AsiaCast

Asia Cast for Thursday 22nd May

In this Bulletin

-United Nations Chief Ban Ki-moon meets with Burma’s military ruler
-Coalition urges Burma to stop the use of child soldiers’ and
-China’s Government accused of redirection of relief supplies

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Aid agencies say they are delivering only 30% of what they could to help cyclone-hit Burma 20 days after Cyclone Nargis struck.

United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon recently arrived in Burma to meet with military ruler Gen Than Shwe.

Mr Ban said the focus should be on saving lives, not on politics.
Burma’s rulers have blocked large-scale international aid but have now agreed to allow some UN helicopters to carry supplies to survivors.

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A human rights group says consensus that minors should not be soldiers in Burma has failed to protect tens of thousands.

Burma has been named as the most persistent user of child soldiers, with thousands in its armed forces – some as young as 11, a human rights group says.

The governments of six other countries, five of them in Africa, also recruit children, says the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

The number of armed conflicts involving children has gone down from 27 to 17.

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You’re listening to Asia Cast on the SOH Radio Network
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The devastating earthquake that hit south-west China last week has left thousands of children without parents.

The Chinese Government now has to decide how to care for these children, with state media reporting that until order is restored, the local government will be responsible for the orphans.

Dr Larry Gee, from China Red Cross, has told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia program the orphaned children will be suffering deep psychological trauma.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs says many people and organisations domestically and internationally have offered to adopt children orphaned by the earthquake, but Chinese authorities are in no rush to adopt them out.

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With supporters of the Chinese regime spitting, throwing eggs, beating people, and shouting propaganda, the scene this week in New York City’s Flushing Chinatown looked like something from China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Edmund Erh, a Queens resident who has faced the brunt of the attacks.

Erh was part of a group of Falun Gong practitioners who for the past three years has organized peaceful rallies to encourage Chinese people to quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that has ruled China for the past 60 years.

Falun Gong is a spiritual practice that was banned in China in 1999.

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And now for our original SOH news direct from China
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A China Seismological Bureau official said to media recently that the Wenchuan earthquake was impossible to predict, and have never received any prediction. This has been refuted by the seismological expert Chen Yiwen.

Mr. Chen claimed that he himself warned the Chinese Communist authorities three times with a prediction of the earthquake, and the last time was on May 3, 2008.

Though the Chinese Seismological Bureau forecasted successfully the 1975 Haicheng earthquake and the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, this time the Chinese communist authorities concealed the predictions.

According to “Southern Workers” newspaper, a school in a disaster area that received an emergency evacuation notice one hour before the quakes, survived while the vast majority of people who failed to evacuate died as a result of the regime’s concealment of the earthquake forecasting. It has not been made clear why there would be a concealment of such information.

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Eight days after the earthquake, Mainland China has received 13.925 billion yuan worth of contributions from around the world.

But the whereabouts of these materials is of much concern.
Continuous rain drenched the post-earthquake disaster areas in Sichuan, where victims of the disaster areas are homeless and suffering from wind and rain.

However, special disaster relief tents have been set up in the luxury community of Chengdu City which is not an earthquake disaster area.

Chinese bureaucrats are busy around the reception to welcome the central leadership while at Chengdu airport and all accesses to the disaster areas, materials and goods are pilling up with no one responsible for distributions.

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“Asia Cast… keeping you across the top headlines from Asia and the World.”