AsiaCast

Asia Cast for Saturday 24th November

In this bulletin …..
-Twin Pakistan Suicide Blasts Kill at Least sixteen
-Passengers Unhurt After Antarctic Cruise Ship Hits Ice and
-Fatal triple bomb attack in India

Twin suicide blasts killed at least 16 people in the Pakistani garrison town of Rawalpindi adjoining Islamabad early on Saturday, the military said, including 15 aboard a defence ministry bus.

A suicide bomber rammed a car into the back of the bus outside an intelligence service office. Another bomber blew up his car at a checkpoint outside army headquarters.

The attacks come on the heels of a string of suicide bombings blamed on Islamist militants amid rising insurgency, and as Pakistan heads towards a general election in early January in political convulsions under emergency rule.

********************

More than one-hundred and fifty passengers and crew escaped unhurt after their cruise ship hit ice in the Antarctic and started sinking Friday.

A Norwegian passenger boat in the area safely picked up all the occupants of the Explorer from the lifeboats they used to flee the ship when it ran into problems off King George Island in Antarctica at 0524 GMT, the Explorer’s owners said.

A spokesman for Gap Adventures, the Canadian travel company that owns the vessel, said one-hundred and fifty four passengers and crew had been on board the ship. He had told Reuters earlier the number was one-hundred.

********************

In the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh three near-simultaneous bomb blasts have killed thirteen people.

Nine people were killed in the holy city of Varanasi, UP Chief Minister Mayawati told journalists, and four in the city of Faizabad.

The other attack was in the state capital, Lucknow.

There has been a number of bomb attacks in India this year, which have left well over 100 people dead.

********************

A senior UN official has said that Indonesia has a “culture of impunity” in the face of ill-treatment and torture.

Manfred Nowak, special rapporteur on torture, has spent two weeks inspecting the country’s prisons and police and military detention centres.

Mr. Nowak said he found evidence of detainees being electrocuted, suffering systematic beatings and even being shot in the legs at close range.

He called on the government to make torture a separate crime under the law.

The BBC’s Lucy Williamson, in Jakarta, says Indonesia has regularly come under scrutiny for its human rights record.

Mr. Nowak’s visit is the third by a UN human rights monitor this year.

********************

A 27 year-old farmer from Henan Province, Chen Chao, sued the forced labor system via legal proceedings.

At present, the lawsuit case has been accepted by the court. Yet, a Forced Labor Foundation of an amnesty body headquartered in Washington believes that more and more forced labor camps are being built in China with several hundred thousand people being confined.

Demolishing the system is entirely up to the Central Government, which is beyond the power of local courts, since Mao Ze-Dong initiated the system in 1957 when Mao classified several hundred thousand of intellectuals as rightists for persecution.

********************

Yuan Wei-Jing, the wife of the blind human rights activist Chen Guang-Cheng, wrote an open letter to the state heads on the twenty-second of November. She shared her consent of Hu and Wen to be concerned with the life of the common people and to run the country by law.

Yet, the officials at the grass roots level simply ignored the policy. With her own experience, she exposed how the Shandong authority is breaching the law.

Chen Guang-Cheng is a popular blind legal worker, who once won the title “The One Hundred Influential Individuals of the World” published in the American Times.

Before the authorities incarcerated him, he had been striving for the rights of farmers and the disabled, providing legal aide for many common folks in need of help.

Since Chen’s imprisonment, his wife has been closely watched, kidnapped and bashed violently. She is deprived of her rights to visit her husband in jail, and barred from seeing a doctor.