It had been used sparingly in the past to describe a dual citizen of Australia and New Zealand, but took on a new lease of life when Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce found out he also had Kiwi citizenship in August.

He was the highest profile scalp of a constitutional provision barring dual citizens from serving in federal parliament, with eight lawmakers forced to resign so far.

“In a time of covfefe, fake news, and tweetstorms, the Australian National Dictionary Centre has looked for a word of the year that is both lexically interesting and Australian,” the centre’s director Amanda Laugesen said in a statement.

Laugesen said “Kwaussie” was first used in 2002 to describe actor Russell Crowe.

“He was described as a Kwaussie — what you get when you cross a Kiwi who can’t decide whether they’re a Kiwi or an Aussie,” she said.

“Subsequent evidence suggests its use is predominantly Australian, found chiefly in social media, and also found with spelling variants including Kwozzie and Kwozzy.

“Thanks to the two Kwaussies identified as ineligible to sit in parliament — Barnaby Joyce and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam — the term is now becoming better known.”

Joyce automatically acquired New Zealand citizenship through his father, and was forced to contest a by-election at the weekend, which he won comfortably.

The citizenship crisis has engulfed a number of MPs who claim to have unknowingly held dual citizenship, and threatens more with politicians given a deadline of this week to come clean about their status.

The Australian National Dictionary Centre is a major centre for lexicographical research, conducting research into Australian English and editing dictionaries.//AFP

    On Friday the head of the Catholic church met a group of refugees from Myanmar’s  stateless Muslim minority in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.

He referred to them as “Rohingya” — a term unacceptable to many in Myanmar where they are reviled as alleged “Bengali” illegal immigrants rather than as a distinct ethnic group.

During his public addresses on the previous leg of his trip in mainly Buddhist Myanmar, Francis did not refer to the group by name or directly allude to the crisis in Rakhine state, from where over 620,000 Rohingya have fled since August.

His caution initially won applause from Myanmar’s tiny Catholic minority — who feared a nationalist blowback — as well as from Buddhist hardliners, who are on the defensive after a global outcry about the treatment of the group.

A deadly attack by Rohingya militants on police posts in late August sparked a ferocious crackdown in Rakhine by the Myanmar military, which the US and UN describe as ethnic cleansing.

As he arrived back at the Vatican, the pontiff said he had taken up the Rohingya cause in private in Myanmar, also describing how he wept after meeting the group of refugees.

“I wept: I tried to do it in a way that it couldn’t be seen,” he told reporters. “They wept too.”

The comments sparked a flurry of online anger in Myanmar, a country locked off from modern communications for five decades but which now has an active social media.

“He is like a lizard whose colour has changed because of weather,” said Facebook user Aung Soe Lin of the pope’s strikingly different stances on the crisis.

“He should be a salesman or broker for using different words even though he is a religious leader,” said another Facebook user called Soe Soe.

Myanmar’s Catholic church had advised Francis not to stray into the incendiary issue of the status of the Rohingya in Myanmar, in case he worsened tensions and endangered Christians.

In his public addresses he treaded softly on the topic, urging unity, compassion and respect for all ethnic groups — but not naming the Rohingya.

“The Pope is a holy person… but he said something here (in Myanmar) and he said different in other countries,” another Facebook user Ye Linn Maung posted.

“He should say the same things if he loves the truth.”

Others were more sanguine about Francis’ choice of language once he had left Myanmar soil.

Maung Thway Chun, chairman of an unofficial party of nationalists called the 135 Patriots Party, applauded the pope’s decision not to name them in Myanmar despite pressure from rights groups.

“It means he respects Myanmar people,” he said. “He even did not use the word many times in Bangladesh… I think he said it once, just to comfort human rights organisations.”//AFP

In an article posted to government mouthpiece Fresh News, the prime minister is quoted as saying CCHR would not need to shutter its operations – less than a week after saying publicly the often critical organisation “must close” and ordering the Interior Ministry to “investigate” it.

“After receiving the statement and the request to the government from CCHR, the Cambodian government has decided to keep this centre by allowing this institution to continue serving human rights activities in Cambodia, and after the investigation of the Interior Ministry has found no activities that involved violations of the law,” the premier was quoted as saying.

Prak Sam Oeun, the director of the Interior Ministry’s General Department of Administration, yesterday confirmed that CCHR could continue its work.

“When it performs properly with neutrality and is not biased to any party, no one will do anything to it. No one is going to do anything to it unless it wrongly supports this or that party,” he said.

CCHR was founded in 2002 by Kem Sokha, who would later go on to co-found the Cambodia National Rescue Party – the country’s largest opposition – only to be jailed in September on widely decried charges of “treason”. The party itself was dissolved at the government’s behest last month in a near-universally condemned Supreme Court decision for allegedly conspiring with foreign governments to foment “revolution”.

Government representatives at the trial accused CCHR, among other groups, of allegedly colluding with the CNRP in its purported plot.

CCHR, for its part, has long been one of the most outspoken local NGOs in Cambodia, and its leaders haven’t hesitated to criticise both the government and the opposition in the past. In a statement yesterday, the organisation welcomed the news that it could remain open.

“Although this has been a challenging time for CCHR’s staff, the organization remained fully confident that any impartial investigation would affirm CCHR’s genuine independence, and the absence of any wrongdoing on its part,” the statement reads. “CCHR looks forward to moving on from this investigation, and continuing the pursuit of its core mission: the urgent and vital work of protecting and promoting respect for human rights in Cambodia.”

Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan also praised the decision in a Facebook post yesterday, saying it showed the government was committed to human rights. “This is the right decision of the prime minister to permit CCHR to continue operating,” he said.

In previous comments he had initially welcomed the potential closure of the organisation. In a message, CCHR Executive Director Chak Sopheap said her organisation had only heard about the investigation second hand.

“Despite hearing through the news channels that CCHR was under investigations, we did not receive any official communication from the Ministry of interior or other authorities, nor were we questioned about CCHR’s operations,” she said.

“In addition, I sincerely hope that the reversal of the Prime Minister’s position regarding the closure of CCHR is the first step for the full restoration of Cambodia’s once vibrant civil society, and that the authorities will work on providing a safe space for all organizations to operate freely.”

Naly Pilorge, deputy director of advocacy at the rights group Licadho, also called on the Interior Ministry to allow other organisations whose operations have been suspended to resume their work again.

“We are pleased that CCHR can continue operating to provide vital services to people in need and we hope that the Ministry of Interior will also clear other NGOs such as Equitable Cambodia to enable them to continue contributing services and assistance to society,” she said.

Equitable Cambodia was suspended for 30 working days at the end of September by the Ministry of Interior for allegedly failing to provide paperwork required by the controversial Law on Associations and NGOs (Lango), and for having allegedly sowed divisions between a ruling partyconnected sugar company and villagers involved in a land dispute.

The organisation said yesterday that it is still waiting for notification that it can resume operations from the Interior Ministry.

But the Interior Ministry’s Sam Oeun said Equitable Cambodia was still under suspension. “It has not expired yet,” he said.

The Working Group on Enabling and Protecting Civil Society, meanwhile, drew attention on Friday to recent contentious implementations of Lango, which has been criticised for unduly restricting NGOs’ freedom to operate.

Police have sealed off traffic on Pan Road near the Embassy pending investigation into the packages, according to 7 Day Daily online.

“The Future of E-commerce in FMCG” (fast-moving consumer goods) tracks the purchase of more than 500,000 shoppers in countries on three continents.

It said the top six contributors to “absolute value growth” were all big economies – China, the United States, South Korea, Britain, Japan and France.

The online grocery sector is expanding into new markets, with significant value growth in Thailand (104 per cent), Malaysia (88 per cent) and Vietnam (69 per cent).

In Vietnam, the e-commerce channel has evolved thanks to booming Internet use and smartphone ownership, together with massive investment by key retail players.

It now represents 0.5 per cent of the FMCG market in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Danang and Can Tho.

The percentage of e-commerce shoppers grew from 5.4 to 8.8 per cent in those four cities in the last year, the report said.

The man removed his shoes and socks on a bus going from the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh to New Delhi and put them near the aisle, police said.

Other passengers protested and asked the man to put away the offending socks or throw them out.

The man refused, sparking a heated confrontation that forced the bus driver to stop at a police station in Una district of Himachal Pradesh.

Una police chief Sanjeev Gandhi told AFP the bus stopped several times because of the smelly chaos before they came to the police station.

“He was arrested on charges of causing public nuisance and later released on bail,” Gandhi said.

Gandhi said the accused had threatened other passengers and caused a disturbance at the police station.

The man in turn filed a complaint against his fellow passengers and the bus crew for harassment and insisted his socks did not smell, the officer said.

He left the area in another bus a day later, police said.//AFP

Hungry customers lined up for Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets at the Vietnamese capital’s first location overlooking the tree-lined Hoan Kiem lake, which draws millions of tourists annually to see French-era colonial buildings and sample street-food favourites like pho noodle soup and banh mi sandwiches.

The restaurant is the first outside of the southern commercial hub Ho Chi Minh City, where 16 branches have opened since McDonald’s first came to Vietnam in 2014 to much fanfare, especially among the rapidly-growing middle class and American-obsessed youth.

The global fast food chain received a similarly warm welcome in Hanoi on Saturday, as hungry diners crammed into the two-storey eatery for a first taste of the Golden Arches.

For 84-year-old Tran Dinh Luyen, who fought against the US in the Vietnam War, the restaurant was a sign of warming ties with a former enemy.

“I am happy that McDonald’s has opened a restaurant in Hanoi. It’s a very famous American brand, so it shows how far US-Vietnam relations have come,” he told AFP after mowing down on a Big Mac with his daughter and granddaughter.

But not everyone agreed.

“It’s a rip-off … this fast food is for kids only, it’s not good at all,” 90-year-old Ta Xuan Huong said, espousing his love for traditional cuisine.

Some curious tourists stopped to see what all the fuss was about, perplexed that a brand ubiquitous in the West would draw so much attention.

“It’s kind of random to see McDonald’s opening … it’s an interesting cultural experience to see how important it is that the store is opening here,” American Dan Moore told AFP, after his wife remarked she might not have expected to find one of the most salient symbols of capitalism in the communist country.

The one-party state has seen dizzying economic growth in recent years as it has opened its doors to foreign investment — which has included an influx of western chains like Starbucks, KFC and Burger King.

Growth in the fast food sector has been buoyed by rapidly rising incomes — annual per capita income has more than doubled in the past decade to about $2,100 today — especially among under-30s, who make up half of Vietnam’s population of 93 million people.

The fast food industry in Vietnam has seen double-digit growth annually for the past five years, and the country has the highest 2017 growth in Asia-Pacific for fast food chains, according to market research firm Euromonitor International.

Though meals can cost as much as three times the local fare, customers are still showing strong appetite.

“Young people like to hang out in fast food restaurants as they are seen as a cool and nice place … and these customers also like the taste of the food,” Euromonitor analyst Samuel Huynh told AFP.

It was one of hundreds of attacks in the British capital every year that have prompted government intervention and left the city’s police force asking the public for help to tackle the crime wave.

Hussain recalled feeling “burning on my face” during the robbery in Hackney.

“If they want to take my bike, there are a lot of weapons… why (have) they got to choose the weapon of acid?” he told AFP as he returned to the spot where the attack happened.

The number of assaults is increasing rapidly.

The British capital saw 454 acid attacks reported last year, up from 261 in 2015 and 166 the year before.

Hussain suffers from chest problems after swallowing water which he believes contained traces of the acid, although his helmet protected much of his face and he has no visible scars.

A pizza delivery driver attacked in north-east London last month was not so lucky, left in a critical condition after being sprayed with acid while his helmet visor was up.

‘Scared’ Londoners

Jaf Shah, head of the London-based Acid Survivors Trust International, said victims were “incredibly strong, resilient and courageous individuals”.

“Because when you take into account the devastation of such an attack, it requires an enormous amount of strength to go through and recover,” he told AFP.

Shah blamed the increase in attacks on a lack of regulation to stop people buying acid, although he noted the recent cases have “concentrated the minds of government officials”.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced new proposals in October to force people carrying acid to prove they have a legitimate reason, taking the same approach used to tackle knife violence where possession of the weapon alone is criminalised.

Rudd also plans to require people buying high-concentrate sulphuric acid — such as drain cleaner — to apply for a Home Office licence.

MP Stephen Timms called for the changes in parliament in July, after his east London constituency of East Ham suffered a spate of attacks.

His intervention followed an attack against two cousins who were sitting in their car in Beckton, leaving both with life-changing injuries.

“What we cannot do is allow a situation where people feel scared to walk around the streets,” he told AFP in his local library.

“And that’s the position we were getting into after that attack on the two cousins, people just thought it wasn’t safe to walk up and down the road anymore.”

‘Melted their skin’

With many offenders in their teens or early 20s, East Ham’s borough of Newham in east London has preempted new legislation by asking shopkeepers to challenge young people buying acid and refuse sales if they are suspicious of customers’ intentions.

“The response in Newham has been really positive… Shopkeepers are actually very happy to be involved in addressing this problem,” said Timms.

While police have had some success in confiscating acid on the streets, Hackney’s borough commander Simon Laurence appealed to parents, teachers and social workers to ask young people what they’re carrying in plastic bottles.

“What’s in it? Why are they carrying it? Because the police can’t stop this alone, and we need the help of the community,” he told AFP outside Mangle nightclub in east London, where 22 people were injured in April with a substance the same strength as hydrochloric acid.

“It melted their skin, and they would have been in horrendous pain. Some of those victims will have life-changing injuries that they will be reminded of every day,” Laurence said, after a 25-year-old man was convicted over the attack.

London police carry acid response kits to treat victims and Laurence said the force wanted to be able to test substances on the streets.

“The bit we’ve got to be able to get better at is identifying what’s in the bottle when someone’s carrying it — and to stop people thinking they’re able to use it to cause such horrendous injuries.”

Fearful of returning to work, Hussain thinks more still needs to be done to make people realise the devastating impact of such a weapon.

“Why (do) they use the acid to destroy somebody’s face, and destroy somebody’s life?” he asked.

Despite cloudy skies and brief downpours, the afternoon was hot and humid. Not exactly the perfect conditions to scale the steps leading to the as yet unfinished platform that is marked by rows of bare concrete pillars.

The platform is spacious and could easily accommodate more than 100 cars. It is open on all sides, giving a 360-degree bird’s eye view of the scenery below.

The sprawling 60-hectare Garuda Wisnu Kencana cultural park with its gigantic limestone columns, the host of numerous world-class concerts, sits below and Benoa Bay, now the most contentious site in Bali because of a controversial reclamation plan, lies in the distance, both clearly visible from the platform’s eastern side

A worker cleans the wet floor while groups of wielders are busy working on steel frames and tubes that intersect each other before jutting out into the gloomy sky.

A brightly painted red crane to the platform’s western side is the only thing that adds color to the otherwise steely gray scene.

“We are now 93.5 meters above the ground,” famed sculptor Nyoman Nuarta said as he pointed to a gigantic head of Garuda.

“We have just finished installing the torso and the head of the Garuda, one of the most critical stages of the construction process,”

His comments referred to Garuda Wisnu Kencana, a gigantic monument he first conceptualized back in 1993.

“It was very challenging technically because the bust of the 22-m tall Garuda protrudes 30-m outward from the statue’s inner core.

“As you can imagine, we had to construct a 30-m long cantilever before installing the torso,” he said.

The next technically challenging task is to install the wings of the mythical bird. Because of Nuarta’s insistence on endowing the wings with the illusion of movement, requiring additional reinforcements of the frame, the space available inside the wings’ tips for fine-tuning the installation can only accommodate one worker.

Designed to be the country’s tallest statue, Garuda Wisnu Kencana was inspired by Hindu mythology about the search for Amerta (the elixir of life). According to this myth, Garuda agreed to be ridden by Lord Wisnu in return for the right to use the elixir to liberate his enslaved mother.

The 75-m tall, 65-m wide statue, sits atop a lofty pedestal that will bring the total height of the monument to 121-m, nearly 30-m taller than the Statue of Liberty in the United States. The completed monument will be about as tall as a 21-story building. It will weigh 4,000 tons, thus, making it the heaviest statue in the country.

The statue is made of copper and brass sheeting, with a stainless steel frame and skeleton, as well as a steel and concrete core column. The outer covering alone measures 22,000 square m in size. It was constructed in Nuarta’s workshop in Sarijadi, Bandung, West Java, before being chopped into more than 700 modules and transported to the construction site in Ungasan, Badung regency.

As many as 120 experienced wielders are currently working at the site to re-assemble the modules before they are lifted up by two cranes and bolted onto the outer steel frame of the statue by workers who specialize in high altitude construction.

“By next week we will have completed the installation of the 300th module. The head of Wisnu will be put into place by April next year,”

Around 24 years after its inception, there is finally light at the end of what has been a very dark tunnel for the construction of the Garuda Wisnu Kencana monument. It has survived many gigantic setbacks, ranging from early opposition from a group of local activists to internal disputes within the company responsible for its development, to political regime change and global financial crisis.

The latter forced the project into a 16-year long hiatus before the giant property developer PT Alam Sutera Realty Tbk. took over in 2013 and injected fresh funds.

For Nyoman Nuarta, the construction of the monument has become a life-long obsession.

“The difficulty level is incomparable to the other projects because Garuda Wisnu Kencana is colossal in size and also very elaborately decorated,” he said, gesturing toward the richly ornamented crown of Garuda.

“Wisnu’s crown will be covered with golden mosaics and the whole statue will have a special lighting arrangement, which is currently being built in Singapore,” he said.

Nuarta is also fanatical about the safety of the monument, with the construction materials, steel frames and the statue itself having undergone various scientific integrity tests. This included a wind tunnel test that revealed the statue could withstand winds with speeds of up to 259 nautical miles per hour. In Bali, the highest recorded winds travel at 70 nautical miles per hour.

“I want it to last 100 years,”

The statue is slated to be completed by August 2018 and Nuarta plans to throw a public party to celebrate the inauguration of the monument.

“It will be my gift to the country that I love so much. A cultural gift to celebrate the 73rd anniversary of our independence,”

2018 will also be a busy year politically, with regional elections to be held across the country.

“Hopefully, Garuda Wisnu Kencana will serve as a reminder throughout that divisive period about our cultural roots as a tolerant and multicultural nation,” he said.

    Christians make up less than 0.5 percent of mainly Muslim Bangladesh, but have in recent years come under attack from Islamist radicals.

Just days before Francis’ arrival, a Catholic priest disappeared in a village in northern Bangladesh.

In Myanmar the pontiff walked a diplomatic tightrope, staying silent on allegations that the army is waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against Rohingya Muslims.

He also refrained from mentioning the minority by name during his four-day trip.

Myanmar’s government denies the Rohingya are an ethnic group, insisting they are “Bengali” immigrants who are not entitled to full citizenship.

But the Vatican rejected suggestions the decision not to confront the issue publically represented a failure of moral leadership.

A spokesman late Wednesday said the Pope’s presence alone drew attention to Myanmar’s myriad troubles and his “moral authority” remained undimmed.

Francis had previously expressed concern over the Rohingya’s persecution.

But he was urged not to mention their name in Myanmar to avoid provoking hardline Buddhists, who were quick to claim the Pope’s avoidance of the term ‘Rohingya’ as a victory.

The pontiff has been warmly embraced by Myanmar’s minority of Catholics — who make up just over one percent of the population.

On Thursday, Francis led a mass at a cathedral in downtown Yangon, which was also broadcast on a big screen in the church’s basketball court where throngs of faithful craned for a view of their religious leader.

“This is a blessing for us to see the Pope. We are a very small community but he came for us,” Tony Ravi, among those in the crowd, told AFP.

In his homily the pope urged young people to defend “human rights” and “justice” — the central theme of his public addresses throughout his landmark visit.

All eyes will now be fixed on the pontiff as he heads to Bangladesh, a country struggling to provide for the more than 620,000 Rohingya who have crushed into its refugee camps after fleeing persecution in Myanmar.

He will arrive in Dhaka on Thursday afternoon.

The Catholic priest who disappeared on Monday in the same village as suspected Islamist extremists hacked a Catholic grocer to death last year.

Walter William Rosario, 40, had been organising for some 300 Catholics to travel to Dhaka for the pope’s mass.

Since 2015 at least three Christians, including two converts from Islam, have been hacked to death in attacks blamed on the militant Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).//AFP