The Royal Brunei Police Force is seeking an Indonesian woman Ani binti Hasan Karim, 47, who is believed to have run away from her employer. She bears the passport number C7400994.
Members of the public with information can contact the Sengkurong Police Station at 2661334 or call 993 or visit the nearest police station.
Local cyclist Amiruddin bin Haji Mohammad Amir won the men’s open category in the 6th Layar Cycling Carnival in Sarawak on Sunday.
Amiruddin, representing Anak Brunei Cycling Team, was among the winners at the competition organised by Saberkas N36 Layar; the Betong Survery and Land Division; and the Sarawak Bicycling Association.
The competition saw some 200 participants compete across an 89-kilometre route across the hilly terrain of Ulu Layar Road. Other categories include Junior, Master A, Master B, Super Master, Women Open, Sarawak Closed, Men Open, and Betong Closed
Amiruddin came first in the men’s open category with a time of 2:15.46.
Among the 200 participants that represent the best cyclists from across the region, Brunei cyclist Amirudddin bin Haji Mohammad Amir from Anak Brunei Cycling Team was among the winners in the 6th edition of the Layar Cycling Carnival (LCC).
Indonesian domestic helper Yayah Nurhayati, 41, pleaded guilty to a charge of child abuse on Tuesday, and will be sentenced on September 26.
Yayah was charged under Section 28(1)(a) of the Children and Young Persons Act, Chapter 219, for abusing her employer’s 10-month-old son on August 26. The incident took place at the family’s residence in Mukim Gadong ‘B’.
According to prosecutor Aeny Zullizam, the defendant, who was responsible for the care of the child, forcefully fed him by shoving food into his mouth, who started crying. She then pushed his forehead backwards and pinched the left side of his thigh.
The incident was recorded on CCTV. The child’s father lodged a police report the following day. Yayah was arrested and admitted to the offence during police investigations. She has no prior convictions in Brunei Darussalam.
Intermediate Court Judge Pengiran Masni Pengiran Haji Bahar will hand down the sentence on September 26.
The court will consider the penalties under the Children and Young Persons Act, which include a fine of up to BND20,000 or imprisonment for up to 10 years. The court may also require the defendant to undergo counselling and psychotherapy as part of the sentencing. – Fadley Faisal
SEOUL (AFP) – High-profile South Korean actor Yoo Ah-in was found guilty Tuesday of illegal use of the anaesthetic drug propofol and handed a one-year jail term, the Yonhap news agency reported.
Yoo, whose real name is Uhm Hong-sik, was accused of using propofol on 181 occasions between 2020 and 2022. The drugs were administered at professional clinics, under the guise of having cosmetic procedures done.
The prosecution had sought a four-year sentence for the actor, but the Seoul Central District Court handed the 37-year-old a one-year jail term, Yonhap reported.
“He is deemed guilty of all his purchases for habitual drug use,” the court stated in its ruling, according to Yonhap News TV.
The court said Yoo had committed the offences “in disregard of relevant regulations” and displayed a “lack of caution against drug substances”.
A doctor who administered propofol to Yoo without a proper prescription was fined KRW40 million (USD30,000) last month.
Propofol, while primarily used as a surgical anaesthetic, is sometimes abused recreationally, often with the involvement of medical professionals who may be willing to provide it without a legitimate clinical need.
An overdose of the drug was cited as the cause of pop star Michael Jackson’s death in 2009.
“I am sorry for having caused concern to many people,” Yoo was quoted as saying in court by Yonhap.
Yoo rose to stardom in the South following his debut in 2003, starring in a range of television dramas and films across genres, and becoming one of the country’s most recognisable actors.
This trial marks the latest drug scandal to hit South Korea.
In a similar incident, K-pop star G-Dragon faced allegations of drug use and was questioned by police, but the case was dropped in November due to insufficient evidence.
Actor Lee Sun-kyun, known for his role in the Oscar-winning film Parasite, took his own life in December after being accused of illegal substance use, sparking public outrage over what many perceived as an excessive investigation by the police without substantial evidence.
Lee Jae-yong, then vice-chairman of Samsung Electronics, was convicted in 2021 of illegally using propofol and was fined KRW70 million. He was found guilty of repeatedly receiving the anaesthetic at a plastic surgery clinic in Seoul on numerous occasions over several years.
The state government has also given conservation officers the power to order people to move away from crocodiles to avoid any potential human-crocodile interactions.
Linard said the reforms would help keep people safe in areas inhabited by crocodiles.
“People may think feeding crocs or interacting with them is fun or harmless, but experience shows that doing so increases the risk to public safety,” she said in a statement.
There have been three fatal crocodile attacks on humans in Australia in 2024, all in the country’s north.
David Hogbin, a 40-year-old doctor, was dragged into a river by a crocodile while walking with his wife near the far north Queensland town of Cooktown in August. His remains were found inside a 4.9-metre male saltwater crocodile that was euthanised by authorities days later.
In the Northern Territory, which shares a border with Queensland, a 16-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl were killed by crocodiles in separate incidents in April and July.
A three-year monitoring programme that ended in 2019 estimated that there were between 20,000 and 30,000 crocodiles in Queensland, with most found in the state’s far north.
Bob Katter, a federal senator representing Queensland, has repeatedly called for crocodile populations in the state to be culled to prevent attacks.
JAKARTA (ANN/KOREA HERALD) – Indonesian unicorns, once thriving start-ups valued at over USD1 billion, seem to have lost their direction over the past few years with funding becoming increasingly difficult to find, while some have seen their market capitalisation plummet years after going public.
Follow-up funding for tech companies has become less and less frequent, for late-stage or early-stage companies, with additional venture rounds for existing unicorns taking place at lower valuations.
Edward Ismawan Chamdani, treasurer of the Venture Capital and Start-up Indonesia Association (Amvesindo) told The Jakarta Post on August 19 that this was a result of the burst of the valuation bubble that formed before mid-2022 when there was “too much capital chasing too few winners”.
Back then, the market trusted heavily on this metric to gauge rising start-ups, but now many companies found themselves under intense pressure to justify their inflated valuations after the trend passed.
“For some others, this led to down-rounds, where additional funding was raised at lower valuations. Others, with less capital and shorter runways, struggled to secure follow-on funding, forcing them to either slash spending, merge or close down,” he said.
Funding for start-ups declined to just USD400 million from 100 deals in the first half of last year according to the annual e-Conomy Southeast Asia report published on November 1, 2023, by tech giant Google, Singapore-based Temasek and the United States-based research firm Bain & Company. Previously, it was USD3.3 billion from 302 deals in the same period of the previous year.
Venture builder Ecoxyztem CEO Jonathan Davy said on August 20 that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) remains unproven with few local success stories.
This, in turn, had made it more difficult for start-ups to plan for exit strategies due to the lack of a clear model for successful ones.
The lack of follow-up funding and larger ticket sizes is pushing some early-stage start-ups to shut down amid a lack of clear direction as many start-ups now face a rapid pivot toward profitability.
“We even see early generation Indonesian unicorns that went public seeing their valuations plummet, as the market deemed them overvalued,” he highlighted.
GoTo, formed in 2021 through the merger of unicorns ride-hailing firm Gojek and e-commerce platform Tokopedia, once represented the largest corporate merger in Indonesian history.
Gojek became the country’s first unicorn in 2016 and reached decacorn status by 2019, joining the ranks of tech companies with a valuation of more than USD10 billion.
At the time of its initial public offering (IPO), its valuation was projected at over INR400 trillion (USD28 billion with exchange rate pegged in 2022), but that had steadily declined to around INR57 trillion as of August 23, which technically stripped its decacorn status.
Last year, GoTo sold a 75 per cent stake in Tokopedia to Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s video-sharing platform arm TikTok for USD1.8 billion.
Meanwhile, Bukalapak was estimated to be valued USD6 billion in 2021 when it became Indonesia’s first unicorn IPO. Now its market cap is squeezed to just over INR12 trillion as of August 23, which using today’s exchange rate is below the threshold to become a unicorn.
The exception is PT Global Digital Niaga (Blibli), which initially boasted a valuation of USD3.4 billion at the time of its IPO in 2022. Its market cap has instead increased to INR56 trillion as of August 23.
Capital Asset Management investment analyst Martin Aditya told the Post on August 21 that in the case of GoTo, investors had become wary over its low stock price and exit of original shareholders and founders despite the company having reported improved fundamentals the first half of this year.
“They should focus on the financial services unit,” he said. “It’s difficult to rely on their on-demand services and e-commerce arms.”
According to CB Insights, six new homegrown unicorns have joined the club between 2021 and 2022 as of this August, with four of them operating in the financial services sector.
In total, Indonesia may have over a dozen unicorns, if including former ones. Meanwhile, the country is estimated to have over 10,000 start-ups this year, but only around 646 of them have been funded, according to market research firm Tracxn’s report for Indonesia in the first half of this year.
Kopital Kenangan cofounder Fandy Chandrajaya told the Post on Aug. 21 that he remained bullish for the publicly listed tech firm, viewing it as a key example of Indonesia’s ability to foster multibillion-dollar tech companies.
“At the end of the day, [GoTo] is still a INR60-70 trillion company. It’s not a decacorn now, but it will go back to being one eventually,” said Fandy, emphasizing that the local tech industry was still in its maturation phase.
The recent market correction, while intense, was deemed healthy and ultimately beneficial for the industry, Fandy opined, especially with second-time funders now entering the space.
He acknowledged the limited exit opportunities for start-ups and lower exit valuations could scare businesses, but he emphasised, “The numbers never lie. A good company is a good company in any market.”
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Eleven people go on trial in Sweden on Tuesday accused of illegally dumping toxic waste in the country’s biggest-ever environmental crime case.
A once-acclaimed waste management company is accused of dumping or burying some 200,000 tonnes of waste from the Stockholm area at 21 sites, with no intention of processing it correctly.
Among those charged with “aggravated environmental crime” is its former chief executive Bella Nilsson, who once called herself the “Queen of Trash”.
High levels of PCBs, lead, mercury, arsenic and other chemicals were released into the air, soil and water, prosecutors said, endangering the “health of humans, animals and plant life”.
They say the now-bankrupt NMT Think Pink “collected waste with no intention or ability to handle it in line with environmental legislation”.
The waste consisted of everything from building materials to electronics, metals, plastics, wood, tyres and toys.
Think Pink left the piles “unsorted” and abandoned, according to the charge sheet.
Nilsson’s ex-husband Thomas, the company’s founder, and Leif Ivan Karlsson, an eccentric entrepreneur who starred in a reality show about his over-the-top lifestyle, are also among those indicted, along with “waste broker” Robert Silversten.
An environmental consultant who helped the company pass inspections, Magnus Karlsson, has been charged as an accessory.
All 11 accused have denied committing any crime.
In its heyday from 2018 to 2020, the company’s fuschia-coloured construction waste sacks could be seen on many a Stockholm sidewalk, and the company twice won a prestigious Swedish business prize.
Burning dumps
Think Pink was hired by municipalities, construction companies, apartment co-ops and private individuals to recycle and dispose of building waste.
But the business came crashing down in 2020 when its owners were arrested.
Bella Nilsson – who has now changed her name to Fariba Vancor – has previously told Swedish media that the company acted in line with the law, and insisted she is the victim of a plot by business rivals.
“She has an explanation for all of this,” her lawyer Jan Tibbling told the Dagens Nyheter daily on Monday.
Considered Sweden’s largest environmental crime case, the police investigation runs to more than 45,000 pages, with 150 witnesses due to testify.
One prosecutor, Linda Schon, told Dagens Nyheter that they had to limit the charges to 21 sites because they were running out of time.
“There may have been a number of sites we haven’t been able to investigate,” but “we believe that 21 sites is enough to show that the crimes were systematic,” she said.
Several municipalities have sought damages for clean-up and decontamination costs, totalling 260 million kronor (USD25.4 million).
One of the biggest claims is from the Botkyrka council, where two Think Pink waste piles burned for months in 2020 and 2021 after spontaneously combusting. One was near two nature reserves.
The trial, which begins at 9.30am local time (0730 GMT) is expected to last until May 2025.
BEIJING (AFP) – A school bus ploughed into a crowd of people outside a middle school in eastern China on Tuesday, killing 11 parents and students, state media reported.
State broadcaster CCTV said the driver “lost control” of the vehicle as it approached the school in Shandong province’s Tai’an city at 7.27am.
The bus ran into a group of parents and children on the side of the road, according to CCTV.
“As of now, (the incident) has caused the deaths of 11 people, of whom six were parents and five were students,” the broadcaster reported in an update just after 11.30am.
It said one other person was in a “critical” condition, while the vital signs of another 12 people were “stable”.
Photos and videos circulating on social media showed people in blood-soaked clothes lying in the road near a hulking grey bus.
Several adults knelt over children sprawled unmoving on the ground, while other people could be heard screaming in the background.
“They’re all dead, it’s so heartbreaking,” a woman’s voice could be heard saying off-camera in one clip of the aftermath of the crash.
“I’d have been killed too if I’d stood there, but luckily I ran away fast,” she said.
AFP was able to geolocate several of the social media photos and videos to the school in Shandong where the crash took place.
The driver was being held by local police and the cause of the incident was “under investigation”, CCTV said.
Many public schools in China reopened for the new academic year this week.
Deadly traffic accidents occur frequently in the country due to lax safety standards and widespread disorderly driving.
In July, police said a vehicle crashed into pedestrians in the central city of Changsha, killing eight people and injuring five.
A 55-year-old suspect living in the area was detained pending an investigation, but it was not clear if the incident was intentional or not.
NEW YORK (AFP) – World number one Jannik Sinner and former champion Daniil Medvedev set up a US Open quarter-final showdown on Monday as both men look to exploit the hole left by the shock exits of Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz.
Australian Open champion Sinner made the last eight for the second time by seeing off US 14th seed Tommy Paul 7-6 (7/3), 7-6 (7/5), 6-1.
Medvedev, the 2021 champion and runner-up to Djokovic last year, outclassed Portugal’s Nuno Borges 6-0, 6-1, 6-3 to reach the quarter-finals for the fifth time in six years.
Women’s world number one Iga Swiatek, meanwhile, stayed on course for a sixth Grand Slam title with a straight-sets win over Russia’s Liudmila Samsonova.
The Italian Sinner recovered from 4-1 down in the first set to see off Paul, who had been hoping to join compatriots Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe in the quarter-finals in New York.
“It will be another tough match with Daniil. There will be a lot of rallies so I have to be ready physically,” said Sinner.
Medvedev is the only former champion left after the first week defeats of four-time winner Djokovic and 2022 champion Alcaraz.
The world number five easily downed 34th-ranked Borges, whose challenge fizzled out under the weight of 51 unforced errors while Medvedev broke serve eight times.
Sinner and Medvedev will be meeting for the fourth time this year.
Sinner came back from two sets to love down to defeat the mercurial Russian in the Australian Open final and came out on top in the Miami semi-finals.
Medvedev then triumphed at Wimbledon in a five-set quarter-final.
“I will try to think more about Wimbledon than the Australian Open,” said Medvedev.
“With Jannik, I feel like we know our games, what we will try to bring to the table, and then it comes to always this moment’s deuce, breakpoint, maybe try to surprise him or not, what he will do, what I will do.”
Draper hails ‘icon’ Murray
Jack Draper became the first British man since Andy Murray in 2016 to reach the quarter-finals by seeing off Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic 6-3, 6-1, 6-2.
The 22-year-old left-hander has only dropped serve once over four matches on his way to a maiden Slam quarter-final, winning 47 of 48 service games and saving 20 of 21 break points.
Draper hailed the influence of Murray, the former world number one and 2012 US Open champion who retired from tennis following the Paris Olympics.
“He’s a legend and an icon and if I have half the career that he had I will be a happy man,” said the 25th seed, who goes on to face Alex de Minaur.
The 10th-seeded De Minaur won an all-Australian battle with Jordan Thompson 6-0, 3-6, 6-3, 7-5.
Four-time French Open winner Swiatek, the 2022 champion in New York, celebrated her 100th Grand Slam match by cantering to a 6-4, 6-1 win over 16th-ranked Samsonova.
The Pole will take on American sixth seed Jessica Pegula for a place in the semi-finals.
“There will be some long rallies and intense hitting,” predicted Swiatek of facing Pegula, who she also beat in the quarter-finals on her way to the title two years ago.
Pegula made the last eight for the second time with a 6-4, 6-2 victory over Russia’s Diana Shnaider.
Beatriz Haddad Maia became the first Brazilian woman to reach the quarter-finals since Maria Bueno in 1968 when she defeated 2014 runner-up Caroline Wozniacki.
The 22nd-ranked left-hander converted a third match point to defeat the former world number one 6-2, 3-6, 6-3.
She will next face 2023 semi-finalist Karolina Muchova, who knocked out French Open and Wimbledon runner-up Jasmine Paolini, the fifth seed, 6-3, 6-3.
Muchova, ranked 52 and who only returned to the tour in June after 10 months out with a wrist injury, has yet to drop a set and knocked out two-time champion Naomi Osaka in the second round.
SYDNEY (AFP) – Australia just sweltered through its warmest August on record, meteorologists have confirmed, with temperatures smashing the long-term average by more than three degrees Celsius.
Bureau of Meteorology data showed that last month was the hottest August since records began in 1910, with several parts of the continent logging their highest-ever maximum and minimum temperatures.
The area-averaged mean temperature across Australia was 3.03 degrees Celsius (5.5 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the long-term average, the bureau said.
From the west coast to the east, record temperatures were recorded, including an all-time winter high of 41.6 degrees Celsius (106.7 degrees Fahrenheit) at a military base on the rugged and remote northwest coast.
The antipodean winter runs from the beginning of June until the end of August.
In all, this winter was Australia’s second-warmest on record, after 2023.
The Bureau of Meteorology said Australia’s mean winter temperature was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.
“Both daytime and night-time temperatures were more than 10 degrees Celsius above August average for large parts of the country,” the bureau said Monday.
About 18 per cent of Australia is desert, and searing heat is common year-round away from temperate zones.
But data shows average temperatures for Australia steadily rising, with climate change fuelling more intense bushfires, floods, drought and heatwaves.
Australia’s climate is heavily influenced by three cyclical climate patterns: changes in Indian Ocean temperatures, changes in a belt of wind that moves between Australia and Antarctica, and changes in Pacific weather patterns known as El Nino and La Nina.
All three of these phenomena are affected by human-induced climate change, according to research by Australia’s state-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
Climate scientists have already predicted that 2024 will be the Earth’s hottest year on record.
Temperature records have tumbled worldwide as human-caused carbon emissions have risen.
This week alone, record temperatures have been recorded in Finland’s Lapland, Shanghai and Japan.
