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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oct 20

Asia Times - China, by issuing residents from Indian-administered Kashmir visas different from those given to Indians from other parts of the country, is treating the disputed area as a sovereign entity. This is a surprising departure from Beijing's traditional policy of leaving the Kashmir issue to India and Pakistan to resolve. Delhi suspects a hidden agenda.

New York Times, By David W. Dunlap & James Estrin, October 14

Any effort to describe the photography of Lu Guang by reference to the work of other artists would almost certainly invoke the name of W. Eugene Smith. (It is, for instance, just about impossible to look at Slide 4 without thinking of “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.”)

So it seems especially fitting that Mr. Lu, a Chinese freelancer, is the recipient of this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his project, “Pollution in China.” The announcement was made Wednesday evening in New York by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.

Oct 15

Asia Times -

ADRIFT ON A RUSSIAN ISLAND, Part 1
Koreans left high and dry

When Sakhalin Island, off Russia's east coast, became a Japanese colony in 1905, thousands of Koreans were brought in to work in the fishery and timber industries. When the Soviet Union regained the island 45 years later, the Koreans became virtual prisoners, and a stormy coexistence began that lasts to this day.

This is the first article in a two-part report.

Quite the history lesson~ tina

Daniel Howden | Oct 15

The Independent - From Liberia to Ethiopia, Beijing is constructing a 21st century empire thousands of miles from home

This afternoon more than a dozen Liberians are expected at the Samuel Doe sports stadium in the capital, Monrovia. In a makeshift classroom with some plastic chairs and a whiteboard their teacher, Li Peng, is waiting to finish the group's second week of instruction in Mandarin Chinese. Early attendances at the free daily lessons provided by the Chinese embassy have been poor, but officials are blaming heavy rain rather than light interest. The class is still struggling with the basics and few Chinese listeners apart from their teacher would recognise the strange "hellos" and "goodbyes" being called out.

"Learning Chinese may prove difficult," Mr Li admitted. "But if they work hard they will make it."

The West African country set up to settle freed American slaves in 1843 is English-speaking and the going is hard.

"Traditionally, we Liberians are closer to the Americans than we are to the Chinese," he says. "But the irony is that the Chinese are more open to us than the Americans are."

Liberia's government has no Mandarin speakers, and China's ambassador, Zhou Yuxiao, admits that he's uncomfortable that multibillion-dollar accords between the two countries are signed with one side unable to read the documents.

Tokyo | Oct 9

AFP - China has detected deadly nerve gas at its border with North Korea and suspects an accidental release inside the secretive state, a Japanese news report said Friday.

The Chinese military is strengthening its surveillance activities after detecting the highly virulent sarin gas in November last year and in February in Liaoning province, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported, citing anonymous sources from the Chinese military.

Sarin gas, which was developed in Germany before World War I, was used in the deadly 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway by a doomsday cult.

The Chinese special operations forces found 0.015-0.03 microgrammes of the gas per cubic metre when they were conducting regular surveys while there were winds from the direction of North Korea, the report said.

China suspects that there were some experiments or accidents in its neighbouring country, it said.

Seoul | Oct 5

AFP - China and North Korea vowed Monday to strengthen a friendship which they said preserved regional peace, as Premier Wen Jiabao pressed on with a mission to bring Pyongyang back to nuclear disarmament talks.

"History has proven that developing China-North Korea relations is in line with the fundamental interests and common aspirations of the two peoples and conducive to safeguarding regional peace and stability," said a Chinese foreign ministry statement quoting its President Hu Jintao and Wen.

"We are willing to work together with North Korea to... constantly push forward friendly and cooperative relations."

The statement, issued to mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations, came on the second day of Wen's high-profile visit to Pyongyang. It made no mention of the North's nuclear programmes.

In the same statement, the North's leader Kim Jong-Il was quoted as calling the bilateral relationship "a common treasure".

Kathy Marks | Oct 4

The Independent - Aid workers reach remote areas beyond Padang to find entire villages levelled by last week's disaster

In rural areas of Indonesia, weddings are communal, open-air affairs. Some 400 people attended the nuptials of a couple in Pulau Aiya, a village outside Padang, last Wednesday. Then the ground shook and swallowed everyone up.

"They were sucked 30m deep into the earth," Rustam Pakaya, head of the Indonesian Health Ministry's crisis centre, said yesterday. "Even the mosque's minaret, more than 20m tall, disappeared."

Three days after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake devastated Padang and surrounding areas on the west coast of Sumatra, the full impact of the tragedy is starting to become clear. Whole villages were found obliterated yesterday by rescuers pushing deeper into the disaster zone, where roads remain cut off and survivors – still desperately awaiting aid – are subsisting on coconut milk.

The official death toll from Wednesday's quake stood at 809 last night, but the Indonesian Red Cross believes up to 4,000 people are lying beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Oct 3

BBC -

Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has met a member of the country's ruling military government for the first time since early 2008.

Ms Suu Kyi, who is under renewed house arrest in Rangoon, met labour minister Aung Kyi, her lawyer said.

The meeting came one day after a court rejected her appeal against her 18 month sentence.

There was no official word on what they discussed, but Ms Suu Kyi has offered to help negotiate an end to sanctions.

Aung Kyi has met Ms Suu Kyi on six previous occasions, the last time in January 2008.

"The meeting lasted about 50 minutes, but I don't know what was discussed," a home ministry official told Reuters news agency.

** Burmese court rejects appeal against Aung San Suu Kyi house arrest
** US Diplomat Outlines Obama Approach on Burma
** Burma’s 2010 elections to test new US policy

Al Labita | Manila | Oct 2

Asia Times - The arrival of about 3,000 US Marines in the Philippines next week for training and humanitarian missions in the wake of recent floods has some Filipino officials wary that the soldiers could be diverted to war-torn Sulu island, where Islamic extremists recently killed two US soldiers. The scheduled deployment represents five times the number of US troops currently stationed in the Philippines.

The US deaths have sparked fears that Washington aims to ramp up its presence and retaliate against suspected Abu Sayyaf rebels, whom the US and European Union have identified as an international terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda. Those concerns have renewed calls among legislators to either scrap or renegotiate the terms of the Philippines-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).

The VFA, which took effect in 1999 after Manila shut down the US military bases of Subic and Clark in 1991, allows US troops to hold joint military exercises with their Filipino counterparts. The deal, however, bars US troops from engaging in combat and any support is limited to providing logistical assistance, technical advice and intelligence to Manila's counter-terrorism operations.

Despite the VFA's legal restrictions, reports persist that US troops are "embedded" in Philippine military units in far-flung combat zones and that they had joined the fight against Muslim insurgents in Sulu and Basilan provinces. Some 600 US soldiers are currently stationed in the Philippines, the bulk of them on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

Two US soldiers were killed on September 29 when their Humvee vehicle hit a roadside bomb, believed to be an improvised explosive device, in Sulu's Indanan town, scene of previous bloody encounters and a known stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf. A Filipino marine was also killed and three Filipino soldiers were wounded.

One can detect something of a siege mentality in Sri Lanka. There is a strong feeling that, after winning a long and brutal war, the country’s independence is threatened by unfair criticism from abroad. An important element in this is in the complex relationship with INGOs (International Non-governmental Organizations).

Susantha Goonatilake called his book on foreign-funded NGOs in Sri Lanka Recolonization.

In his conclusion he wrote: “Sri Lankan NGOs emerged in the late 1970s when the then government cracked down on democracy, transparency and accountability and killed locally-grown civil society… Sri Lanka thus became a partial NGO franchise state, with the NGOs attempting to erode the country’s sovereignty …The NGOs are now being squeezed and widely criticised, not only by the media, but also through massive street protests and countrywide posters. The coming years will see an outcome of the struggle between real civil society and foreign-funded NGOs. This struggle, which is partly between a reconciliation agenda and local voices, echoes Sri Lanka’s 500-year-old struggle with western colonial powers.”

Sept 29

BBC - Two US soldiers and a Filipino marine have been killed in a landmine blast on the southern Philippine island of Jolo, a Philippine army spokesman has said.

Two other Filipino soldiers were also wounded in the explosion, which hit their vehicle near the town of Indanan.

The Philippines' military said last week that it had captured Indanan, a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf rebels.

The US has about 300 soldiers in the southern Philippines, advising the local army in fighting insurgents.

The American soldiers are the first to be killed in the Philippines since 2002, when one serviceman died in an bombing in the port city of Zamboanga, also in the south of the country.

Under a US agreement with the Philippines its troops are not allowed to take part in combat unless attacked. Otherwise, they are there to train and advise the Philippine army in counter-insurgency operations.

Manila | Sept 27

AFP - At least 73 people were killed and more than 330,000 others displaced after the heaviest rain in more than four decades plunged the Philippine capital into chaos, officials said on Sunday.

The nine-hour deluge across Manila on Saturday submerged houses, washed away shanties and turned roads into raging rivers, forcing terrified residents to seek refuge on top of homes or cars where they waited for more than 24 hours.

"I am calling on our countrymen... to please stay calm," President Gloria Arroyo said, as she set a deadline of nightfall on Sunday for the military and other rescuers to save those who remained stranded.

The downpour from tropical storm Ketsana left some areas of Manila under six metres of water, and the storm's ferocity shocked a country that is accustomed to typhoons.

"This is the worst that I have seen," Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said of the extensive flooding that also severely damaged other parts of the northern Philippines.

Arroyo said more rain had fallen on Manila and surrounding areas than on New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina devastated the American city in 2005.

Andrew Buncombe | Sept 25

The Independent - A Cat Ba leopard gecko - AFP/Getty Images

A gecko with spots like a leopard and a fanged frog that preys on birds are among more than 160 new species that have been discovered along the Mekong River but which face the threat of extinction as a result of climate change.

Scientists in south-east Asia said that in 2008 they discovered 100 plants, 28 fish, 18 reptiles, 14 amphibians, two mammals and one bird species in the region that spreads over Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand Laos and southern China.

Yet almost before they are fully documented, the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) believes these new species could disappear because of the increased incidence of extreme weather linked to climate change. Floods, droughts and rising sea levels are all threats.

Related:
** Discovered - a species of rat as big as a cat
** Maori legend of man-eating bird is true
** Pictures - other discoveries
** More Pictures

Steven Morris | Bristol, England | September 24

The Guardian - New discovery unearthed in rock formations in north-eastern China confirms birds evolved from dinosaurs, scientists claim

The discovery of five remarkable new fossils has confirmed that birds evolved from dinosaurs, Chinese scientists claimed tonight.

Because the fossils - unearthed in rock formations in north-eastern China - are older than previous discoveries of similar creatures, the find adds weight to the theory that birds descended from predatory dinosaurs.

The fossils all have feathers or feather-like structures. The clearest and most striking of the specimens can be seen to have four wings, extensive plumage and profusely feathered feet.

Manila | Sept 24

DPA - The Philippines plans to review an agreement with the United States that defines the conduct of visiting American troops in the country, a government spokesman said Thursday.

Edilberto Adan, spokesman for a Philippine commission overseeing the implementation of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), said the review could lead to the renegotiation of the pact which is being criticized by some senators as unconstitutional.

'We will undertake a review to determine and address some of the issues raised by some senators,' he told a press briefing. 'We will start as soon as possible.'

The VFA was signed in 1998 under the administration of former president Joseph Estrada and came into force a year later.

On Wednesday, Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago urged the Philippine government to renegotiate the agreement, or terminate it if the US refuses to revise the pact.

Daniel Allen | Bangkok | Sept 20

Asia Times - China's role in the development of northern Laos has grown significantly in recent years, but with several unfortunate side effects. Rare wildlife is being poached for Chinese consumption, while land grabs for rubber plantations are destroying not only the environment, but also the livelihoods of the local people.

John Grafilo | Camp Darapanan, Philippines | Sept 20

DPA - With its senior commanders in their 60s and 70s, the largest Muslim rebel group in the Philippines may seem headed for a serious leadership crisis that could set back its struggle for a Muslim homeland.

But the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) says a new generation of leaders is ready to take over in case their dream of a Muslim homeland in the southern region of Mindanao would not be attained within the life time of the current leadership.

Murad Ebrahim, chairman of the 12,000-strong MILF, said junior commanders were being trained for war and peace as well as national development.

'We are training them both for peace and war,' he said in an interview inside Camp Darapanan, an MILF camp in the outskirts of Sultan Kudarat town in Maguindanao province, 960 kilometres south of Manila.

'Our training is geared towards nation-building, towards preserving the peace. But it is also geared towards a situation where they have to defend themselves.'

Murad, however, warned that the next generation of MILF leaders who are in their 30s and 40s may not be as patient as the current leadership in negotiating with the Philippine government since they grew up facing hardships caused by war.