AsiaCast

Asia Cast for Wednesday 31st October

One person was killed and 42 injured, 15 seriously, in a gas explosion in a building northeast of Paris, emergency officials said on Tuesday. Police said a fire broke out after an explosion of gas mains in the centre of the suburb of Bondy.

“One person was found dead in the wreckage of the building,” a local authority spokesman said.

He said 42 people had been injured, 15 seriously and three were in an extremely serious condition.

Gilbert Roger, the mayor of Bondy, said that a restaurant and another building had caught fire

A Huge demand for tickets to see the 2008 Beijing Olympic games has caused the ticketing system to crash.

Organisers said an average of two hundred thousand applications were being submitted through the website every minute.
There were also long queues outside banks selling tickets, and telephone lines were jammed.

This second round of sales has made one point eight million tickets available to people in China, following a lottery in June which allocated one point six million tickets.

Tickets are being sold on a first-come-first-served basis through the official ticketing website, run by the Beijing Olympic Games Organising Committee .

The website received eight million hits in the first hour alone.

Tickets were also on sale by phone and at designated Bank of China branches across the country

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Kim Dae-jung, South Korea’s former President, is said to be not happy with the results of an official report into his abduction from Tokyo in 1973.

The South Korean National Intelligence Agency admitted last week to seizing Mr Kim while he was in Japan.

Mr Kim said the report did not make clear his belief that the agents had originally intended to kill him.

He also said it should have stated that the incumbent South Korean leader Park Chung-hee had ordered the abduction.
With the publication of the report on Tuesday, Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said he now considered the issue closed and urged Japan and South Korea to look to the future.

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The Burmese army is forcibly recruiting thousands of children to cover gaps left by a lack of adult recruits, says a report by a US-based human rights organisation.

Human Rights Watch says children as young as 10 are beaten or threatened with arrest to make them enlist.

Burma has previously said it is working towards preventing the recruitment of children by the military.

Human Rights Watch has urged the UN Security Council to do more to punish Burma over its alleged use of child soldiers.

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Up to Fourteen children working in a textiles factory in New Delhi have been rescued after media reports said an Indian supplier to US retailer Gap was employing underage workers.

Police carried out the raid after alerts by a non-profit organisation which acted on a British newspaper report that Indian children as young as 10 were working for a Gap supplier in New Delhi.

The children who were rescued late on Monday worked in the building that houses the Gap supplier, but did not produce clothes for the US label, said the Save the Childhood Foundation, which works to rehabilitate child workers.

The government has already lost control of the upper house of parliament at elections in July, and would not welcome a fresh poll for the lower house, correspondents say.

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Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has failed to make a deal with the opposition party to continue supporting a naval mission in Afghanistan.

Japan has been providing fuel for coalition forces in Afghanistan, but its mandate runs out on 1 November.
Mr Fukuda held talks with Democratic Party leader Ichiro Ozawa, who said he could only back such a mission if it was part of a United Nations operation.

There are fears the dispute could spark early elections in Japan.

The government has already lost control of the upper house of parliament at elections in July, and would not welcome a fresh poll for the lower house, correspondents say.

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This is …………………………………. from the SOH Radio Network.