AsiaCast

Asia Cast for Saturday 15th August

Frightened residents on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island huddled in tents outside their damaged homes on Friday, traumatized by the latest of more than fourty aftershocks since a huge earthquake struck two days ago.Indonesia’s meteorology agency issued on Friday the latest in a series of tsunami warnings after another strong quake in Sumatra, although it was lifted about an hour later.

Officials said food and other aid had reached some of the areas hit by the quake, but added many more tents were needed as people were still sleeping in the open, either because their houses had been destroyed or because they were too scared to return home in case of further quakes.

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Floods from torrential rains have caused the deaths of at least eighty more people, displaced thousands, and devastated crops and livestock across sub-Saharan Africa.

Often prone to drought, East and West Africa also frequently endure floods in August and September, the end of the rainy season.

In the worst-hit nations in East Africa, government and aid agencies have said that at least sixty-three people died in Ethiopia, fifteen in Rwanda and nine in Uganda.

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Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Hu Jintao conversed with Taiwan envoy Stan Shih at the APEC summit in Sydney on September the eighth. A rare sight to see, Hu chatted with Chen Shui-bian’s representative Shih on a love seat for five to ten minutes.

Central News Agency reported that Taiwan’s representative at APEC, Stan Shih, stated on September the nineth that he had already passed on President Chen’s message and good wishes to U.S. President Bush and CCP leader Hu.

He could not disclose the exact content, but his talk with Hu did not touch upon the issue of Taiwan holding a referendum on whether to apply for membership in the United Nations under the name of Taiwan. As to whether he had talked about this with Bush, Shih said that it was “not appropriate” for him to answer.

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In a latest report by Asian Newsweekly it exposes a sinister plot of Henan villages that carry the AIDS virus.

The report said that since 2004, four former committee members of the Henan Provincial Discipline Inspection Commission have accused Li Changchun, a member of the Central Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), of severe negligence of duty.

This has resulted in hundreds of thousands of new HIV infections and more than seventeen-thousand three-hundred deaths due to AIDS.

But Li still remains in power because he is a direct descendant of Chinese ex-president Jiang Zeming.

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In a report on September the thirteenth by the Hong Kong Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, it stated that with the Chinese Communist Party’s Seventeenth Congress just around the corner, another wave of petitioners controls have been sweeping across the nation.

Local police have been monitoring about one-hundred thousand people who used to appeal in Beijing and are forcibly stopping them in local areas.

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Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will meet U.S. President George W. Bush in New York this month on the sidelines of a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

The talks will follow a slew of reports and testimony in Washington this week about Iraq, including an announcement by Bush on Thursday that he would start reducing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh did not say specifically when Maliki would meet Bush, but he said the Iraqi leader would be heading to New York around September twenty-first.

He said the two leaders¡ªwho met last week when Bush made a surprise trip to Iraq¡ªwould hold a “general evaluation” about the situation in Iraq.