Heavy rains that began on Tuesday evening and prolonged until midmorning yesterday, damaged several houses in Kampong Kiudang.

One of the worst affected residential areas was Jalan Batang Mitus, where according to the Lamunin Fire Station, water reached 0.50 metre high, making the roadway inaccessible to normal saloon cars.

However, some areas usually affected by flash flood like Kampong Keranching Benutan, Kampong Kuala Unggar/Rambai and Jalan Bengkuru in Mukim Rambai remained unaffected this time.

Despite the torrential rain and flash flood, a newly-wed couple was able to perform their ‘Balik Tiga Hari’ ceremony, a traditional Malay ritual which heralds the newly married couple’s return to the groom’s family house after three days at the bride’s home.

The torrential rains did not deter 81yearold Pengiran Ibrahim bin Pengiran Haji Tengah from holding the ‘Balik Tiga Hari’, albeit in moderation.

Some areas in Tutong District are no stranger to flash floods, he said. “In 1998, flood water reached three-and-a half feet high and this year it reached more than two feet,” he added.

With the rainy weather continuing, members of the public, especially those living in low-lying areas or flood-prone areas, have been urged to exercise extra caution.

The 193-member General Assembly adopted the resolution by 128 to nine with 35 abstentions, in what Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour called a “massive setback” for the United States.

An additional 21 countries did not turn up for the vote including Ukraine, which had supported the same resolution in the Security Council, indicating the US threats did have a chilling effect on some governments.

Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Togo joined the United States in opposing the measure.

Among the countries that abstained were Argentina, Australia, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Romania and Rwanda.

Speaking at the emergency session, US Ambassador Nikki Haley warned the United States “will remember this day.”

“America will put our embassy in Jerusalem,” Haley said in defense of the US move, which broke with international consensus and unleashed protests across the Muslim world.

“No vote in the United Nations will make any difference on that,” Haley said. “But this vote will make a difference on how Americans look at the UN and on how we look at countries who disrespect us in the UN.”

“When we make generous contributions to the UN we also have a legitimate expectation that our goodwill is recognized and respected,” she said.

The resolution reaffirms that the status of Jerusalem must be resolved through negotiations, and that any decision reached outside of that framework must be rescinded.

Without explicitly referencing the US move, it “affirms that any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the vote showed the “illegality” of Trump’s decision, urging the United States to withdraw it.

– ‘Unprecedented test’ –

The motion was sent to the General Assembly after it was vetoed by the United States at the Security Council on Monday, although all other 14 council members voted in favor.

While resolutions by the General Assembly are non-binding, a strong vote in support carries political weight.

Ahead of the vote, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the UN as a “house of lies,” saying Israel “rejects outright this vote, even before it passes.”

“No General Assembly resolution will ever drive us from Jerusalem,” vowed Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon.

Palestinian foreign minister Riad al-Malki called the vote an “unprecedented test” for the UN, and referenced the US warning that it was “taking names.”

“History records names, it remembers names — the names of those who stand by what is right and the names of those who speak falsehood,” al-Malki said.

Trump’s decision on December 6 to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital prompted a flurry of appeals to the United Nations.

The status of the Holy City is one of the thorniest issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Trump warned that Washington would closely watch how nations voted, suggesting there could be reprisals for those that back the motion put forward by Yemen and Turkey on behalf of Arab and Muslim countries.

“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars and then they vote against us,” Trump said.

“Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”

– ‘House of lies’ –

The resolution mirrored the text that was vetoed at the Security Council on Monday, and although it does not mention Trump’s decision, it expresses “deep regret at recent decisions” concerning the city’s status.

No country has veto powers in the General Assembly, unlike in the 15-member Security Council where the United States, along with Britain, China, France and Russia, can block any resolution.

UN diplomats privately said the United States had succeeded in making some countries think twice.

Haley tweeted that 65 countries had “refused to condemn the United States” over its decision on Jerusalem – a tally of “no” votes, abstentions and no-shows.

“While the resolution passed, the vote breakdown tells a different story,” said a spokesperson for the US mission.

“It’s clear that many countries prioritized their relationship with the United States over an unproductive attempt to isolate us for a decision that was our sovereign right to make.”

The Palestinian ambassador insisted the vote was more about Trump’s foreign policy approach than the status of Jerusalem.

“They made it about them,” said Mansour. “They did not make it about Jerusalem, so when you make it about them and to only be able to get nine votes to say ‘no’ to it, I think it was a complete failure for their campaign.”

Israel seized the largely-Arab eastern sector of Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, claiming both sides of the city as its “eternal and undivided capital.”

But the Palestinians want the eastern sector as the capital of their future state and fiercely oppose any Israeli attempt to extend sovereignty there.

They said the fire started from a vehicle in the basement parking lot of the eight-story building that houses several leisure facilities, inclduing a fitness club, sauna, restaurants and an indoor golf practice facility, in the city,  about 170 kilometers southeast of Seoul.

Most of the victims were found in the public sauna on the second and third floor, the authorities said.

It was not still known the cause of the deadly fire.  About 20 fire engines and trucks as well as 50 firefighters were sent to scene, according to news reports.

They said the fire started from a vehicle in the basement parking lot of the eight-story building that houses several leisure facilities, including a fitness club, sauna, restaurants and an indoor golf practice facility, in the city,  about 170 kilometers southeast of Seoul.

Firefighters search for missing persons after a fire broke out in an eight-storey building in Jecheon, 120 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on December 21, 2017. // AFP PHOTO

Most of the victims were found in the public sauna on the second and third floor, the authorities said.

It was not still known the cause of the deadly fire.  About 20 fire engines and trucks, as well as 50 firefighters, were sent to the scene, according to news reports.

President Moon Jae-in ordered a thorough investigation into the fire incident.

Rescue members carry the body of a victim from an eight-storey building after a fire broke out in Jecheon, 120 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on December 21, 2017. // AFP PHOTO

Hailed by the plaintiffs — a Spanish taxi association — as “a social victory”,  the case is yet another thorn in the side for US-based Uber, which has drawn the fury of taxi drivers and officials for flouting local regulations.

It also comes the same week as one of its drivers admitted to the attempted rape and murder of a British embassy worker coming home from a night out in Beirut, Lebanon.

“The service provided by Uber connecting individuals with non-professional drivers is covered by services in the field of transport,” said the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice.

“Member states can therefore regulate the conditions for providing that service.”

Uber, the biggest name in the growing gig economy, claims it is a mere service provider, connecting consumers with drivers in more than 600 cities.

Uber has run into huge opposition from taxi companies and other competitors who say this allows it to dodge costly regulations such as training and licensing requirements for drivers and vehicles.

The case was brought by a taxi drivers’ association in the Spanish city of Barcelona, where belief runs high that Uber is a taxi company that should be subject to rules governing such vehicles.

“This will truly represent a social victory, and the whole of society will benefit from this,” Ivan Esma, spokesman for the Elite Taxi association, told reporters, adding that “the road will be long” for the ruling to be enforced.

Ruling ‘won’t change things’

Uber said the ruling would make little difference in practice.

“This ruling will not change things in most EU countries where we already operate under transportation law,” an Uber spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“However, millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours.”

In a dense legal judgement, the ECJ said that Uber was a service that connects “by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys.”

That means it is “inherently linked to a transport service and, accordingly, must be classified as a ‘service in the field of transport’ within the meaning of EU law.”

The EU court’s senior adviser had said in a legal opinion in May that Uber was indeed a transport company.

Uber has had a rough ride in Spain, where a judge ruled in 2014 that its UberPop service risked breaking the law, leading to the Barcelona submission to the ECJ.

Early last year it decided to only operate a limited a version of its UberX service in Spain which uses licensed, professional drivers instead of the amateurs who had previously worked via the UberPop application.

Uber has already had problems with the law in several European countries, particularly France where the company was forced to overhaul its business model.

In November a labour court in London, where the company is threatened with losing its license, said it had to pay the drivers a minimum wage and give them paid leave.

Uber does not employ drivers or own vehicles, but instead relies on private contractors with their own cars, allowing them to run their own businesses.

Licensed taxi drivers meanwhile often have to undergo hundreds of hours of training, and they accuse Uber of endangering their jobs by using cheaper drivers who rely only on a GPS to get around.//AFP

The Thai People in Eight Mekong Provinces Network working group met in Chiang Rai’s Chiang Khong district yesterday, with participants concluding that the Mekong was under imminent threat of irreversible damage by proposed hydropower dam projects on the main tributary in China, Laos and Cambodia. The discussion also highlighted that there were still no effective legal tools to regulate projects.

China’s potential cancellation of the Mekong River navigation channel improvement project was also a major discussion topic. The working group considered whether the move was because the Chinese government had recently passed a new law forcing the Chinese investment board to respect the laws of destination countries and ensure that investments did not affect the environment or violate human rights.

On Tuesday, Thailand’s Foreign Affairs Minister Don Pramudwinai said China would change the scope of the project or cancel it in order to relieve the concerns of Thai people over the adverse impacts to the environment and people’s livelihoods.

Community Resources Centre coordinator Sor Rattanamanee Polkla said China’s adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights was good news, resulting in a more positive trend of development on the river.

The network members also concluded that Chinese project owners in the region had become more active working with local people about their projects.

However, Sor Rattanamanee emphasised the need for an international law to safeguard the environment and human rights in the Mekong River region, given the current lack of oversight and existing projects generating problems for the environment and riverside residents.

“Even though Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam signed the Mekong Agreement 1995, there has been no real enforcement of the regulations in the agreement,” she said.

“Moreover, we have found that there have been many attempts to wrongly interpret projects’ scope to avoid the enforcement of the regulations in the Mekong Agreement, such as in the Khong-Loei-Chi-Mun water diversion project and the Mekong River navigation channel improvement project.”

She said everyone had a duty to demand and campaign for legal tools for environmental and human rights protections.

Meanwhile, Somkiat Keuanchiangsa, coordinator of the Network for Preservation of Natural Resources and Lanna Culture, also said strategic environmental assessments should be conducted before environmental impact to assess the value of projects in all aspects weighed against the cost to the river ecosystem.

Somkiat also asked the governments of Mekong countries to review the damage to the river over the past two decades, as people who depend on the region’s natural resources were suffering due to the degrading ecosystem resulting from development projects.

    Victoria state police said they had arrested the driver of the car after it “collided with a number of pedestrians” in downtown Melbourne at a busy intersection just before 5pm local time (0600 GMT).

Police did not immediately say whether the driver had acted deliberately.

Paramedics were “treating and transporting to hospital” 13 people, with some seriously injured after the collision on Flinders Street between Elizabeth and Swanston streets, Ambulance Victoria added.

Sky News Australia reported that a pre-school child with a head injury was taken to hospital in a serious condition.

Citing witnesses, Sky said a white Suzuki SUV with two men inside drove into the crowd, with no signs the vehicle made an effort to slow down, but later crashed into a bollard.

In a tweet, police appealed to members of the public to upload any images they might have of the incident to a cloud address to help assist with their investigation.

A witness, Sue, told Melbourne radio station 3AW that she heard screams and saw “people flying everywhere”.

“We could hear this noise, as we looked left, we saw this white car, it just mowed everybody down,” she said.

“People are flying everywhere. We heard thump, thump. People are running everywhere.”

Another witness, John, told ABC Radio Melbourne that he saw a “SUV coming at high speed”.

“(I) really just heard the collision with people with bags and what must be shopping trolleys – and I hope not prams,” he said.

“I’ve really never seen anything like this before and I haven’t stopped shaking.”

The incident came months after a car mowed down pedestrians in Melbourne’s busiest mall in January, killing six people.

The driver, whose case is still being heard in court, had been pursued by police prior to the rampage after he had allegedly stabbed his brother.//AFP

    UN Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee had been due to visit Myanmar in January to assess the state of human rights across the country including in Rakhine, which was plunged into crisis by a military crackdown on the Rohingya minority Muslim community in late August.

Some 655,000 of them have fled for Bangladesh since then, with accounts of arson, murder and rape at the hands of soldiers and vigilante mobs in the mainly Buddhist country.

The UN has accused troops of ethnic cleansing and possible “elements of genocide” against the Rohingya — charges the government vigorously denies as it faces intense global outrage.

“I am puzzled and disappointed by this decision by the Myanmar government,” said Lee, who is required to go to the country twice a year in order to report to the Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly.

“This declaration of non-cooperation with my mandate can only be viewed as a strong indication that there must be something terribly awful happening in Rakhine, as well as in the rest of the country,” she added.

The South Korean academic said she was told the decision was based on a statement she made after her last visit to Myanmar in July, in which she sharply criticised the government’s rights record and its treatment of the Rohingya.

At the time the government criticised the statement as “biased and unfair”.

The UN confirmed Myanmar had withdrawn all cooperation for the duration of Lee’s tenure.

Myanmar’s government spokesman Zaw Htay said Lee had been barred because she was not unbiased.

“She is not impartial and objective while conducting her work. There is no trust on her,” the spokesman said.

But Amnesty International described the ban as “outrageous”.

“It is a further indication that authorities will do anything they can to avoid international scrutiny of their human rights record,” said James Gomez, the rights group’s director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

“The Myanmar military claim they have done nothing wrong during the past months. If so, the authorities should have nothing to hide — why are they denying access for independent and impartial investigators?” he said in a statement.

Lee, who has visited Myanmar six times since 2014, has consistently sounded the alarm over the persecution of the Rohingya.

The stateless group has been targeted by bouts of violence and systematically stripped of legal rights in recent decades.

But the latest crisis is the worst to rip through Rakhine state in years.

Myanmar has blocked journalists and investigators — including a UN fact-finding team — from independently accessing the conflict zone.

Last week two Reuters reporters were arrested for allegedly possessing documents relating to the security forces in Rakhine, raising fears that fragile press freedoms are being further eroded.

The journalists’ families, lawyers and colleagues have not been told where the two are, and have not been allowed any contact with them.

The pair could face a maximum sentence of 14 years in jail under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act.//AFP

More than 35,000 pangolins — docile, ant-eating mammals with a thick armour — were seized by Indonesian authorities between 2010 and 2015, exposing the scale of the illegal business, the study by wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic said.

Indigenous to parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, the pangolin is prized as an edible delicacy and ingredient in traditional medicine, especially in China and Vietnam, and is the world’s most trafficked mammal.

Rampant poaching is putting Indonesia’s indigenous manis javanica species at an “extremely high risk of extinction”, the group said.

“Indonesia’s wildlife is being drained on an industrial scale to feed the global illegal trade,” Kanitha Krishnasamy, acting regional director for Southeast Asia, said in a statement.

“While the relatively high number of seizures speaks to Indonesia’s commitment in tackling the problem, it also highlights the relentless poaching.”

The study found at least 127 suspects had been arrested in connection with the trade over six years in Indonesia.

Sumatra was identified as a hotspot and served as a key link to smugglers in Malaysia and Singapore, where the animals were most often sent on to China and Vietnam.

Indonesia’s government said it could not halt the illegal trade alone and urged recipient countries to crack down on importers.

“Don’t just blame Indonesia. It takes two to tango,” Bambang Dahono Aji, the conservation director at Indonesia’s Environment Ministry, told AFP.

“We are huge archipelagic nation with limited resources to monitor all the sea routes.”

In October, more than 100 live pangolins were seized in a fishing boat off the east coast of Sumatra. Two people were arrested for attempting to smuggle the scaly mammals to Malaysia.

That came after more than 223 live pangolins as well as nine large bags of pangolin scales were discovered in a warehouse near Medan, North Sumatra, in June.

Many of these Penang hawkers, who have started to get paid via the China-based cashless payment platform that uses a smartphone app and QR code, are making more money too.

Durian seller Mike Chuah, 54, said his business improved after he started accepting Alipay, known as Zhifubao in Chinese.

Chuah, who operates a stall in New Lane here, likened Alipay to a credit card, saying it is easy and safe to use.

“This is because they do not need to use up their remaining cash (before they leave for home) and they won’t feel the pinch,” he said.

Karen Yeoh, 51, who run a jiu hu eng chai (cuttlefish salad with water convolvulus) stall, said the Alipay platform can also help advertise their business.

“Alipay is currently used only by Chinese tourists.“When they see our Alipay signboard, they will order the dish.

“For example, if the bill is RM28, I only need to open the app, key in the amount and scan the barcode for the transaction to complete. The sum will be deposited into my bank account within two days.

“They don’t even have to convert their money. This digital form of payment allows more people to continue spending after they run out of local currency,” she said.

Yeoh said she was hesitant at first about the new app but jumped on the bandwagon after being encouraged by her daughter.

“She told me to start or I would be left behind. Once I got started, I found it quite easy to use. What’s more, the app is free,” she added.