Asia Cast for Saturday 27th October
The Global Human Rights Torch Relay aimed at pressuring China on human rights ahead of the Beijing Olympics has arrived in Australia.
The year-long Torch Relay will visit one-hundred cities on five continents before the 2008 Games, in a campaign which calls for an end to China’s human rights violations.
The relay started in Athens, where the torch was lit on August the ninth, before traveling through Europe and the UK and arriving in Sydney at 10am (AEST) today.
It will travel around Australia over the next two months, before continuing its world tour in Africa. In Sydney, the torch was welcomed by a couple of hundred people with a ceremony at Town Hall.
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Thousands came to Centennial Olympic Park on Monday to hear the Dalai Lama. He had come to town to become a visiting Professor at Emory University.
The Dalai Lama arrived, bowing and smiling and pressing his hands together. The 1987 Nobel Peace Prize laureate said he was a simple monk.
He had three points to make in his talk “Educating the Heart and Mind. The first was Compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment.
The second point being Harmony and understanding between religions. The Dalai Lama made a statement saying that some of his Christian friends tell him he is a good Christian and some of his Islam friends say anyone who creates bloodshed, he is not Islam.
The last point the Dalai Lama made was he felt as a Tibetan carrying the title Dalai Lama, that he is committed to speaking for the Tibetan people, in their struggle for justice.
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Iran’s biggest reformist party openly challenged President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline nuclear policy on Friday, a day after Washington imposed new sanctions on the Islamic republic over its disputed atomic work.
The Islamic Iran Participation Front also warned of an escalating crisis with the international community, calling for a review of Tehran’s nuclear policy.
The United States on Thursday dubbed Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a proliferater of weapons of mass destruction and accused its Qods force of backing terrorists. Washington also imposed sanctions on more than twenty Iranian companies, major banks and individuals.
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An independent freelance author, the Chief Editor of China Online of Record and Investigation, Xu Xiang was detained by the local police in Chang-Sha City, Hunan Province, for issuing an article titled, ‘The Secretary of the Politics and Law Committee of Chang-Sha Involved in Framing the Journalist.’
The article was handed over to the local Politics and Law Committee for verification and opinions, which raged the secretary of the Committee, Xie Shu-Lin who detained the author of the article.
Xu Xiang stated that he committed no crimes alleged by the police and did not lie about what he did which was to help the local residents defend their basic rights.
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Human rights activist Yang Chun-Lin, from Jia-Mu-Si City, Heilongjiang Province, finally met his lawyer through arduous efforts. As Yang Chun-Lin talked about his ordeal inside the jail, the meeting was terminated abruptly by monitoring officers.
His lawyer stated that the practice at jail seriously breached the law. Yang Chun-Lin fought for the licit rights of the lost-land farmers at Jia-Mu-Si and collected over ten thousand signatures on the petition of “No Human Rights, No Olympics” raised this June, which infuriated Beijing authority.
He was held in custody by police in July and was arrested officially in August, being charged with “instigating subversions of the state power”.
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