Beijing | November 6

Al Jazeera - China has described as protectionist new US anti-dumping duties on steel pipes and demanded Washington's recognition that it is a market economy.

The reaction came a day after the US imposed preliminary anti-dumping duties ranging up to 99 per cent on $2.63bn in Chinese-made pipes used in the oil and gas industry.

Tim Johnston | Bangkok | November 6

WaPo - After a rare trip by high-level U.S. diplomats to Burma, there was little indication from either nation Thursday about how the Obama administration's overture of engagment had been received.

Burmese state media merely noted that Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Kurt Campbell and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Scot Marciel met with Prime Minister Thein Sein during the visit on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Nov 6

BBC -
China is planning to hold a robot Olympics in 2010.

The international event will be held in the city of Harbin and will see robots take part in 16 different events.

Robots will be able to compete in familiar Olympic sports such as athletics as well as those more suited to machines such as cleaning.

Entry to the competition will be restricted to robots resembling humans. They must possess two arms and legs. Wheels are banned.

The organisers of the games expect from more than 100 universities from around the world to send competitors to the event.

Ryskeldi Satke | Bishkek,Kyrgyz Republic

http://english.ohmynews.com - Kyrgyz journalist Kubanych Djoldoshev suffered multiple injuries after being assaulted by unknown attackers at about 2 a.m. on November 1 in the southern city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan.
As Djoldoshev recalls, three men approached and beat him, resulting in a concussion and broken ribs.
The emergency staff at the local hospital described his condition as critical.
This is the latest incident in a series of hostile actions against freelance journalists and reporters in the country.
Djoldoshev has been working for the Kyrgyz branch of the RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) prior to his current assignment with a newspaper. The paper, Osh Shamy, has been critical of local authorities in the country's southern region.

Seoul | Nov 4

AFP - The United States and North Korea have agreed to hold two rounds of bilateral meetings before the North returns to multilateral nuclear disarmament talks, a US news report said.

The agreement was reached at last month's meetings in New York and San Diego between officials from the two sides, Foreign Policy magazine said on its website, in a report seen Wednesday.

The communist state, putting further pressure on the United States to start direct talks, announced Tuesday it has completed reprocessing spent fuel rods to produce more plutonium for its atomic weapons programme.

The US State Department responded that the plutonium production "runs counter" to the North's disarmament commitments and violates UN Security Council resolutions.

It said it has not decided when and where to hold bilateral talks involving the US special envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth.

Phnom Penh | Nov 4

AFP - Cambodia said on Wednesday it had appointed fugitive former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra economic adviser to premier Hun Sen in a move that adds to tensions between the countries.

The appointment was announced on state television almost two weeks after Hun Sen first riled Thailand by offering safe haven to Thaksin, who was ousted in a coup in 2006 and is living abroad to avoid a jail term for corruption.

"Thaksin has already been appointed by royal decree... as personal adviser to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and the adviser to the Cambodian government in charge of economy," said a government statement read on television.

"Allowing Thaksin to stay in Cambodia is virtuous behaviour...good friends need to help each other in difficult circumstances," it added.

The statement went on to call charges against Thaksin "politically motivated" and vowed not to extradite him if he "decides to stay in Cambodia or travels in and out of Cambodia in order to fulfill his duties".

WOW

Last week the Washington Post printed two letters from different sources who had spent time on the ground in Afghanistan that came to very different conclusions about the American presence there.

First, there is the letter from Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who had fought in Iraq and had recently taken a temporary foreign service assignment in Zabul province. One State department official referred to this area as, “one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected.” Hoh had developed great misgivings about the war and had become so disillusioned that he chose to resign. Hoh wote in his resignation letter,

It's obvious by what I've written in the past (here and here as well.) that I don't think highly of India's economic prowess, writ large and I don't believe any of the hype when it comes to India's economic miracle. But Quax makes a point about Kerala that deserves further comment.

Quax brings up the point about the matrifocal ethnicity in Southern India, namely the state of Kerala. And he's right: Kerala is different from the rest of India. I'm not sure what makes Kerala different: the prevalence of Christianity, the relative freedom of women in the state, years of Communist rule, and the forward looking and commercial character of Muslims there? Perhaps it's a combination of all four. Needless to say, Kerala was the cleanest, least intimidating and most upwardly mobile of Indian states, even more so than the miracle city of Bangalore. And I found the Muslims in Calicut to be the most forward looking of any Muslims I've ever encountered, outside of pockets in Turkey and those in North Tehran.

Their daughters were educated, free to pursue a love match--not an arranged marriage and not relegated to a very real purdah extant in many places in India. It's the sort of place where a young Indian woman can have lunch with a strange foreign man and no one raises an eyebrow. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the fact that the area around Calicut has been integral to the global economy for two thousand years--ships have plied the monsoons from East Africa to the Malabar Coast since very early Roman times, bringing pepper an other spices to the West in exchange for gold, or how much of it is due to the tolerance between Hindus, Christians and Muslims. There is much more history to this area than meets the eye.

More after the jump.

Nov 3

BBC - Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and deputy Scot Marciel hope to hold talks with the ruling junta and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Mr Campbell, the top US diplomat for East Asia, is the highest ranking US official to visit Burma since 1995.

The visit is being seen as the latest move by President Barack Obama's administration to find ways to engage with the military regime.

The US diplomats are unlikely to see the reclusive chief of the junta, Than Shwe, but will instead meet Prime Minister Thein Sein in the remote jungle capital of Naypyidaw on Tuesday, according to Burmese officials.

They will then travel to Rangoon on Wednesday to meet Nobel Peace laureate Ms Suu Kyi, whose house arrest was extended by 18 months this year, provoking international outrage.

People love to talk about how India is a rising power in Asia:

Upshot: America is done. Our once-great empire is cooked. Not only is China (and India, fast behind) about to stomp all over everyone in economic power and resource abuse, they already own a huge chunk of our debt, manufacture most of our holidays and build almost everything we like to buy. And that includes the device you are reading this on right now. Oh well. We'll always have football.

I'd submit to any writer who just looks at the raw statistics on Indian growth rates to actually visit the place. Take a look at the crumbling infrastructure. Reality looks a lot different on the ground.

Yes, I realize it is only a throwaway sentence by the writer, but still, it's propagating a meme that doesn't represent reality.

Now, there is a case to be made about China. I've seen a great deal of the country and there is a very real energy to succeed and get ahead there. And while many Chinese are mired in poverty, it isn't the kind of nasty, pervasive, grinding poverty to be found in India. In India if you are born poor there is virtually no chance you can rise in society. Not so in China. (Not to idealize the life of the poor in China, mind you. It's still extremely difficult to find real upward mobility in China. In India on the other? For all intents and purposes, such a concept doesn't even exist.)

Furthermore, culturally speaking the Chinese are much better when it comes to cultural or societal innovations than India is. For example: arranged marriages are still the norm in India. And the place of woman is rotten. In China? Not likely. Especially as the idea of romantic love spreads among young female factory workers with a disposable income. (Again, not to idealize often gruesome working conditions for these young women, and yet.)

India when it comes to culture, is probably the most extremely conservative place I have ever visited. Indians like to think they can compete with the Chinese, but they cannot. And we shouldn't buy the tripe that India is an emerging economic power. The only reason we do business with India is wage-arbitrage. It's cheaper to pay an Indian twenty five cents an hour for something a well-educated American would ask fifteen dollars or more for.

And yes, I realize I am a white, post-Colonial man of European descent making cultural judgments. Having visited both countries multiple times I am quite comfortable doing so.

David Boyle | October 31

ABC News (AU)/Radio Australia - The beleaguered Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia have hit another obstacle.

Two pre-trial judges, including Australian Rowan Downing QC, have been accused of taking instruction from their respective governments in a motion filed last week.

Jim Yardley | Barsur, India | October 31

NYT - At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.

“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.

M K Bhadrakumar | Oct 30

Asia Times - The worsening Afghan war has brought some good news for Uzbekistan. On Tuesday, the European Union announced it was lifting a four-year old arms embargo against Uzbekistan. The EU imposed wide-ranging sanctions in 2005 after Uzbek troops fired on civilians during an uprising in the city of Andizhan in Ferghana Valley, and Tashkent rejected calls by Western countries for an international inquiry into those killings.

Tuesday's decision completes an incremental process stretched over the past year or so on the EU's part to kiss and make up with Tashkent. The EU officials justified their decision with Tashkent's recently release of some political prisoners and abolishment of the death penalty. Amnesty International has promptly contradicted the claim with facts and figures.

Aside from the veracity of the EU claim, the reality is that Europe not only blinked first, it also bent its knees while doing so. Brussels kept a straight face, though, assuring the world audience that it would "closely and continuously observe the human-rights situation in Uzbekistan … [and] assess progress made by the Uzbek authorities."

All the same, the EU decision is a good thing. It underscores a new degree of realism often lacking in Western policy towards the strategic Central Asian region. The West has been far too prescriptive towards a region whose civilization dates back several centuries further than Europe's. Besides, the dogma regarding democracy and "regime change" was alien to the steppes and somewhat irrelevant at this point in time.

Are we seeing the end of the "regime change" ideology? The signals are tentative. Statements made by United States Vice President Joseph Biden during his tour this month of Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania, hark back to the former president George W Bush era. But then, Biden was grandstanding in front of people upset over President Barack Obama's reversal on the Anti-Ballistic Missile system deployment in Central Europe.

....The fact that EU was making an exception that it isn't ready to contemplate yet for China should drive home the fact that the Afghan war is hitting the European capitals where it hurts.

Omar Waraich | Sherwangai | Oct 30

The Independent - In the mountains of Waziristan, the army claims to have recovered passports of extremists with links to the September 11 and Madrid attackers. Does this mean they are finally closing in on Osama bin Laden himself?

After a sweep of a militant stronghold in the lawless tribal region of South Waziristan, the Pakistani army has recovered passports purportedly belonging to two leading al-Qa'ida figures, including a member of the notorious Hamburg cell that orchestrated September 11.

Among a pile of documents, photographs, weapons and computers seen by The Independent yesterday in Waziristan, is a German passport belonging to Said Bahaji, the logistical expert of the notorious German terror cell that orchestrated the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Paul Richter | Washington DC | October 30

LA Times - On a fence-mending visit, the secretary of State turns blunt, saying she finds it 'hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to.'

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, visiting Pakistan on a fence-mending tour, turned unusually blunt Thursday, accusing the government of failing to do all it could to track down Al Qaeda.

Clinton told a group of journalists in Lahore that she found it "hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to." Al Qaeda, she said, "has had a safe haven in Pakistan since 2002."

Clinton's three-day visit is her first to Pakistan since she became secretary of State, and its principal goal is to improve strained relations. On the first day of her visit, in Islamabad, she declared that she wanted to "turn a page" in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

But on the second day, frustration seemed to surface as Clinton, a former U.S. senator from New York, confronted the long-standing strains between the countries.

Discussing Al Qaeda, she raised the issue of Pakistan's powerful military intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which has been accused of secretly supporting militant groups in Afghanistan.

"There are issues that, not just the U.S., but others have with your government and with your military security establishment," she said.

Robin Forestier-Walker | Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan | Oct 28

CSM -

Turkmenistan has prevented dozens of students from travelling abroad to study at a US-sponsored university, and has harassed some that have come home.

The United States has in recent months sought to improve relations with Turkmenistan, the secretive former Soviet possession that is home to rich oil and gas deposits and straddles a strategically vital central Asian location, sharing borders with both Iran and Afghanistan.

But those efforts are being complicated by a government campaign against students seeking to study at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA), located in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Some students have been barred from travelling abroad to the school and others have been subject to surveillance and harassment when they come home.

Steve Hynd writes on the growing violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, here.

Zahid Hussain/ Islamabad & Nico Hines | Oct 28

Times online - More than 95 people were killed by a car bomb in Pakistan today as Hillary Clinton arrived to offer US support for the Government’s crackdown on militants.

A series of terrorist attacks have shaken the country since Pakistani troops launched an assault against Islamist extremists in the tribal borderlands near Afghanistan.

Eyewitness and police in the north-western city of Peshawar said the bomb struck the area of the Meena market, which is generally visited by woman shoppers. Witnesses said many of the victims were women and children.

The blast set many shops on fire and people were trapped inside a multi-storey building, which collapsed after becoming engulfed by flames. As the wounded tried to flee, they were engulfed in flames and buried alive by falling masonry.

“Most of the bodies are charred beyond recognition,” a doctor told The Times.

”My entire shop fell on me. Smoke filled my face,” said Raza Ali, 30, a grocery store owner whose face was badly burnt.

Shakil Ahmed, another shopkeeper, said: “There was a huge explosion and black smoke covered the area.”

The explosives-packed car was apparently parked outside a shop and was denoted by remote control, police said.

Relief workers said the number of casualties could rise as most of the 200 wounded were in a critical state. Others may still be trapped inside buildings.

Pierre Salignon | Oct 26

Humanitarian Practice Network - In early July 2009, following on from the closing weeks of fighting between the Sri Lankan army and Tamil Tiger rebels (LTTE), a Times journalist raised the alarm on the mortality rate in the internment camps, opened by the Sri Lankan government. The article reported 1,400 deaths a week in Manik Farm camp, which then held around 280,000 people. Presenting no methodology or basis for this figure, and without naming any names, the journalist cited “a humanitarian source” [1]. This was a serious accusation, corresponding to a rate of 7 deaths per 10,000 persons per day. The emergency threshold applied in crises stands at 1 per 10,000 per day. In other words, according to The Times’ survey the internally displaced in Manik Farm were dying en masse, “mainly due to the sanitary conditions", deprivations and a lack of assistance.

Unsurprisingly, the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health’s version of events differed from the British journalist’report. According to a bulletin covering the period 15th June to 15th July 2009, an average of 5 to 6 people died every day in Manik Farm camp - a mortality rate of under 0.25 deaths per 10,000 per day (the official national average in Sri Lanka stands at 0.15 per 10,000 per day)[2]. Despite the ferocity of the fighting during the conflict’s final weeks, the Sri Lankan authorities found no cause for concern in the camps in June and July – when the Times was concluding the opposite.

How can such troubling and contradictory estimates be explained? Given the lack of access to more specific data, we should turn to other sources. What do NGOs and others present in the field have to say?

Seoul | Oct 27

DPA - In a rare incident, a man from South Korea has defected to the communist North, traversing the heavily fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ), it was reported Tuesday.

North Korea's official news agency KCNA identified the man as Kang Dong Lim, 30, who defected on Monday and 'is now under the warm care' of the relevant North Korean authorities.

'He is pleased with the accomplishment of his desire for defection,' the KCNA report said.

KCNA said that Kang, during his military duty for South Korea, had already attempted on a few occasions to defect. It said that he last had worked in the semi-conductor division of the Samsung company.

Kolkata | Oct 27

Reuters - Hundreds of Maoist guerrillas stormed a high-speed train in eastern India on Tuesday and were battling security forces, police said.

The Rajdhani Express, one of the country's most prestigious passenger trains, was stopped by the guerrillas in eastern West Bengal state.

"About 300 Maoists have stopped the Rajdhani Express and have pulled out the driver," Dilip Mitra, a police officer, told Reuters in state capital Kolkata.

The Maoists, who have stepped up violence across eastern and central India, had asked passengers to get off the train, local TV channels said.

"One policemen has been injured and we are currently engaged in a battle with the rebels," Mitra said.

Maoist rebels regularly attack goods trains and have in the past even hijacked a few local passenger trains in remote districts of India before fleeing.

The Maoist rebellion began four decades ago championing the cause of poor peasants in the east, but has now spread to about 20 of India's 29 states, with the rebels targeting police and government property in hit-and-run attacks.

Washington | Oct 27

AFP - A top Chinese general on Monday defended Beijing's rapid military modernisation, including the development of advanced weapons that threaten US forces in the Pacific, as aimed at meeting its minimum defence requirements.

General Xu Caihou, vice chairman of China's military commission, sought to allay US suspicions over the growing might of the Asian superpower by insisting that Beijing harboured no expansionist ambitions and wanted collaborative international relations.

"We will never seek hegemony, military expansion or an arms race," he told an audience of foreign policy experts at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

But when asked about its development of missiles designed to target US warships in the Pacific, Xu said Western suspicions about China's aims were unfounded.

"It is a limited capability, and limited weapons and equipment for the minimum requirement of its national security," he said, speaking through an interpreter.

Xu, whose position is the rough equivalent to a defence minister, also defended China's double-digit annual increases in defence spending as "quite low" both in real terms and as a percentage of its gross domestic product.

Whereas US defence spending amounts to 4.8 percent of GDP, China's was only 1.4 percent, he said.

The United States has repeatedly urged China to be more transparent about its military spending, warning of a shifting balance of power in the region that could arouse misunderstanding and miscalculation.

Park Si-soo | Oct 26

Korea Times - Disgraced stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk was convicted Monday of embezzling state and private funds and illegally buying human eggs for his research, but was cleared of fraud charges.

The Seoul Central District Court gave the 56-year-old scientist a two-year prison sentence suspended for three years, ending a three-year, four-month saga that dates back to his indictment in 2006.

His lawyer said Hwang was unlikely to lodge an appeal. But the prosecutors are said to be planning to file an appeal, which means that a legal battle over Hwang's case will likely drag out.

Hwang reported false breakthroughs in human stem cell research and had them published in the journal Science and other global research magazines in 2004 and 2005.

However, when it was revealed by a Korean research team that he had fabricated the experimental results, Korea's reputation as a leading scientific country in stem cell research was literally "devastated."

The journal, Science, retracted his papers following the finding and still remains cautious of publishing papers by Korean scientists.

Prosecutors didn't try to penalize Hwang for his test fabrications, leaving that to the discretion of the science community.

The prosecution sought a four-year jail term, but Presiding Judge Bae Ki-ryul reduced it, citing Hwang's dedication to the development of Korea's biotechnology, his lack of a criminal record and deep remorse.

Jason Szep and Martin Petty | Hua Hin, Thailand | October 25

Reuters - Asia-Pacific leaders called on Sunday for regional-wide free trade and other measures to reduce dependence on the United States and big Western markets as Asia leads the way out of the global economic downturn.

[...]

At the meetings, held under tight security, Hatoyama found tentative support from his Asian counterparts for a proposed regional community inspired by the European Union that would account for nearly a quarter of global economic output.

"I think my long-term vision of forming an East Asia Community was largely welcomed by participants," Hatoyama told reporters. The bloc, however, would take more than 10 years to create and may include some sort of regional currency, he added.
The end of the American Empire is near

Martin Hickman | Oct 24

The Observer - Commitment aimed at halting ecological damage done in South-east Asia

Marks & Spencer will commit to paying more for sustainable palm oil across its entire range of products today in an attempt to limit environmental damage in south-east Asia.

In a rolling programme over the next six years, M&S will buy GreenPalm certificates for sustainably produced palm oil equivalent to the amount it uses in almost 1,000 food, beauty and home products. Like other food manufacturers, M&S pours palm oil, the world's cheapest vegetable fat, into a wide variety of food and household products such as biscuits and convenience foods.

By early next year, the retailer said nine products, including 200g packs of oatcakes, a 500g cookie selection and seven types of cooked potatoes, would be covered by the GreenPalm scheme. By 2015, it promised to buy certificates for all relevant products. M&S, which would not disclose the cost of the commitment, is also funding a 120-acre wildlife corridor between plantations in Borneo.