YANGON – Myanmar appeared to have escaped with only minor damage to buildings including pagodas after a magnitude 6.9 earthquake that rattled its remote north, police said Thursday, as early reports said there not had been any casualties.

The quake, which struck late Wednesday more than 130 kilometres (80 miles) below the surface, was felt from China to Bangladesh, where scores of people were injured in stampedes as panic spread.

But initial surveys suggested the damage was limited in Myanmar, according to an official from Sagaing province, around 100 kilometres from the epicentre.

“We have no casualties although there was some small damage to pagodas in villages,” a police official told AFP, requesting anonymity.

“People are now enjoying the water festival,” he added, referencing the Buddhist new year celebrated across the region.

The Relief and Resettlement Department posted on its Facebook page that “there were no casualties, injuries or major damage to buildings because of (the) earthquake.”

A second, unnamed policeman in the capital Naypyidaw, said emergency checks on the quake-rattled zone had so far revealed only minor damage to buildings.

“It seems like there was not so much damage from the quake,” the officer told AFP.

“But we are releasing instructions of ‘dos and don’ts’ if earthquakes occur in the future.” Wednesday’s quake rippled out to Bangladesh, which shares a border with Myanmar.

More than 80 people in the country were injured, mostly in stampedes as panicked residents fled their homes and offices, local television reported.

In neighbouring India, tremors were felt in several northeastern cities, while Chinese state media said some residents in the Tibetan city of Lhasa ran out into the streets in panic.

Earthquakes are relatively common in Myanmar, but the country has not seen a major quake since November 2012, when a powerful 6.8 magnitude tremor struck the centre of the country, killing 26 people and injuring hundreds.

Crumbling infrastructure and poor urban planning in Myanmar has made the country’s most populous areas vulnerable to earthquakes and other disasters, experts say.

Around 450 Vietnamese drug addicts have escaped from a rehabilitation centre where many were held for compulsory treatment, an official said Thursday.

The detainees attacked guards, climbed walls, and broke down the main gate at the centre in the Vietnam’s southern province of Ba Ria Vung Tau late Wednesday.

“We have brought 150 patients back, while search efforts are underway for nearly 300 others,” Le Thi Trang Dai, director of the provincial labour department, told AFP.

Vietnam’s communist government enforces a compulsory treatment programme for the country’s estimated 140,000 drug addicts.

Addicts can also voluntarily enter the centres to undergo rehabilitation treatments.

The escapees were a mix of compulsory and volunteer admissions, Dai said.

Local authorities are urging families to bring back runaway patients so they can complete their treatment, she added.

“Police are also investigating the reasons behind the escape, trying to understand if there is a leader behind the incident,” she said.

The escapees have been begging for clothes from local residents and trying to hitchhike out of the area, the state-run VN Express newspaper said.

“Others have escaped into (a) nearby deep forest,” the report added.

Addicts undergo two-year spells of treatment at the centres aimed at curbing rising drug use rates, especially among young people.

US-based Human Rights Watch has denounced the conditions in Vietnam’s rehab centres and a UN expert has recommended they be closed.

HRW says the treatment centres are “forced labour camps” where inmates do not receive proper health care and are often subjected to physical violence.

Addicts are mostly forced to report to the centres by their family or local authorities, but they are not criminals.

HONG KONG – Jasmine Li was still a student when she opened her first offshore bank account through Mossack Fonseca Hong Kong, but the shady world she entered that day had been part of the city’s underbelly for decades.

The granddaughter of China’s then fourth-ranked politician was among dozens named in a vast cache of documents leaked from the Panama law firm that have given a glimpse into how the rich and powerful hide their money.

But the so-called Panama Papers, released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists this month, have also exposed the key role played by Hong Kong and Singapore in funnelling that wealth into tax havens.

Mossack Fonseca’s Hong Kong offices were their busiest in the world, the ICIJ analysis showed, setting up thousands of shell companies including some linked to China’s top political brass, the city’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, and movie star Jackie Chan.

Experts say the Asian financial hubs have already channelled billions into tax havens, and the Boston Consulting Group predicts they will be the world’s fastest-growing offshore centres over the next five years.

“Hong Kong is set up to make it easy for people to do business, and it is very easy to do business here,” said Douglas Clark, a barrister with one of Hong Kong’s largest chambers.

“But when it’s easy to do business then it’s easy to do any type of business, legal or illegal.” Offshore companies are not necessarily illegal, but they operate on the fringes of what is allowed and their opaque structures make it easy to conceal ill-gotten or politically inconvenient wealth.

They have proved a boon for Hong Kong and Singapore, which are known not only for their financial expertise but also light-touch regulation, discretion and non-co-operation with foreign tax authorities.

Both are already on regulators’ radars – the EU briefly added Hong Kong to its tax blacklist last year – but experts say they are unlikely to do anything to jeopardise the lucrative offshore business.

Domiciling offshore has a long history in the region. In 1984, then trading house Jardine, Matheson & Co, one of the most powerful companies in Hong Kong’s colonial history, relocated to Bermuda citing concerns about the city’s handover to China.

“Hong Kong’s history as a financial centre that specialises in turning a blind eye to things that would be investigated elsewhere goes right back to the 1960s,” said financial commentator Tom Holland.

Today, Chinese investors use offshore companies legally in Hong Kong to bypass red tape, take advantage of tax breaks for foreign investors and circumvent strict capital controls.

Hong Kong University law professor Douglas Arner said it has become “perfectly normal” for companies to park money from overseas operations offshore, as the city does not tax profits made elsewhere.

But their widespread use has earned Hong Kong and Singapore reputations for murky dealings, and the Tax Justice Network ranked them among the least transparent places in the world in last year’s financial secrecy index.

In Singapore, seen as more rigorous in policing its financial sector, the TJN said a culture has evolved of enforcing the law domestically but tolerating the illicit money that flows in from crimes committed overseas.

“Singapore is not only a secrecy jurisdiction… but also a tax haven, providing numerous tax avoidance and evasion opportunities,” the group said in its profile of the city state.

Clark said criminals, drug dealers, email scammers and corrupt Chinese officials have turned to Hong Kong to try to hide their money offshore.

But even when used legally, offshore companies can make it harder to sniff out crime.

Shareholder activist David Webb said three-quarters of companies listed in Hong Kong are domiciled in the Cayman Islands or Bermuda, but their opaque structure makes it practically impossible to tell who is behind transactions.

“I don’t think there is any appetite in the stock exchange to look under that particular rock, because they’ll find snakes if they do,” he said. “They see tighter regulation as a problem.” A Hong Kong exchange spokesman disputed Webb’s figures and said all listed companies must comply with Hong Kong and exchange rules.

Despite the controversy, few expect authorities in Hong Kong or Singapore to change their regulations surrounding offshore dealings any time soon given how lucrative the industry is.

And, because the cities’ own laws haven’t been broken, experts say even international efforts to stop tax cheats are unlikely to make any difference.

“If anything, this is going to make people even more careful when they set up offshore holdings,” said Clark.

“People will make sure investments are structured in such a way that if they are ever revealed, you won’t be in trouble.” Hong Kong authorities said they were aware of the Panama Papers allegations. Singapore’s monetary authority said it was investigating and “will not hesitate to take firm action” against wrongdoers.

BEIJING – Chinese legal authorities on Thursday formally disbarred a prominent rights lawyer who was handed a suspended sentence last year for writing Internet posts the government said incited ethnic hatred, ending his career.

Activists have said the three-year suspended sentence for Pu Zhiqiang would serve as a strong reminder to other rights lawyers that the Communist Party, currently engaged in a severe clampdown on dissent, would brook no challenge to its rule.

Pu has represented many well-known dissidents, including artist Ai Weiwei and activists of the “New Citizens’ Movement”, a group that has called on Chinese leaders to make their wealth public, and his case attracted wide concern in Western capitals.

Pu told Reuters he had received the formal notification from the Beijing City Judicial Bureau that his lawyer’s licence had been revoked. He declined further comment, saying he was not supposed to accept interviews.

Calls to the judicial bureau seeking comment went unanswered.

Fellow rights lawyer and friend Shang Baojun told Reuters the disbarment had been expected since Pu’s conviction in December, because a person found guilty of a criminal offence is not allowed to practice law. “Unless one day his conviction is overturned, then he’ll never be allowed to practice law again. It’s really the end of his career,” Shang said.

The charges against Pu were based on seven microblog posts that he had published online, criticising the government’s ethnic policy in the troubled western region of Xinjiang and several officials, according to his lawyers.

The news of the disbarment comes as the US State Department criticised Beijing’s “severe” crackdown against lawyers and law firms handling cases that authorities consider politically sensitive.

China has always strongly denied accusations of human rights abuses, saying people like Pu are punished because they break the law and that nobody in China is above the law.

China has also criticised the United States for ignored its own human rights problems, such as racism and police brutality.

SEOUL – South Korean President Park Geun-Hye’s ruling conservative party was reeling Thursday from a shock electoral defeat that broke its 16-year parliamentary majority and threatened its chances of retaining the presidential Blue House in 2017.

Voters punished the party for its economic record, analysts said, with high levels of youth unemployment accounting for particularly high dissatisfaction among younger people.

The crushing defeat leaves Park, who has less than two years left of her single, five-year term, as a lame duck leader and will weaken her ability to push through her conservative agenda, including labour reforms.

Pollsters had forecast an increased majority for the Saenuri, saying its hawkish stance towards North Korea would provide an electoral boost at a time of surging military tensions with North Korea.

But provocations by Pyongyang, including a nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch a month later, appear to have had little effect at the ballot box.

“This is the voters’ judgement against President Park. All the pent-up anger they had about the worsening economy and widening inequality exploded in this election,” said Choi Chang-Ryul, a politics professor at Yongin University.

Political power in South Korea is firmly concentrated in the presidency and Park has fallen short on most of her key economic promises, a failure she puts down to legislative inaction.

But critics accuse her of skewed priorities, poor decision-making and a dogmatic style of leadership.

Wednesday’s defeat saw Park’s Saenuri Party win just 122 seats in the 300-member chamber, sharply down from the 152 it held in the last parliament.

It marked the first time since 1999 the conservative party has lost control of parliament, with the three liberal opposition parties garnering a combined 167 seats.

The main liberal opposition Minjoo Party was the largest grouping, with 123 seats.

Losing the majority would mean projects such as labour reforms that critics have said would make it easier for businesses to fire workers would likely lose steam, said Jeong Han-Wool, senior fellow at the East Asia Institute.

“This miserable poll result will also greatly hurt the party’s prospect for the 2017 presidential election,” he added.

Several Saenuri party heavyweights seen as potential successors to Park suffered shock defeats, some by large margins.

Party chief Kim Moo-Sung offered his resignation as leader to take responsibility for the rout.

The left-wing opposition had sought to frame Wednesday’s vote as a referendum on Park’s economic policies, with the jobless rate among those aged 15-29 at record levels.

Factional infighting and breakaways split the liberal vote, but the result represents a clear shift leftwards for the national assembly.

Under Park’s presidency, annual economic growth in Asia’s fourth largest economy has averaged around 2.9 per cent compared to 3.2 per cent under her predecessor Lee Myung-Bak.

Exports, which account for more than half of GDP, have fallen for the past 14 months consecutively, while household debt has soared to a record $1.0 trillion (S$1.4 trillion)