Daily round-up, Aug 12: Tradenation couple charged; Singapore man gets life sentence for Newcastle murder; J&J to stop selling talc baby powder

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The couple at the centre of an alleged multi-million-dollar luxurious goods scam has been charged in court.

Pi Jiapeng, 26, and Siriwipa Pansuk, 27, have been on the run for five weeks, before getting arrested in Malaysia and handed over to Singapore police.

Speaking to the courtroom, Pi said it was “not right” to allow them to have fled the country and that he and his wife were “facing a lot of death dangers and pressure” at the time.

Fong Soong Hert was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his wife, Pek Ying Ling, while they were on holiday in Newcastle.

The minimum sentence in the UK for murder, and the determine ruled that Fong must serve 12-and-a-half years in jail before being regarded as for parole.

Johnson & Johnson will stop selling talc-based baby powder globally in 2023, more than two years after this ended US sales of the product.  

Instead, every its baby natural powder will be cornstarch-based.

The drugmaker people about 38, 000 lawsuits claiming its talc products triggered cancer.

It denies the allegations, saying decades associated with testing and regulating approvals show talc is safe and free of asbestos.  

Homebuyers in China are usually boycotting mortgage payments over fears their properties will not be completed by cash-strapped developers.

Chinese authorities launched a crackdown upon excessive debt in 2020, squeezing financing options for property industry giants as they fought to make repayments and restructure mountains associated with debt.

Analysts estimate that Chinese language developers have just delivered around sixty per cent of homes they pre-sold between 2013 and 2020.

The crisis leaves homebuyers in limbo and saddled along with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

And with casing and job woes growing, more Chinese language citizens are thinking of an exit option,   Hong Kong Baptist University’s Yew Wei Lit writes in this comments .

“To me personally, the pandemic has brought home to many people that the people that all of us look down on, we spend very poorly, we all disrespect, are essential to our security and well being, ” Ambassador-at-Large Professor Tommy Koh mentioned in a Heart of the Matter podcast over the conversations Singapore should have as it faces a post-pandemic future.

“We need to take much better care of these people, inch he said.

Listen to the podcast to hear the unfiltered views of 3 generations of Singaporeans, including that of Prof Koh.