Asia-Cast

Asia Cast for Wednesday 17th October

President George W. Bush hosted the Dalai Lama on Tuesday despite China’s warning that U.S. plans to honor the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader could damage relations between Beijing and Washington.

The White House talks were held on the eve of a congressional award ceremony for the Dalai Lama, but the Bush administration took pains to keep the encounter with the president low-key in a bid to placate China.

Beijing has bitterly denounced plans for the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile in India since staging a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, to receive the Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday.

Bush will attend the ceremony on Capitol Hill, the first time a U.S. president will appear in public with the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists and a Nobel Peace laureate whom China regards as a separatist and a traitor.

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In Tonga, an annual Pacific regional summit has opened, raising the issue of how to deal with Fiji following last year’s coup high on the agenda.

Both Australia and New Zealand have imposed sanctions on Fiji’s military rulers, and want regional leaders to urge Fiji to return to democratic rule.

But other Pacific leaders have suggested a more conciliatory approach.

Leaders from 16 nations are attending the two-day Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Tonga’s capital.

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Following the arrest of Madam Liu Jie, a human rights defender from Heilongjiang Province, prior to the 17th Party Congress, another activist Wang Gui-Lan was arrested, being charged with “subverting the state power” of Clause 5 under the Criminal Law.

The Epoch Times disclosed on the 8th of October that a petition letter signed by over twelve thousand people, represented by Liu Jie, Wang Gui-Lan, Cheng Ying-Cai and Liu Xue-Li, was publicized over the internet and emails, calling on the attention of the regime to impose concrete policies to protect its citizens’ rights stipulated in the Constitution.

Residents have also been deprived of their rights to their houses, unemployment, aggravated law and order, badly-consumed resources, degenerated morality, and outcries of petitioners who appeal for justices.

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A large-scale protest took place on the 14th of October in Kunshan City, due to employees from the foreign electronics factory suffering from long-term exposure to harmful substances, which led up to the illnesses in hundreds of people with some already dead from the substances-induced cancer.

Staff demanded medical compensation but the employer refused. Nearly two thousand employees went on strike.
Police deployed hundreds of riot squads to the scene to disperse the employees.

The confrontation resulted in some being taken away by the public security.

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In Egypt, four bodies and several people are missing after a crash sent passengers boarding a ferry spilling into the Nile.

An unidentified interior ministry official told the official Middle East News Agency the dead included three children.

Five other people were slightly injured in the accident in the province of Minya in central Egypt, about two hundred km south of Cairo, he said.

Minya Governor said seven people were unaccounted for.

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Japan is considering to cancel a humanitarian grant worth millions to Burma, over the shooting death of a Japanese journalist caught in the military crackdown.

Japan has reneged on a five point two one million grant to the military junta, according to Japan’s foreign minister Masahiko Komura, who said it was in connection with the killing of Kenji Nagai, aged fifty, in Burma last month.

It is the first punitive action taken by Tokyo since Burma’s junta launched its deadly crackdown on demonstrators, prompting Western-led calls for further sanctions on the military regime.

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Australia Labor politicians they are concerned at the number of people removed from the rolls in the lead up to next month’s election.

The Australian Electoral Commission says removing One hundred and forty three thousand people from the rolls is part of a process to maintain the accuracy of the voting record.

Commission spokesman Phil Diak says people are taken from the rolls if their addresses cannot be verified.

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