Asia Cast

Asia Cast for Saturday 10th November

In this bulletin ……..
-Pakistan’s Bhutto Released From House Arrest
-Gas leak kills twenty-nine Chinese miners and
-Sunni chiefs killed in Iraq blast

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was freed from house arrest late on Friday, hours after she was stopped from leaving her Islamabad home to lead a rally against the president’s imposition of emergency rule.

A security official said police barricades around Bhutto’s home were being taken down. A spokeswoman for Bhutto’s party, Sherry Rehman, said she had no information about the lifting of the order.

Earlier in the day police prevented Bhutto from leaving her home and sealed off the capital and the nearby city of Rawalpindi to stop a rally against President Pervez Musharraf.

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State media has reported that at least twenty-nine miners have been killed in a gas leak at a colliery in south-west China’s Guizhou province.

The leak happened on Thursday at the Qunli coal mine in Nayong County.

Xinhua news agency said that fifty-one people were rescued from the mine and another six were missing. Seven miners were being treated in nearby hospitals.

Officials are investigating the leak and have suspended operations at all county mines pending safety checks.

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A suicide attack in Iraq’s Diyala province has killed five Sunni Arab tribal leaders.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt in the house of Sheikh Faez al-Obeidi, killing him and four of his relatives.

Those killed were members of the Diyala Salvation Council, a group opposed to the presence of al-Qaeda militants in the province, north-east of Baghdad.

Ten others were wounded in the blast, which happened near the town of Khalis.

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The eighth of November is China Mainland’s “Journalist Day” and it has been over four months since the gutsy reporter Qi Chong-Huai, who exposed the corruption, was arrested by the authorities on the twenty-fifth of June.

The Teng-Zhou Police claimed that the arrest of Qi Chong-Huai was ordered by a “relevant superior”. A photographer of Shandong Province, a freelance writer Ma Shi-Ping was detained by the authorities and charged with the crime of “swindler” on the sixteenth of June this year.

Ma Shi-Ping, who exposed photos he took of the luxurious Teng Zhou Municipal Government complex over the internet was arrested and has not been heard of since then. Another two media workers were arrested the same day with Qi Chong-Huai.

The fate of these journalists has shown that their career in Mainland China is the most risky profession.

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During the 17th Congress of the Communist regime, the representatives read a very conservative internal material which stated that in the past fifteen years, the ranking officials of the Communist regime who defected the country overseas had reached over sixty-one thousand.

The figure excludes those relatives of Jiang Ze-Min who has attained overseas residents’ status, the two sons of Jia Qing-Lin and the son of Zeng Qing-Hong who left to reside overseas in legal identifications.

The survey findings by the Central Disciplinary Committee, the State Council Research Bureau and the Central Bank show that apart from the corrupt officials who were exposed and intercepted in their course of defection, those officers who escaped and defected successfully overseas had packed away with them large sums of the public and state funds.

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In battles in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu more than seventy people have died and more than two-hundred have been wounded.

Ethiopian forces are engaged in reprisal attacks after soldiers’ bodies were dragged through the streets on Thursday.

Somalia’s presidential envoy defended the Ethiopian army’s tactics.

Abdirashid Sed told the BBC that the Ethiopians were responding to aggression by insurgents and had not attacked civilians.

Fighting between Islamist-led insurgents and elements of the Ethiopian army for control of Mogadishu has intensified during the past two weeks, prompting thousands of citizens to flee the city.