in New Zealand use an education agency in some way, and we hope that closer engagement with agencies will continue to enrich the experience for students,” said McPherson.

An uptodate list of Recognised Agencies will be published on the Study in New Zealand website from November 1.

The head of the Genoa brach of emergency response Francesco Bermano gave that estimation to a number of Italian outlets, and it was then confirmed to AFP by his secretary.

The same source told AFP that four seriously injured people had been taken to hospital.

A section of a viaduct on the A10 motorway collapsed on Tuesday in Genoa, Italian firefighters said, with cars and trucks trapped among the rubble.

Television images showed the viaduct in the mist with a huge chunk missing, with Italian media reporting that 200 metres of the “Morandi” bridge had fallen away.

The Italian fire service said that the viaduct, located in an industrial area in the west of the city, collapsed at around 1200 (1000 GMT).

A fire service spokesperson told AFP that the bridge had mostly fallen on rail tracks 100 metres (yards) below and that “cars and trucks” had fallen with the rubble.

No casualties have yet been reported.

Genoa is located between the sea and the mountains of northwestern Italy. Its rugged terrain means that motorways that run through the city and the surrounding area are characterised by long viaducts and tunnels.

Police said they had arrested the driver, in his 20s, and were holding him on suspicion of terrorist offences.

“At this stage, we are treating this as a terrorist incident,” said Scotland Yard, adding that none of the injuries are believed to be “life-threatening”.

The silver Ford Fiesta collided with a number of cyclists and pedestrians, before crashing into barriers outside the Houses of Parliament at 07:37 (06:36 GMT), said police.

Armed officers swooped in to arrest the driver, removing him from the vehicle at gunpoint.

Later images showed police holding the man, dressed in jeans and a black puffer jacket, in handcuffs as roads and Underground stations around parliament were sealed off.

“The driver of the car, a man in his late 20s… was arrested on suspicion of terrorist offences,” said police.

“There was nobody else in the vehicle, which remains at the scene and is being searched. No weapons have been recovered at this stage.

“A number of people were injured,” added police.

London Ambulance said they had treated two people at the scene for non-serious injuries and taken them to hospital.

Prime Minister Theresa May tweeted that her “thoughts are with those injured in the incident in Westminster and my thanks to the emergency services for their immediate and courageous response.”

Witness Ewalina Ochab told the Press Association that the incident “looked intentional”.

“I was walking on the other side. I heard some noise and someone screamed,” she said.

“I turned around and I saw a silver car driving very fast close to the railings, maybe even on the pavement.

“I think it looked intentional — the car drove at speed and towards the barriers.”

– ‘Loud bang’ –

Eyewitness Jason Williams, 45, also said that the incident looked deliberate.

“I saw a car going at high speed towards Parliament. It hit a bollard,” he told the Press Association.

“It didn’t look like an accident. How do you do that by accident? It was a loud bang.”

Westminster was the scene of a terror attack last year, when Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old British convert to Islam, drove a car at pedestrians on a bridge over the River Thames, before fatally stabbing a policeman on guard outside parliament.

The attack left five people dead and around 50 injured, and only ended when police shot Masood dead.

Britain endured a tumultuous period following the March 22 rampage, with four further terror attacks within months.

Twenty-two people — including children — were killed when lone suicide attacker Salman Abedi detonated an explosive device at Manchester Arena following a performance by US singer Ariana Grande on May 22.

Eight people were killed on June 3 when a van ploughed into people on London Bridge before the three attackers carried out a knife rampage in Borough Market.

One man died and several others were injured when far-right extremist Darren Osborne rammed his van into Muslim worshippers in north London on June 19.

And 51 people were injured when Ahmed Hassan, 18, planted an explosive device, that partially exploded on an Underground train.

    The 36-year-old actress, model, and producer has been a household name in China for years and tasted Hollywood success with a role in the 2014 blockbuster “X-Men: Days of Future Past.”

But Fan, usually active on social media, has gone dark online and has reportedly not been seen in public for weeks.

“Will Fan Bingbing go to prison?” asked one of hundreds of thousands of recent postings about her on China’s popular Twitter-like Weibo platform, while others speculated she had been banned from movies or was under house arrest.

Fan’s troubles began in May when a former presenter for state-run China Central Television (CCTV), Cui Yongyuan, posted purported contracts online that suggested she had received under-the-table payments.

The documents Cui posted suggested Fan was officially paid 10 million yuan ($1.45 million) for a project while unofficially receiving an additional 50 million yuan — all for four days of work.

So-called “yin and yang” dual contract arrangements — with one contract for income declared to tax authorities while the other is kept secret — are reported to be used in China to evade taxes.

After the documents posted by Cui went viral, the national tax administration announced it had instructed authorities in eastern Jiangsu province to investigate alleged use of such dual contracts in the entertainment industry.

Fan was not mentioned by name but she has businesses registered in Jiangsu.

 – ‘Slander’ –

Exorbitant pay for Chinese film and television stars has been a subject of online debate for years, and Fan led Forbes magazine’s list of top-earning Chinese celebrities in 2017 with income of 300 million yuan.

A statement released by Fan’s studio said she was the victim of “slander”, but did not dispute the authenticity of the documents Cui released.

The actress has gone unusually quiet on social media with no original postings to her personal Weibo account since late May.

State news agency Xinhua reported in late June that five Chinese government agencies, including the tax authority and the film and broadcast regulator, would crack down on excessive pay and tax evasion in entertainment.

The trend had pushed up production costs and encouraged youths “to blindly pursue stardom”, the agency said.

It also re-affirmed guidelines released last year capping pay for those appearing in movies, television shows, and online programmes to 40 percent of production costs and pay for lead actors to no more than 70 percent of the budget for performers.

Nearly a dozen Chinese film producers and video sites last week announced they also would boycott “unreasonable” pay for actors.

Fan is one of five leading international actresses cast in the forthcoming Hollywood spy thriller “355”, alongside Jessica Chastain and Penelope Cruz.

Believed to be the highest in Southeast Asia, the mountain stands at an estimated 5,881 metres (19,294 feet) in the northern tip of Myanmar near the border with China and India, a Himalayan cap of the largely tropical nation.

The formidable route to the top starts with a gruelling 240-kilometre (150-mile) slog by foot through Kachin state’s dense jungle, filled with venomous snakes and bloodsucking leeches.

But it is the challenging climb itself that has thwarted nearly all of the handful of attempts to reach the summit, one of which resulted in a deadly rescue attempt.

“The difficulty level of the mountain is extreme,” Zaw Zin Khine, 32, told AFP during a break from a training session on a limestone karst cliff in eastern Karen state.

The team will have to negotiate precipitous faces of loose scree, frequent avalanches and a choice between ridges spiked with towers of rock and shrouded in snow and ice.

“There is a risk we won’t come back alive,” the climber added.

He and his two partners Pyae Phyo Aung, 36, and Aung Khaing Myint, 32, aspire to make history as the first all-Myanmar team to summit the mountain.

They also hope to settle a decades-long dispute over whether Hkakabo Razi or the nearby Gamlang Razi — also in Myanmar — claims the honour as the region’s highest.

‘Makes Everest look easy’

The three climbers, now waiting for the right window in the weather to start their expedition, have been in intensive training for months, including a trip to Nepal and sessions in a Yangon gym, wearing masks to simulate low-oxygen levels at altitude.

Team member Pyae Phyo Aung is one of only two people from Myanmar to have summited Mount Everest but he says Hkakabo Razi’s isolation and lack of infrastructure makes it far more perilous.

“Even if you’re 70 years old, you can get to the top of Everest if you have the money to pay people to pull you up,” he says.

“They maintain the routes from the base camp to the summit, have lots of porters and it’s easy to find people by air if they’re missing. That’s not the case on Hkakabo Razi.”

The first known attempt to scale the mountain was by British explorer and botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward in 1936.

In his book “Burma’s Icy Mountains”, he describes how the peak “utterly defeated” him, forcing him to turn back a vertical kilometre below the top.

It took another 60 years before Japanese mountaineer Takashi Ozaki and his Myanmar climbing partner Nyima Gyaltsen prevailed on their third attempt.

Ozaki, the first-ever climber to successfully tackle Mount Everest’s north face, reportedly described the peak as “one of the most difficult and dangerous mountains in the world”.

Two separate expeditions in 2014 both met with costly failure.

One local Myanmar team never returned, a tragedy magnified when a rescue helicopter crashed, killing one pilot.

The other ill-fated ascent is the subject of a National Geographic documentary.

The expedition ground to an icy halt on what team member Emily Harrington remembers as a “nightmare ridge” that dropped off for hundreds of feet on either side, leaving them “depleted on all fronts”.

“We kinda assumed it would be like Nepal and Pakistan where the culture is centred around the mountains,” the 31-year-old told AFP from California.

“But it’s not. They’re not used to people coming here to trek so we had to take more on ourselves.”

– ‘Listen to the mountain’ –

This year’s expedition organisers are preparing for anything.

Tycoon Tay Za, who was behind both the 2014 Myanmar team’s failed attempt and the successful ascent of Everest, is also bankrolling this venture, which is expected to take around two months.

The three climbers will have a five-member support team and some 70 porters to help — compared to 25 last time — as well as several rescue helicopters on stand-by.

“If we complete this, we can be proud Myanmar citizens,” Zaw Zin Khine said.

“We plan to plant the nation’s flag with our own hands at the summit.”

He also hopes they will inspire more climbers in a country that only boasts a few dozen enthusiasts.

But Harrington warns that reaching the summit is not everything and advises the team to “listen to the mountain”.

“If it’s telling you not to go for it then don’t go for it. In my head the only thing that matters is that you come back alive.”

Deputy Health Minister Dr Lee Boon Chye said it was among the effort to curb addiction towards video game and social media applications among teenagers in the country.

“There are also gaming providers that prevent users aged under 17 from accessing the game after one to two hours and then they are cut offline. These are among the steps we are looking into to ensure the game addiction could be brought under control,” he said during the question-and-answer session at the Dewan Rakyat.

He was replying to a supplementary question from Lukanisman Awang Sauni (PBB-Sibuti) on the government’s move to curb e-games addiction which led the user to avoid other activities.

“The addiction could become a habit in the individual which then affect the users from more important activities such as education and career,” he said.

Dr Lee said a survey by the National Health and Morbidity in 2017 showed that 34.9% of teenagers aged 13 to 17 were addicted to the Internet.

Meanwhile, a survey by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) on Internet usage pattern in 2017 showed that there were 24.1 million Internet users in the country with 80% of them accessing the social media with an average usage of over four hours a day.

“The male driver of the car was detained by officers at the scene,” the police statement said. “A number of pedestrians have been injured.”

Police did not say if they suspected terrorism, calling it only a “collision”.

Armed police immediately surrounded the silver car after it crashed at 7.37am (06:37 GMT), pointing guns at the driver as he was removed from the vehicle, according to footage posted on Twitter.

Later images showed police holding the man, dressed in jeans and a black puffer jacket, in handcuffs as roads around parliament were sealed off.

Westminster was the scene of a terror attack last year, when Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old British convert to Islam, drove a car at pedestrians on a bridge over the River Thames, before fatally stabbing a policeman on guard outside parliament.

The attack left five people dead and around 50 injured, and only ended when police shot Masood dead.

The teenager is taking advantage of a quirk in the constitution of the bucolic northeastern state that imposes no age limit on running for governor. Candidates only have to have lived in Vermont for at least four years.

Ethan, happily for his campaign, has lived in the state for 14. He faces a crowded field of adult rivals in Tuesday’s Democratic gubernatorial primary.

His website proclaims him a champion for middle- and working-class families, with “the right ideas” on healthcare reform, economic development and education — never mind that he’s still years from graduating high school.

He identifies with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has been increasingly in the ascendant in the United States since the ultimately thwarted run for president by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016.

“I think I’m the candidate who best represents the change we need,” he told a televised town hall event earlier this month.

His rivals include Christine Hallquist, running to become America’s first transgender governor, James Ehlers, a Navy veteran and environmentalist, and Brenda Siegel, the executive director of a dance festival.

But despite praise for Sonneborn’s “maturity” and political awareness, his campaign has attracted calls for Vermont lawmakers to close the loophole.

“I think we should probably take a look at that to be perfectly honest,” Republican Governor Phil Scott told reporters when asked if he thought 14-year-olds should be eligible to run.

“I think you should at least be able to get your driver’s license at the time that you become governor.”

Scott, 60, has been at the helm of Vermont since 2016 and is running for re-election, facing Keith Stern, who runs a fruits and vegetable business, in the state’s gubernatorial Republican primary, also on Tuesday.

The Ministry of Public Security has recently worked with police departments in 52 provinces and cities to dismantle cases of fraud through the use of the Internet, telecommunications and banking system to illegally appropriate property.

The trick the criminals deployed was looking for the accounts of bank customers who did not subscribe to Internet banking services.

The criminals hacked into the banks’ websites and found ways to access the accounts and subscribe to online banking services.

Then, posing as bank employees, they called the account holders asking for an OTP (one-time password) to disburse a loan. If the customer provided the password, the criminals could log into the account and steal money, transferring it to their own accounts.

An old method but one still deployed by criminals was pretending to be employees of lottery companies to cheat people.

Investigators determined that over 560 victims have been affected by the fraud, with the total damage estimated to reach 43 billion dong (Bt61.6 million).

A dozen suspects have been arrested and many documents have been seized.

Illegal gambling on the Internet has also become more sophisticated over the past few years.

The most typical example was a case involving an online gambling ring worth 9.8 trillion dong, discovered by police in the northern province of Phu Tho and the Ministry of Public Security.

The provincial police were asked to bring to court 92 people on seven criminal charges, from organising gambling activities and purchasing fake invoices to money laundering, bribing and abuse of power.

The ringleaders of the online gambling case (held via the card game rikvip/tip.club) were identified as Phan Sao Nam, former chairman of VTC Online Telecommunication company, and Nguyen Van Duong, chairman of CNC, a private hi-tech security company in Hanoi and later chairman of infrastructure development company UDIC.

Since 2014, nearly 43 million accounts were created to join the gambling ring, bringing in revenues of nearly 10 trillion dong.

Although the organisation of football betting is strictly prohibited, this kind of crime has increased in recent years.

In the 2018 World Cup, online betting with transactions valued at thousands of billions of dong was busted by local police. However, it was not easy to investigate as the masterminds in these cases had contact with servers in foreign countries.

Cyber criminals have often exploited several tricks including using social network sites to illegally appropriate other people’s property, the newspaper Kinh te va do thi (Economic and Urban Affairs) reported.

They created Facebook or Zalo accounts and sold household equipment and clothes at an extremely low price to lure customers.

Once the customers expressed interest, they were asked to transfer payments in advance and the contact was quickly cut off after money was received.

The criminals might also hack social-network accounts and then send messages to the users’ contact lists to borrow money, asking them to purchase phone cards with big denominations to steal their property.

They could steal information to take money from ATMs and use fake credit cards to buy expensive goods.

Other crimes involved people pretending to be banking officials and making Internet calls to cheat people.

According to a report from the Hanoi Public Security Department, last year about 97 hi-tech criminal cases were discovered by the police, resulting in the arrests of 165 people.

The police solved 33 criminal cases in the first six months of this year, a reduction of 17 compared with the same period last year.

Data from Internetworldstats.com, a website dedicated to tracking the number of Internet users around the world, showed that, by mid-2017, Vietnam had 64 million users, representing 67 per cent of the population.

The figure gives Vietnam the 12th-highest number of users in the world and ranks it sixth among 35 countries and territories in Asia.

Some believe the Law on Cybersecurity recently adopted by the National Assembly and taking effect in January 1 will be an effective tool to protect the online community and to assist in the fight against hi-tech cybercrime.

Critics at home and abroad, though, say it will stymie the growth of Internet use and hamper firms’ online marketing activities.

According to the Ministry of Public Security, once the law is implemented, it will help protect users from malicious information that could affect their honour, reputation and dignity and from other activities that might affect their legitimate rights and interests.

In addition, the risk of the theft of personal information will also be minimised, while gambling and the dissemination of negative cultural products will be eliminated.