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The Corruption and Crime Commission has found a former Curtin University lecturer tried to pressure students into sexual favours in return for higher marks. The CCC report revealed Nasrul Ali asked three students for sex in return for better marks while he was working at Curtin's Business School last year. It says Dr Ali reduced the marks of a fourth female student because he was angry with her when she did not meet him while they were separately visiting Malaysia. The CCC report says he targeted young, vulnerable, full-fee paying overseas students but none of them accepted his advances. Three...

What's wrong with this picture? Senator Hillary Clinton is urging President George W. Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in order to protest China's crackdown in occupied Tibet. At the same time, Bill Clinton's foundation takes money from a Chinese Internet company alleged to be part of the same crackdown in Tibet that Mrs. Clinton feels so strongly about. According to the Los Angeles Times, Senator Clinton's recent stern comments on China's internal crackdown collide with former President Bill Clinton's fundraising relationship with a Chinese Internet company accused of collaborating with the mainland government's censorship of...

Shares of Alibaba.com, China’s biggest e-commerce company, more than doubled in price in their Hong Kong debut on Tuesday, outperforming a largely flat market. Alibaba.com, part of the Alibaba group that includes internet auction site Taobao, raised $1.5bn in the world’s biggest internet offering since Google. Alibaba.com’s share price traded as high as HK$32, compared with its IPO price of HK$13.50, before returning to opening levels around HK$30. Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index was up 0.9 per cent at 29200 in the morning, after a 5 per cent fall on Monday in reaction to news of delays in a...

BEIJING, China (AP) -- China will have to tolerate more dissent as its economy grows and opens up to the rest of the world, former President Clinton said Sunday. Clinton, who is on a four-day visit to China, also said he would have raised the case of a Chinese journalist imprisoned for allegedly providing state secrets to foreigners when he spoke at a conference on Saturday but he had not been aware of the issue at the time. Clinton delivered the keynote address at a conference hosted by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc.'s new Chinese partner, Alibaba.com, at the eastern...

Former US president Bill Clinton urged China yesterday to recognize the urgency of the environmental threats to its growth, and to use the Internet as a tool to surmount them. But he remained silent on the risks faced by those who use the Internet as a forum for dissent. "You will have to come to grips with significant challenges to your growth," Clinton said at an Internet conference in this eastern resort city, warning that the energy consumption required to keep China's economy growing at its recent rate of more than 9 percent is "unsustainable." Clinton, the keynote speaker...

Yahoo Inc. is close to paying $1 billion and forking over its China operations for a 35 percent stake of China's second-largest e-commerce operator, Alibaba.com, a source close to the discussions said on Wednesday. The deal is in the final hours of discussions, the source told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. Members of the Chinese media have been invited by Alibaba to a news briefing set for Thursday in Beijing. The combination would create an e-commerce giant by bringing together Alibaba's business-to-business and consumer online auction sites with Yahoo's search operations, China's second largest after leader Baidu.com. Yahoo's shares...

BEIJING (AP) - Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) is paying $1 billion in cash for a 40 percent stake in China's biggest online commerce firm, Alibaba.com, strengthening the ties that international companies are forging in the world's second-largest Internet market. Yahoo said it will merge its China subsidiaries into Alibaba as part of Thursday's deal, the biggest in a flurry of investments by foreign Internet firms eager for access to China's soaring number of Web users, now pegged at 100 million. "This is Yahoo getting much bigger in China," Daniel Rosensweig, Yahoo's chief operating officer, said at a news conference in Beijing...

Saudi Kingdom to test warning sirens The Saudi Kingdom is set to test a siren warning system nation-wide next week, according to a Saturday newspaper report. Sirens throughout the country will sound at midday next Saturday to "verify safety and readiness" for use in case of emergency, an unidentified official source at the Saudi kingdom's civil defense told Okaz. However, the test was "not related to the existing circumstances in the region, or an indication that a possible (United States) war on Iraq is nearing," the source added. (Albawaba.com)