HANOI: Vietnam’s parliament decided on Wednesday (Nov 29) to raise the effective tax rate on multinationals including Samsung to 15 per cent from Jan 1, and delayed measures to offset the higher levy in a potential blow to the foreign investments the economy relies on. Parliament approved the higher taxContinue Reading
PARIS: Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh won the right to host the Expo 2030 world fair, vote results showed on Tuesday (Nov 28), in another diplomatic victory for a Gulf country after the Qatar World Cup last year. South Korea’s Busan and Italy’s Rome were also in the running to host theContinue Reading
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He’s opened a casual restaurant at Telok Ayer Street called Chicco Pasta Bar, offering not just hearty plates of carbohydrates but also focaccia and sharing platters of Italian street food like roasted cauliflower with garlic chilli sauce, meatballs, salmon tartare, and cold cuts and cheese. Meats from the grill are available at dinner time.
Chicco is “a very, very no-stress restaurant you don’t have to get dressed up for”, in contrast to the slightly more formal vibe at Cenzo, which fans of Nocente’s previous restaurant Salted & Hung will connect more easily with his style of cooking. He still spends most of his time behind the pass at Cenzo, but pops into Chicco quite regularly.
Here, “It’s quality food done properly, in a nice setting. You can sit down, have a drink, chill out and relax. If you’re in a rush, you can just have a quick bowl of pasta. I still feel Singapore has a lot of restaurants but they are always pushing more high-end, like, you’ve got to dress up and spend a fortune. This is more a place to have a peaceful date night or something easy to eat – nothing too over-the-top. It’s still the ethos of Cenzo of quality over quantity, but just a little bit more price-friendly; a little bit more relaxed.”
While Liam is constantly jet-setting around the world, whether for modelling or art shows, her home these days is in Penang, where she moved during the pandemic. “I technically got stuck there during the pandemic and started growing my practice increasingly as my daily life and work intertwined with the city,” she reminisced. “I like Penang; it has fewer distractions, and I find it easier to run a studio and focus on my work.”
Liam’s Penang household also includes her husband, Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic, who first gained fame for the large-scale street art murals he did in George Town. Married since 2018, the couple have studios in Penang.
“We work very differently and have different processes, but I find having a deep understanding of each other’s careers creates a shared experience we both enjoy,” she concluded. “He likes getting feedback, and I enjoy having sole independence over my work. He also creates mess and chaos, and I require a clean studio with no paints or food near my work due to the nature of the raw canvases I work with. Now that we have separate studios, it’s more functional for work-life balance.”
PUBLISHED : 29 Nov 2023 at 05:31
The cabinet has approved a salary raise of 20% over the next two years for newly recruited civil servants.
Danucha Pichayanan, secretary-general of the National Economic and Social Development Council, on Tuesday said the cabinet had agreed in principle to raise salaries by 10% a year in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 as proposed by the Office of the Civil Service Commission (OCSC).
The monthly baseline salaries for newly recruited civil servants will eventually go up from 15,000 baht to 18,000 baht. The first hike will go into effect from May next year after the issuance of the annual budget.
The salary adjustment will also apply to long-serving civil servants in positions below the C8 level who earn less than 18,000 baht per month.
Their salaries will be raised higher than the revised rate for the newly recruited officials.
It is estimated that the government will initially need to spend about 6 billion baht for the hike, and the money is expected to be drawn from a central budget earmarked for emergency use.
However, the increase in the next fiscal year will be worth more than 10 billion baht.
Members of the OCSC, the Comptroller General’s Department and the Finance Ministry will meet to discuss the proposed hike again and set a clear budget plan for raising civil servant salaries.
The hike is to be carried out as the government seeks to slim down the bureaucracy through the use of a trimmed state sector workforce, Mr Danucha said.
Meanwhile, Dr Prommin Lertsuridej, secretary-general to the Prime Minister, said the Office of the Civil Service Commission put forth the salary rise in the hope of boosting the competitiveness of state agencies against the private sector, with a focus on the fair treatment of new recruits.
The hike will be adjusted appropriately according to officials’ positions, he said.
This plan, however, has been criticised by academics as placing a significant burden on the state budget and could affect expenditure in other areas.
Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn, the Minister of Labour, earlier this month said that the minimum daily wage will also be pushed up but to a rate below 400 baht.
The promised 400-baht rate, however, will come later, about the end of next year in certain provinces.
More Bersatu MPs may jump ship now that it is clear the anti-hopping does not work in practice. There are rumours that another three or four opposition MPs may switch their support to Mr Anwar before the end of this year, with the incentive simply the ability to access government funding for their constituency.
This would have increased political pressure on Muhyiddin to take political responsibility for losing the MPs. But after the Bersatu Supreme Council’s swift rejection of his decision to step down, Muhyiddin has confirmation that he is safe politically.
Muhyiddin’s “24-hour resignation” was a shrewd political move. He has emerged stronger politically after the annual party congress when it could easily have turned against him.
More importantly, he is now in pole position to retain the presidency in Bersatu internal elections next year. If he wins without a challenger, then all he has to do is to wait for the next general election, due by 2027 at the latest.
If PN wins that election, then he will break Mahathir’s record as a second-time prime minister.
The bad news, of course, is that Malaysian politics is wholly unpredictable. Anything can happen between now and 2027.
But Muhyiddin’s political stunt ensures that no matter what happens over the next four years, he will remain a major player in Malaysian politics.
James Chin is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Tasmania and Senior Fellow at the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia.
Experts expect China to continue walking a fine line between the developed and developing world. It remains reluctant to take on a more intermediary role, they said.
It is a position that deflects calls for Beijing to take on a more assertive role in climate leadership, yet maintains its position of economic influence among countries calling for more financial assistance from the West.
“They are unwilling to agree to developed country obligations, such as contributing to a loss and damage fund, because they see this as a slippery slope to broader obligations. So it seems they are often selective and strategic in how they portray climate leadership,” Ms Hsu said.
This “special” role could come under more pressure from nations feeling restless about the lack of progress on loss and damage in particular.
Beijing will again likely speak in solidarity with those calling for the mobilisation of assistance funds, another possible flash point with Washington, which has been a consistent drag on the concept.
“China should leverage its ‘in-between’ position to align the (Global) South and North. Its unique status could be the source of an identity crisis, but could also be an asset for Beijing to be a trusted friend with both sides,” Mr Li said.
“The world is anxiously waiting for China to redefine itself,” he said.
China has kept up its breathtaking levels of installing solar and wind power infrastructure and remains crucial to the value chain of green technologies like solar cells, thermal heating and electric vehicles.
But its levels of international engagement have not been fully revived post COVID-19.
Overseas development spending that has been ostensibly frozen under the Belt and Road Initiative has yet to resume in any form under the country’s new project, the Global Development Initiative. A key potential plank of China’s green leadership remains unfulfilled.
For two years, no overseas energy sector lending has been recorded from China’s two development finance institutions to foreign governments, according to research by the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.
“Now is the time for China to use its scale and experience to redirect development finance towards greener goals,” Dr Cecilia Springer, a non-resident fellow with the centre’s Global China Initiative, said in a statement.
But China has remained steadfast about not bowing to outside pressures, a position unlikely to yield at the negotiating tables at COP28.Continue Reading
SYDNEY: At the time of the first major climate change conference, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, China was one of the least developed nations. Its per capita income was below Haiti, Niger and Pakistan. The export sector was smaller than that of Sweden or Austria, and its airports saw fewer departures than Norway’s.
Its emissions were just 12 per cent of the global total, and on a per-capita basis it wasn’t even in the top 50 emitters. As recently as 1985, China had generated less electricity than Canada, and produced less steel than West and East Germany.
With nations set to gather for the latest such meeting in Dubai this week, things have changed beyond recognition.
China is likely to produce half the world’s steel and coal this year, and emit more carbon than every developed nation put together. Even adjusting for its huge population, it now consumes more energy and generates more pollution per person than most countries in Western Europe.
Visitors to its sparkling cities find a country whose amenities rival those of the richest nations. China’s roads, railways, power facilities, public buildings and other infrastructure now add up to a richer stock of public capital per capita than can be found in Australia, Spain or the United Kingdom.
One last crucial measure may soon flip. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it was barely outside of the ranks of low-income countries, a category the World Bank reserves for the least developed nations.
That gave considerable weight to the claim that its emissions needed to be given a pass – that it should, in the language of climate diplomacy still quoted today, benefit from “common but differentiated responsibilities”.
Rapid growth relative to the world since the COVID-19 pandemic means it is now closely tracking the dividing line the World Bank uses to separate high-income nations from upper-middle-income countries. Low inflation and a stable exchange rate may push it above that level in a matter of months.
“It is very close to reaching the threshold for a high-income country,” said Penny Goldberg, a Professor at Yale University and the Bank’s chief economist from 2018 to 2020, by email. “It may not happen this coming year, but it will happen very soon.”
Economically, this would count as one of the most remarkable transformations in human history, and comes decades earlier than anticipated. In the same year as the Rio conference, former leader Deng Xiaoping said it would be “an extraordinary achievement” if China was able to attain the status of a moderately developed country by 2049.
Experts expect China to continue walking a fine line between the developed and developing world. It remains reluctant to take on a more intermediary role, they said.
It is a position that deflects calls for Beijing to take on a more assertive role in climate leadership, yet maintains its position of economic influence among countries calling for more financial assistance from the West.
“They are unwilling to agree to developed country obligations, such as contributing to a loss and damage fund, because they see this as a slippery slope to broader obligations. So it seems they are often selective and strategic in how they portray climate leadership,” Ms Hsu said.
This “special” role could come under more pressure from nations feeling restless about the lack of progress on loss and damage in particular.
Beijing will again likely speak in solidarity with those calling for the mobilisation of assistance funds, another possible flash point with Washington, which has been a consistent drag on the concept.
“China should leverage its ‘in-between’ position to align the (Global) South and North. Its unique status could be the source of an identity crisis, but could also be an asset for Beijing to be a trusted friend with both sides,” Mr Li said.
“The world is anxiously waiting for China to redefine itself,” he said.
China has kept up its breathtaking levels of installing solar and wind power infrastructure and remains crucial to the value chain of green technologies like solar cells, thermal heating and electric vehicles.
But its levels of international engagement have not been fully revived post COVID-19.
Overseas development spending that has been ostensibly frozen under the Belt and Road Initiative has yet to resume in any form under the country’s new project, the Global Development Initiative. A key potential plank of China’s green leadership remains unfulfilled.
For two years, no overseas energy sector lending has been recorded from China’s two development finance institutions to foreign governments, according to research by the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.
“Now is the time for China to use its scale and experience to redirect development finance towards greener goals,” Dr Cecilia Springer, a non-resident fellow with the centre’s Global China Initiative, said in a statement.
But China has remained steadfast about not bowing to outside pressures, a position unlikely to yield at the negotiating tables at COP28.Continue Reading