The judge who convicted former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak over the 1MDB scandal said the plunder of the sovereign wealth fund was so vast that it eclipsed the exploits of Attila the Hun, one of history’s most notorious conquerors. “The scale of the plunder that took place (financially speaking, of course) made Attila the Hun look like a choirboy in comparison,” Collin Lawrence Sequerah said in the introduction to his 809-page grounds of judgment. The written judgment was issued on...

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi hailed increasing defence cooperation with the UK during a meeting with her British counterpart Keir Starmer on Sunday, amid uncertainty about a new fighter jet programme. “The UK is a very important partner to Japan given the deepening of ties across a wide range of fields, including security and defence,” Takaichi said as she met with Starmer in London. “Given the GCAP project, I think we have reached a level that we can call a near-alliance,” she said,...

Western allies believe Iran has most likely added new-build Russian weapons to its inventory and reconstituted large swathes of its missile arsenal during the eight-week ceasefire, giving the Islamic Republic the firepower to strike back at nearly full strength if hostilities resume. Tehran has about three-quarters of the munitions it had before the war and can easily build it up further, according to intelligence assessments. That includes unspecified Russian missiles that probably came off the...

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he planned to appoint James McDonald as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the federal prosecutor whose office handles many of the most high-profile cases involving Wall Street. McDonald would replace Jay Clayton, whom Trump nominated as US director of national intelligence less than two weeks after a congressional backlash against his interim appointee, housing official Bill Pulte. Trump had tapped Pulte after Tulsi Gabbard, the...