World briefs

PHILIPPINES The country’s top diplomat says his country won’t raise its recent international arbitration victory against China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea during Asian summit talks that Manila will host this year.

SINGAPORE A court in Singapore has found a former manager at a private bank guilty of failing to report more than USD1.26 billion in suspicious transactions in a case linked to the indebted Malaysian state fund 1 MDB. Jens Sturzenegger, a Swiss national and former manager at Falcon Private Bank pleaded guilty to six charges including not disclosing information and lying to investigators.

MYANMAR More than 3,000 people have fled airstrikes and heavy fighting in northern Myanmar since the weekend as the government tries to flush out rebel positions, activists said yesterday. 

NEPAL’s government yesterday fired the chief of the agency assigned to rebuild the nearly 1 million homes and other structures damaged in a devastating 2015 earthquake, officials said. The official was removed because of delays in the reconstruction work. He was given two chances to explain the delays but the responses were not satisfactory.

RUSSIA’s deputy prime minister, responding to calls for the nation’s sports teams to be excluded from all international competitions because of doping, said yesterday that the country is “among the cleanest in the world.”

YEMEN Heavy fighting continued to rage yesterday near the strategic Red Sea strait of Bab al-Mandab in western Yemen, leaving dozens dead and wounded, security officials said. Since Monday, fighters aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognized President, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, have been making advances and seizing more territory from Yemen’s Houthi rebels, the officials said.

SYRIA An opposition monitoring group and rescue workers say airstrikes have resumed in a Damascus suburb despite a Russian-Turkish cease-fire in Syria, killing at least one woman and injuring several others. Since the cease-fire came into effect on Dec. 30, fighting has raged as government troops attempt to gain ground.

GERMANY’s Interior Ministry says that about 280,000 new asylum-seekers arrived in the country last year — far below the influx of 890,000 in 2015. Arrivals declined sharply with the closure of the Balkan migrant route in March and the subsequent agreement between the European Union and Turkey to stem the flow across the Aegean Sea to Turkey.

BRITAIN is considering charging employers 1,000 pounds (USD1,200) a year for every skilled worker they recruit from the European Union after the U.K. leaves the bloc, the country’s immigration minister said yesterday.

US President Barack Obama bid farewell to the nation in an emotional speech that sought to comfort a country on edge over rapid economic changes, persistent security threats and the election of Donald Trump.