AsiaCast

Asia Cast for Saturday 22nd September

Nearly ten-thousand Buddhist monks marched through Myanmar’s second largest city, Mandalay, on Saturday, their biggest demonstration since launching a street campaign against the ruling military junta five days ago.

A group calling itself the All Burma Monks Alliance also, for the first time, urged ordinary people to join the monks “to struggle peacefully against the evil military dictatorship till its complete downfall”.Until now the monks have discouraged others from joining the marches, the most sustained protests since 1988 pro-democracy rallies were crushed by the regime, for fear of reprisals against civilians and to ensure the demonstrations remain peaceful.

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Major powers said on Friday they had “serious and constructive” talks about new U.N. Security Council sanctions aimed at trying to force Iran to halt its uranium enrichment activities.

But the officials of the five permanent Security Council members and Germany said they will keep pursuing a “dual track” approach to Iran¡ªtrying to persuade it to abandon enrichment via negotiations while considering new sanctions.

Western nations, which suspect Iran may be seeking to develop an atomic bomb under the cover of its civil nuclear program, have demanded Tehran suspend its uranium enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for a bomb.

Iran says its nuclear program is to generate power so it can export more of its oil and gas and has so far rebuffed three U.N. Security Council resolutions¡ªincluding two that imposed sanctions¡ªdemanding it halt uranium enrichment.

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In the West Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, nine cases of Ebola virus have been confirmed, the epicentre of an outbreak that has killed at least one-hundred and seventy-four people.

Symptoms of the epidemic – high temperature, bloody diarrhoea, visible haemorrhaging – were first seen on April the twenty-seventh in the Kampungu region of West Kasai.

The Belgian chapter of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) says it had five people with Ebola in its clinic in Kampungu.

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On the nineteenth of September, the authorities seized the fund of China Celestial Human Rights Centre sponsored by a Taiwan NGO.

The human rights website claimed that the fund would be applied to the operation of human rights related activities. Yet, Bank of China, which is a partner for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, reported them to the authority as they are against the convention of international commercial banks.

The popular human rights website is comprehensive, also the first of its kind in Mainland China since its operation in the 1990¡¯s, with several thousand cases of human rights and public interests winning the support across the Mainland.

It has also been severely suppressed by the Communist regime.

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On the morning of September the nineteenth, a few children at Shiyan Pre-school of Wu-wei City were diagnosed by the local health department as having food poisoning.

Two-hundred and sixty of the children were treated at the in-patient department of a hospital with sixteen of them in a fairly serious condition.

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Four-hundred and thirty-three laid-off cadres jointly appealed to the UN Human Rights Organization and Refugee Rescuing Centre for desperate help.

In their letter of petition, they revealed that after ten years of being laid-off they were without land or business and had no means to make a living.

They had made numerous desperate appeals to all levels of the government, writing over a thousand letters to report their wronged conditions for years, but with no response.

They have no alternatives but to appeal to the UN Human Rights Organization and Refugee Rescuing Centre for much-needed aids.