AsiaCast

Asia Cast Thursday 1st November

- Myanmar Monks March again, U.N. Envoy Due Back

-Caribbean Deaths Mount in Wake of Tropical Storm Noel and

- Chadians Protest Children Case, Cite ‘Slave Trade’

Read on for more

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Buddhist monks in Myanmar staged a protest march on Wednesday, their first since troops crushed a pro-democracy uprising a month ago, as U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari prepared a return visit to the former Burma.

The United Nations said Gambari, who first visited shortly after the army crackdown, would visit Myanmar from November 3rd to the 8th on a second mission to coax the country’s ruling generals into talks with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The latest march by monks in the central town of Pakokku, three hundred and seventy miles northwest of Yangon, suggests the crackdown merely managed to stifle, not eradicate, widespread unrest over forty-five years of military rule and deepening poverty.

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In China, Tianjin’s First Central Hospital director of liver transplantations, Zhu Zhijun, uses medical seminars in other countries, to evaluate potential liver transplants for patients.

Overseas reports have raised concerns, that the largest organ transplant centre in China has many unidentified donors.

The spokesman of the “International Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong,” Wang Zhiyuan said that Zhu Zhijun is the current executive director of Tianjin’s organ transplant centre, and also an organ transplants researcher.

The Coalition’s records state that Zhu Zhijun is one of the key suspects of live organ harvesting in China.

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A massive tropical storm, named Noel, drenched Cuba killing at least sixty-one people with surging floodwaters and mudslides. Noel has strengthened and has begun to head towards Florida and the Bahamas.

The death toll from days of downpour in the Dominican Republic, begun to climb as emergency workers fanned out to bring aid to towns and villages cut off by raging rivers and inundated by chest-high floods.

The storm has claimed forty-one people with another thirty-three missing while at least twenty five thousand, five hundred and forty people were homeless and six thousand three hundred homes had been destroyed.

According to Luis Luna Paulino, head of the Dominican Republic’s emergency operations centre.

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Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has canceled plans to travel abroad on Wednesday, after hearing rumors the government could impose a state of emergency during her absence.

The opposition leader, who was targeted by suicide bombers when she returned home on October the 18th following eight years in exile, had been preparing to go to Dubai to see her husband and three children.

She said at a hastily arranged news conference that senior party aides told her President General Pervez Musharraf might impose emergency measures if the Supreme Court found that his recent election win was unconstitutional.

A ruling is expected later this week.

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Eight people dead and fifty wounded after a bomb ripped through a bus at rush hour in the southern Russian city of Tolyatti.

The Local Governor said a terrorism investigation had been opened after the explosion and he briefed President Vladimir Putin on the emergency measures being taken.

The blast struck residents heading to work and was near university buildings early in the morning at a busy junction in the centre of the city, which is synonymous with Russia’s car industry.

Fragments of glass and metal scattered far from the green bus and the shock wave blew out the windows of a residential block.

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Chadians chanting “no to the slave trade, no to child trafficking” protested on Wednesday against a French group accused of trying to abduct African children as France sought to avoid a row with its former colony.

Several hundred angry locals gathered outside the governor’s office in the eastern town of Abeche, where nine French nationals and seven Spaniards were arrested last week as they tried to fly one hundred and three children out of the impoverished state.

The detained French are members of a group called Zoe’s Ark which said it wanted to place orphans aged three to 10 years from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region with European families.

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