In Singapore’s worst cyber attack, hackers have stolen the personal particulars of 1.5 million patients. Of these, 160,000 people, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and a few ministers, had their outpatient prescriptions stolen as well.

The hackers infiltrated the computers of SingHealth, Singapore’s largest group of healthcare institutions with four hospitals, five national speciality centres and eight polyclinics. Two other polyclinics used to be under SingHealth.

At a multi-ministry press conference on Friday (July 20), the authorities said PM Lee’s information was “specifically and repeatedly targeted”.

The 1.5 million patients had visited SingHealth’s specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics from May 1, 2015, to July 4, 2018.

Their non-medical personal data that was illegally accessed and copied included their names, IC numbers, addresses, gender, race and dates of birth.

No record was tampered with and no other patient records such as diagnosis, test results and doctors’ notes were breached. There was no evidence of a similar breach in the other public healthcare IT systems.

Health Minister Gan Kim Yong and Minister for Communications and Information S. Iswaran both described the leak as the most serious, unprecedented breach of personal data in Singapore.

Mr Gan apologised to the affected patients, saying: “We are deeply sorry this has happened.”

Mr David Koh, chief executive of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, said that “this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyber attack”.

“It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs,” he added.

In the light of the attack, all of Singapore’s Smart Nation plans, including the mandatory contribution to the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) project – which enables the sharing of patients’ treatment and medical data among hospitals here – have been paused.

Specifically, mandatory contribution to NEHR is now on hold until further notice.

Mr Iswaran, who is also Minister-in-Charge of Cyber Security, will convene a Committee of Inquiry (COI) to conduct an independent external review of the incident. Retired district judge Richard Magnus will chair the committee.

Initial investigations showed that one SingHealth front-end workstation was infected with malware through which the hackers gained access to the data base. The data theft happened between June 27, 2018, and July 4, 2018.

SingHealth has imposed a temporary Internet surfing separation on all of its 28,000 staff’s work computers. Other public healthcare institutions will do the same.

Unusual activity was first detected on July 4 on one of SingHealth’s IT databases. Security measures, including the blocking of dubious connections and changing of passwords, were taken to thwart the hackers.

On July 10, the Health Ministry, SingHealth and the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore were informed after forensic investigations confirmed that it was a cyber attack. A police report was made on July 12.

No further data has been stolen since July 4.

All patient records in SingHealth’s IT system remain intact and there has been no disruption of healthcare services.

SingHealth will be contacting all patients who visited its specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics from May 1, 2015, to July 4, 2018, to notify them if their data has been stolen. An SMS message will be sent to all patients over the next five days.

Patients can also access the Health Buddy mobile app and SingHealth website to check if they are affected by the breach. They can also check using this link.

Mr Iswaran said that “we must get to the bottom of this breach”.

“We must not let this derail our Smart Nation services… it is the way of the future,” he said, taking a longer-term view of the projects.

Even though a thorough review of Smart Nation projects will be conducted, he stressed that Singapore has paused but not halted these projects.

The Ministry of Health has directed a thorough review of the public healthcare system to improve cyber security, and all public and private healthcare institutions have been advised to take cyber-security precautions.

Fighting broke out on July 11 between soldiers and Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) insurgents near Awelaw village in remote Shan state near the Chinese border, both sides confirmed.

The military announced Friday that eight people, mostly women, were killed in the clashes.

“Among the TNLA insurgents, the bodies of three men and five women in camouflage uniforms were seized,” the post on the Commander-in-Chief’s Facebook page stated.

A different account of the clashes released on Monday by the TNLA, however, described how six women medics were arrested after an ambush by troops before being “killed brutally”.

The area, in Myanmar’s restive eastern frontier, is off-limits making it difficult to verify either side’s claims.

In recent years, women have been swelling the ranks of some rebel groups with frequent posts on Facebook of armed female insurgents in jungle training.

The rebellion in the northeast — completely separate from the Rohingya crisis in the west — has been festering for decades.

It is just one of some two dozen conflicts plaguing more than a third of the country since independence in 1948, according to a 2017 Asia Foundation report.

Civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has made it a priority to end the unrest by trying to bring the rebel groups to the negotiating table.

So far 10 organisations have signed up to a ceasefire agreement but at least seven, including some of the largest and most influential, are holding out.

Meanwhile, fighting still continues between the myriad factions, splinter outfits and the military, displacing tens of thousands of civilians across the country’s borderlands.

A third annual peace conference ended on Monday after six days with little progress made and the military placing full responsibility for the ongoing fighting on the ethnic rebel groups.

“If their people have no discipline, problems can happen,” army appointee and defence minister Sein Win told AFP.

Suu Kyi has no control over security policy, with the military retaining key government posts in the delicate power-sharing arrangement.

The latest incident followed clashes in May between the TNLA and the army which saw 19 people, mostly civilians, killed in the town of Muse on the Chinese border — some of the worst bloodshed in the region for several years.

It was a sharp reversal from 3.9 percent growth in 2016, according to the Bank of Korea (BOK).

The UN Security Council last year banned the North’s main exports — coal and other mineral resources, fisheries and textile products — to cut off its access to hard currency in response to Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

As a result the North’s mining industry slumped 11 percent, the BOK said, having grown 8.4 percent in 2016.

Manufacturing output fell 6.9 percent – down from 4.8 percent growth – while agriculture and fisheries slipped 1.3 percent, after also expanding in 2016.

“Sanctions against the North were much more intense last year,” a BOK official told journalists, adding that bad weather was also a factor.

Exports tumbled 37.2 percent to $1.77 billion, while imports inched up 1.8 percent to $3.78 billion.

Inter-Korean trade collapsed 99.7 percent on-year to a mere $900,000 after the South shut down the joint Kaesong industrial complex in the North amid tensions over the North’s nuclear and missile development.

The North does not publish economic statistics of its own, leaving outside estimates – which by definition are based on limited information – as the only available figures for its financial performance.

According to the BOK, the North had a per-capita Gross National Income of 1.46 million won ($1,011), while the South’s was 23 times higher.

The North, which holds most of the peninsula’s mineral resources, was once wealthier than the South, but decades of mismanagement and the demise of its former paymaster the Soviet Union have left it deeply impoverished and suffering chronic food shortages.

Despite a historic summit with the North’s leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June, US President Donald Trump has said sanctions would remain in force until the North takes substantial steps toward removing its nuclear arsenal.

“The UN imposed fresh sanctions against the North in August and December, and those will make a serious dent in the North Korean economy this year,” another BOK official said.

“Especially, trade with China which accounts for 95 percent of the North’s overall transactions, fell sharply” in the first half of 2018, he added.

With a trip to Northern Ireland this week, May began a tour of Britain to convince voters to back her blueprint for close economic ties with the bloc after Brexit next March.

Her new Brexit minister Dominic Raab — appointed last week after his predecessor quit over the compromise proposal — also held his first talks in Brussels on Thursday where he vowed to “heat up” the withdrawal negotiations.

May still faces significant anger from her Conservative party over her plan to follow EU rules in trade on goods after Brexit, which has been called “Brexit in name only”.

But, while the danger of a leadership challenge remains, she has ridden out the resignation of two cabinet ministers and seen off a threatened parliamentary defeat by pro-Europeans.

“For the first time she’s got a cabinet united around her vision,” said Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank based at King’s College London.

He said the resignations of Brexit minister David Davis and foreign minister Boris Johnson may actually help in persuading Brussels to take her plan seriously.

“It allows her credibly to turn around to the EU and say I’m taking these people on and I need some help,” he told AFP.

“The EU doesn’t like the (plan) but the muted reaction is evidence that they understand the need for sensitivity.”

‘Looked into the abyss’

Britons voted to leave the EU in June 2016 but the government has been divided on what it wants from the future relationship.

With the clock ticking, May gathered her warring ministers on July 6 and persuaded them to back a new free trade area on goods.

It unleashed fury from those who want a clean break with the EU, and a string of junior aides followed Davis and Johnson out the door.

May faced open hostility from her own MPs, with one asking her in the House of Commons if she could explain “at what point it was decided that Brexit means remain?”

With an eye on dispersing MPs who may try to plot against her, May tried to bring forward parliament’s summer holidays, only to abandon the idea due to a lack of support.

However, she survived a crucial vote that would have forced her to try to keep Britain in a customs union with the EU, something she has repeatedly rejected.

And at a meeting of her MPs on Wednesday, she won pledges of support, with one even announcing that he was withdrawing his letter of no confidence tabled the week before.

Simon Clarke told reporters that he still disliked May’s plan but had been shocked by the in-fighting.

“We have looked into the abyss in the last few days,” he said, adding: “A Conservative party civil war is not where we need to be.”

‘No deal’ planning

It is far from clear however that even if May sticks to her Brexit plan and secures enough support to get it through parliament, it would be acceptable to the EU.

Critics have called it unworkable and the EU has repeatedly warned it will not allow Britain to pick and choose which bits of its single market that it wants to follow.

Both the European Commission and Britain say they want an agreement, but both are stepping up preparations for the possibility the talks fail.

For some in Britain, the Conservative party in-fighting signals that parliament will never agree on a way forward, and the only ways out are crashing out of the EU with no deal or putting the decision to another vote.

May’s former education minister, Justine Greening, this week became the most senior Conservative to argue for a second referendum.

Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair echoed this call, telling AFP: “Once this thing has been started by a referendum it can frankly only be finished by a fresh vote.”

Park, the South’s first female president, was impeached last year after huge street protests over a sprawling scandal, and was jailed for 24 years for corruption and abuse of power in April.

Friday’s penalty – issued in her absence after she refused to attend the Seoul Central District Court – came after a separate trial for pocketing money from the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and improperly intervening in 2016 in the selection of her ruling party’s parliamentary candidates.

The Seoul Central District Court gave Park six years for taking 3.3 billion won ($2.9 million) from the spy agency, and two years for the electoral offence.

The penalties apply consecutively, meaning the 66-year-old now faces a total of 32 years in prison.

“The accused received some three billion won over three years from the three NIS chiefs. Through this crime, the accused incurred a considerable amount of loss to the state treasury,” said senior judge Seong Chang-ho at the Seoul Central District Court.

Three former NIS chiefs testified they had funnelled the funds to Park on her orders, the court said.

The judge rebuked Park, who denied the charges, for being “un-cooperative” throughout the court hearing and questioning by prosecutors.

Park allegedly squandered the taxpayer money on maintaining her private house, financing a boutique where her secret confidante Choi Soon-sil – the central figure in the corruption scandal – had Park’s clothes made and other private purposes, including massage treatment.

Choi was found to have taken advantage of her “long private ties” with Park to extort bribes worth millions of dollars from businesses including telecommunications giant Samsung and retail conglomerate Lotte.

She is serving a 20-year sentence for abuse of power, bribery and meddling in state affairs.

William Nguyen, 32, was taken into custody on June 10 by plainclothes police during mass protests in Ho Chi Minh City against proposed special economic zones.

The demonstrations quickly spun out of control when rioters set cars on fire and damaged government property in actions against the proposal to grant foreign investors 99-year land leases on the SEZs.

The Texas-born Yale graduate was accused of trying to damage a fence and flip over police vehicles on the main road to the airport.

At a half-day trial at Ho Chi Minh City’s people’s court Friday, Nguyen was found guilty of a public disorder offence and told to leave the country.

“The People’s Court of Ho Chi Minh City applied the deportation order against Nguyen William Anh,” a court clerk told AFP without providing further details.

In a televised report aired by local state-run HTV some days after his arrest, Nguyen confessed to his role and promised “not to join any anti-state activities any more.”

According to Nguyen’s family and friends, he was only there to celebrate the right to free assembly.

“Will is free,” his sister Victoria Nguyen told AFP on Friday.

Six Vietnamese have been jailed over the protests.

To calm tensions the communist government delayed the proposed bill, which stirred fears that Vietnamese land could be handed over to Chinese firms on soft terms.

Communist Vietnam still bans public protest.

Vietnam’s latest deadly protests erupted in 2014 when Beijing moved an oil rig into waters claimed by Vietnam.

Violent riots destroyed several foreign invested facilities and killed several Chinese nationals.

The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef, about the size of Japan or Italy, is reeling from two straight years of bleaching as sea temperatures rise because of climate change.

Experts have warned that the 2,300-kilometre (1,400-mile) long area could have suffered irreparable damage.

While the government has pledged to tackle climate change — the greatest threat to the world’s largest living structure — there has also been a push to explore shorter-term measures to buy the reef some time.

Canberra in January offered Aus$2.0 million (US$1.5 million) to attract innovative ideas to protect the site, which is also under pressure from farming runoff, development and the predatory crown-of-thorns starfish.

Six schemes selected out of a total of 69 submissions will be tested to see if they are feasible.

One selected concept is cloud brightening where salt crystals harvested from seawater are fired into clouds, making them more reflective and therefore deflecting solar rays back into space.

David Mead, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said the idea might seem wacky but the proposal has real potential.

“The team have been looking at using a very fine nozzle to pump small droplets of salt water at the rate of several billion per second,” he told national broadcaster ABC.

“The water vaporises and you’re left with a salt particle which will float around, and if you can introduce those into the system you can increase the amount of sunlight reflected back.”

Another idea was a biodegradable “sun shield”, where an ultra-thin film containing light-reflecting particles covers some reef waters to protect corals from heat stress.

“The great thing about the film is it is only a molecule thick so you can swim straight through it and it’ll just keep self-forming,” Andrew Negri from the Australian Institute of Marine Science told the ABC.

Other short-listed projects include mass producing coral larvae with the aid of 3D-printed surfaces to support new growth, and large-scale harvesting and relocation of larvae.

The experimental commissions came as Canberra said Friday it was updating its Aus$2.0 billion “Reef 2050” plan — first unveiled in 2015 — to protect the reef, with further measures to improve water quality.

Prime minister Tshering Tobgay and his wife Tashi Doma along with representatives from regional and international organisations in the country and diplomats, received the Prime Minister and his delegation at the Paro international airport.

Students, villagers, and business community members were seen along Paro-Thimphu highway waving flags of the two countries to welcome the visiting delegates. The Babesa-Thimphu expressway was decked with colourful flags and portraits of the two prime ministers.

General Prayut Chan-o-cha and his wife were ushered into Tashichhodzong in the traditional ceremonial procession with traditional music, dance and song.

Later His Majesty The King hosted a lunch banquet for the visiting prime minister and the Thai delegation at the Dechenchholing Palace.

The two prime ministers met at Gyalyong Tshogkhang (National Assembly hall) yesterday evening.

Bhutan’s prime minister thanked General Prayut Chan-o-cha for visiting Bhutan and expressed the warm wishes of the people of Bhutan.

General Prayut Chan-o-cha said that he appreciated the invitation extended to him. He said that the two countries have been bound by friendship and mutual areas of culture and religion.

Prime minister Tshering Tobgay congratulated the Thai prime minister and Thailand for the successful rescue missions undertaken in rescuing 12 boys and their football coach who were trapped in a flooded cave network in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province.

“This rescue effort will go down in history,” he said. “What you personally oversaw was an inspiration not just for the Thai people, but to the whole world,” Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay said.

The two prime ministers also discussed on areas of mutual cooperation like health, education and human resource development between Bhutan and Thailand.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha also inaugurated the new office of the Royal Thai Honorary Consulate General, which is based at the Royal Textile Academy building in Chubachhu. The consulate office began its operation in November 2003.

Thailand is Bhutan’s second import supplier, accounting for US$24 million (Bt800 million) of Bhutan’s total imports worth $455 million.

Bhutan established an embassy in Bangkok in 1999, a decade after it established diplomatic relations with Thailand. Lyonpo Chenkyab Dorji was the country’s first ambassador to Thailand.

Thimphu hosted the first Bhutan-Thailand festival in June last year. The festival held food fair of traditional cuisines, silk and agro products from the two countries besides cultural performances and Thai boxing.

Prime  Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha’s delegation leaves for Thailand today.

Rather than closing in on the goal of “ending” AIDS, new HIV infections have surged in parts of the world as global attention has dwindled and funding levelled off, say leaders of the anti-AIDS movement.

And they lament that too fine a focus on virus-suppressing treatment has overshadowed basic prevention with the result that HIV is still spreading with ease among the most vulnerable people.

“The encouraging reductions in new HIV infections that occurred for about a decade has emboldened some to declare that we are within reach of ending AIDS,” said Peter Piot, a veteran virus researcher and founder of the UNAIDS agency.

However, “there is absolutely no evidence to support this conclusion,” he insisted, and warned: “the language on ending AIDS has bred a dangerous complacency.”

This was evident from declining global and domestic funding for HIV eradication and treatment programmes, Piot said at the launch this week of a report by the International AIDS Society (IAS) and The Lancet medical journal.

The authors of that report, he said, “are extremely concerned that there is a real risk that the world will declare victory long before our fight against AIDS is over.”

Rubbing shoulders with celebrity activists such as actress Charlize Theron, Britain’s Prince Harry, and singers Elton John and Conchita, more than 15,000 delegates are expected in the Dutch capital for the conference, opening Monday.

Charlize and Conchita

While high-profile speeches will seek to revive the flagging fight, the five-day event will also present an opportunity for scientists to mull over recent advances and setbacks in the quest for simpler, better anti-HIV drugs.

More than three decades of research have yet to yield a cure or vaccine for the AIDS-causing virus that has infected nearly 80 million people since the epidemic burst onto the world scene in the early 1980s.

A UNAIDS report Wednesday said about 36.9 million people last year were living with the virus which, thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), is no longer a death sentence.

It reported the lowest annual death toll in two decades, and a record number of people on life-saving treatment.

But the report also alerted that new HIV infections are rising in about 50 countries, and have more than doubled in eastern Europe and central Asia.

IAS president Linda-Gail Bekker told AFP that there may have been “a strategic mistake on the part of the AIDS gurus” to prioritise treatment at the expense of preventing HIV infection — the only real way to stop the epidemic.

“There is no epidemic that we have treated our way out of,” she said, citing Ebola and tuberculosis.

“Clearly, a vaccine is the holy grail, but we are not there yet.”

In the meantime, the world needs a renewed focus on prevention, said Bekker — stressing condom use, expanding the use of virus-suppressing ART as an infection shield, and providing safe, infection-free needles to drug users.

But to do this while also getting treatment to the 15.2 million infected people who do not yet have access, the world needs cash.

And this at a time that the US administration under Donald Trump has vowed to cut AIDS spending.

A report this week by UNAIDS and the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy NGO, found that after two years of declining global funding, donor payments to low- and middle-income countries rose 16 percent to $8.1 billion (seven billion euros) last year.

Don’t walk away

But it cautioned this was no cause for celebration, as the trend was “not expected to last”.

The extra money came mainly from a rollover to 2017 of funds the US government — by far the largest funder of AIDS programmes — had appropriated but not spent in previous years.

Funding from donor governments “is likely to fall again”, said the report.

According to UNAIDS, the global effort is short about $7 billion per year to achieve the goal of ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, by reducing new infections and deaths by 90 percent from 2010.

“The job is not done,” stressed Robert Matiru, director of operations at Unitaid, a non-profit body that channels financing for HIV research and development.

“We need people to not only continue to fund… but even increase it.”

Bekker fears that “people have walked away to soon” from the fight.

“We’re either moving forward in this epidemic, or we’re sliding back,” she warned.

“The minute you take your eye off the ball, infections will resurge and we will see this thing take off again.”

Tsang was jailed last year after being found guilty of failing to disclose his plans to lease a luxury flat from a major investor in a broadcaster, which was later granted a licence from the government while he was leader.

The 73-year-old, who held the leadership post of chief executive for seven years from 2005, is the most senior city official ever to be convicted in a criminal trial and the highest-ranking one to be put behind bars.

His trial came at a time when residents were losing faith in Hong Kong’s leaders after a string of corruption cases fuelled suspicions over links between public officials and business figures.

Tsang was released on bail last year after two months in prison, pending the appeal.

The Court of Appeal sent him back to prison Friday, but shortly after he was led out of the courtroom by security guards, Tsang was taken away in an ambulance.

Local media reported that he had “felt unwell” and was wearing an oxygen mask.

The Court of Appeal judgement said Friday that: “It defies belief that someone with the applicant’s long experience and background in government service could have overlooked the need to make a declaration of interest in these circumstances.”

It added that Tsang’s misconduct was “particularly serious, given his pre-eminent position in the community and the harm his actions will have engendered among the people of Hong Kong in their confidence in the way the Government does its business”.

However, the court reduced Tsang’s sentence from 20 months to 12 months, saying the previous judge’s starting point for sentencing was too high.

Speaking outside court after the judgement was delivered and before Tsang was taken to hospital, his wife Selina said she was “disappointed and heartbroken”.

“After discussing with the lawyers later, we will decide the next move as soon as possible,” she told reporters.

Prosecutors during Tsang’s trial characterised his conduct as an abuse of power to further his own personal interests.

In 2012, he apologised over separate allegations that he had accepted inappropriate gifts from business friends in the form of trips on luxury yachts and private jets.

His former deputy Rafael Hui was jailed for seven-and-a-half years in 2014 after being found guilty of taking bribes from Hong Kong property tycoon Thomas Kwok.