CHINA - Torrential rain battering southern China has forced more than 150,000 people from their homes, toppled hundreds of houses and punched a dangerous hole in the spillway of a dam, Xinhua news agency reported.

INDIA - Indian paramilitary rescue teams rushed on Saturday to an island in one of Asia's largest rivers, where nearly 100,000 people took refuge after heavy monsoon rains flooded their homes, said a local administrator. Nearly 300,000 people in remote northeastern Assam state have seen their homes flooded in three days of nonstop monsoon rain, said state Revenue Minister Bhumidhar Barman.

BANGLADESH - Torrential rains triggered landslides and flash floods killing six people and stranding half a million in their homes in Bangladesh, officials said on Saturday. The landslides occurred near Habiganj district town, some 200 km (125 miles) northeast of the capital Dhaka Saturday, burying all six members of a family. Officials said the situation had worsened at three other nearby districts, with some 500,000 people stranded at their homes as the rivers Surma and Khusiara, flowing into Bangladesh from northeastern India, burst their banks following incessant rains over the last four days.

The refugees from the SWAT valley may also be in dire trouble.

Amy Yee | Dharmasala, India | June 29

NYT - Tibetan monks and nuns spend their lives studying the inner world of the mind rather than the physical world of matter. Yet for one month this spring a group of 91 monastics devoted themselves to the corporeal realm of science.

Instead of delving into Buddhist texts on karma and emptiness, they learned about Galileo’s law of accelerated motion, chromosomes, neurons and the Big Bang, among other far-ranging topics.

Many in the group, whose ages ranged from the 20s to 40s, had never learned science and math. In Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries, the curriculum has remained unchanged for centuries.

Andrew Buncombe | June 22

The Independent - After 500 years of autocracy, Tibetan leader calls for democracy

In a speech that underscored the pressures he has had to bear during his life serving as both a spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama has said there is no need for his successor to perform the two roles.

In a video clip shown to hundreds of monks, nuns and lay people gathered in the mountain town of Dharamsala, the 73-year-old said it was essential that the Tibetan community in exile embraced democracy if it were to keep step with the wider world.

"The Dalai Lamas held temporal and spiritual leadership over the last 400 to 500 years. It may have been quite useful. But that period is over," said the Nobel prize winner. "Today, it is clear to the whole world that democracy is the best system despite its minor negativities. That is why it is important that Tibetans also move with the larger world community."

Beijing | June 20

Reuters - Google has been "ordered to comply with China's laws and regulations and completely filter pornographic content to prevent pornographic material from entering from overseas", Xinhua said.

The order coincides with plans by the city of Beijing to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor the Internet.

The volunteers would be asked to report to the authorities if they came across "lewd" content or find Internet users exhibiting "uncivilised behaviour" when surfing the Internet, Xinhua said.

LoL! What will be left?

Beijing | June 18

Reuters - Several dams on tributaries of China's Yellow River are near collapse shortly after being built, highlighting risks that parts of China's hastily built infrastructure may not be safe, media reported on Friday.

At least five newly built dams in Huan county, in Gansu province in arid northeast China, are "in very fragile condition", the China Daily said, citing a report from the China Youth Daily.

Reports blamed improper construction and embezzlement of funds.

Ryan Libre | June 18

NewsReview.com - (Kachins are preparing to fight for autonomy in cyberspace as well as on the battlefield.)

The car came to an abrupt stop. “Get out,” the driver said. My friend and partner in journalism Tim Patterson and I stumbled in the moonless night through an uneven, bulldozed field toward the sound of a river. When we reached the river, we crossed a creaky bamboo footbridge and scrambled up a loose-dirt hill to an older SUV with its lights off.

“Welcome to Free Kachin,” our contact said, smiling broadly.

It had been a long trip. After flying from Thailand to Kunmin, the capital of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, where I had met Tim, we had boarded a bus for a 20-hour overnight ride to western Yunnan, where we had planned to meet our Kachin contact. It was November 2008, and with the rainy season over, our trip stood a better chance of success.

After crossing the river from China, we finally reached northern Myanmar, in the Himalayan foothills. We had come here to spend three weeks with the people known as Kachins, an ethnic and religious minority that for decades fought a war of independence against the brutal military junta that rules Myanmar, or Burma. The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting covered the costs of our trip so that we could tell the story of these remarkable people.

We were among the only foreign journalists who in recent years have reported from rebel-held territory beyond Myitkyina, the Burmese-spy-filled capital of Kachin State. One was a freelancer who was deported in just a day. Another was Mark Jenkins, an adventure columnist at Outside magazine, who left under threat of death after being drugged and beaten. Tim and I knew we had a rare opportunity—and a potentially dangerous one.

Lara Farrar | Shanghai | June 16

CNN - On Saturday at 10 a.m. it's show time for Brenda Zhang and her subtitle team. They roll out of bed, meet each other online and chat, while their modems download the latest episode of "Prison Break," which just aired half a world away on Friday night in America.

Once they have the show on their hard drives, the team spends the rest of the day creating subtitles for it in Chinese before putting it back online for other fans to watch.

Dozens of such groups exist in China. They are voluntary and are translating a mix of media, from books and magazines to games, TV shows and movies. The translated products are for an audience whose primary means of accessing foreign entertainment is the Internet.

Jill McGivering | June 18

BBC - A new drive to contain the spread of HIV/Aids in Laos is forcing officials to recognise a marginalised group - transgender men known as "katheoy". The BBC's Jill McGivering went to meet some of them in the capital, Vientiane.

Unnamed katheoy at a drop-in centre
Discrimination can make it hard for katheoys to find work

Khom was born male.

But she has thought of herself as female since she was about nine years old.

Now 28, she could easily be accepted as a woman. She has long, styled hair, make-up, and a gentle, feminine manner.

But when she talks about her experiences of being "katheoy" in Laos, her voice is solemn. They're not fully accepted, she says.

Denis D. Gray | Bangkok | June 15

AP - Charming a fuming Elizabeth Taylor, personally snipping a British duke's hair or catering to the refined palates of Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge leaders.

It was all in a day's work for Kurt Wachtveitl, as he looks back on 41 years running one of the world's fabled hotels, not with nostalgic tears but plenty of juicy tales and trenchant thoughts about how Bangkok's Oriental Hotel got to be so good.

A legend himself among the international hotel fraternity, the 72-year-old Wachtveitl retires this month, having amassed awards for the five-star hotel along the Chao Phraya River as well as an endless roster of famous and rich, albeit not always agreeable, guests.

more

Stephen Kurczy | Ratanakiri | June 15

Asia Times - The remoteness of Cambodia's northeast once made it an ideal hideout for Vietcong, Khmer Rouge, wildlife poachers and illegal loggers. The same isolation had in recent years drawn adventure travelers to the once jungle-covered province, which is now struggling to strike an equitable balance between eco-tourism and sustainable natural resource extraction.

After decades of civil war and lawlessness, Cambodia is now politically stable and promoting tourism to generate foreign currency earnings. Bordering Laos and Vietnam, Ratanakiri now has the infrastructure - a paved road that stops 96 kilometers from the provincial capital, Banlung - and a range of accommodations to host amateur explorers.

The Lonely Planet guidebook refers to the province as "a colorful hotchpotch of natural beauty and cultural diversity". The Wall Street Journal Asia recently labeled it "one of the last frontiers of Asian adventure travel". Those picture-perfect assessments have drawn bigger and bigger crowds: according to the Tourism Ministry, visitors to Ratanakiri surged from 6,000 in 2002 to over 105,000 in 2008.

However those expecting to find pristine forests teeming with wildlife are increasingly disappointed to find lifeless patches of freshly cut tree stumps. Officials say they are doing everything in their limited powers to protect the areas, but the market forces driving resource extraction are often too powerful to resist.

Taipei | June 15

DPA - Three Taiwan university students have invented a motorcycle helmet
that can generate electricity and power a scooter's lights.

Cheng Shiu University outside the south-western city of Kaohsiung announced the invention Friday, saying it plans to find a factory to mass-produce the helmets.

The students fixed five tiny fans that are also generators onto the front of the helmet so that when the motorcycle starts running, wind blow the fans and the fans produce electricity, said Professor Chen Feng-shih, who supervised the invention.

Through a Bluetooth wireless transmitter, the power is sent to the motorbike to power the scooter's front and back lights, brake light and direction indicators.

It can also power a pair of direction indicator and brake lights on the back of the helmet.

Singapore | June 11

AFP - Police have arrested nine people, including six youths aged between 12 and 19 years old, for suspected involvement in five separate cases of loanshark harassment.

The arrests were all made within 24 hours between June 9 and 10.

First-time offenders found guilty of assisting an unlicensed moneylender to carry out his business may be fined not less than S$20,000 and up to S$200,000, or imprisoned for up to 2 years, or both.

First-time offenders guilty of loanshark harassment may be fined not less than S$4,000 and up to S$40,000, or imprisoned for up to 3 years, or both, and be liable for caning if damage or harm was caused to any property or person, while committing the act of harassment.

Washington | June 9

AFP - Indonesia on Monday offered a boost to President Barack Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world, pledging to ratify a treaty banning nuclear tests if the US Senate does so.

Obama said in April said he would ask the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), part of his ambitious goal of eliminating nuclear weapons unveiled in a speech in Prague.

Indonesia is one of nine countries including the United States that need to ratify the treaty, which would ban all nuclear explosions everywhere for any purpose, to come into force.

"We share his vision of a world in which nuclear weapons have been eradicated," Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said on a visit to Washington.

"We trust that he will succeed in getting the CTBT ratified - and we promise that when that happens, Indonesia will immediately follow suit," he said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Biswajyoti Das | Guwahati, India | June 8

Reuters -

India will deploy thousands of additional troops and build airstrips along its remote northeastern border with China, in a sign of persisting wariness between the two countries despite growing business ties.

India and China fought a brief war over their 3,500 km (2,200 mile) Himalayan border in 1962, and both sides claim the other is occupying big but largely uninhabited chunks of their territory.

Although India and China have signed a treaty to maintain "peace and tranquility" along the disputed frontier and agreed to find a political solution to the row, talks have made little progress.

Last year, the army said Chinese soldiers had crossed the border in Arunachal Pradesh state illegally and entered their territory, urging the government to deploy more troops.

"Two army divisions comprising 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers each will be deployed along the border in Arunachal," said J.J. Singh, the governor of the remote state.

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON A NEW BEGINNING

Cairo University
Cairo, Egypt

1:10 P.M. (Local)

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you very much. Good afternoon. I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning; and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement. And together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I'm grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. And I'm also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalaamu alaykum. (Applause.)

Clifford Coonan | June 4

The Independent -

On this day in 1989, the brutal crushing of a popular protest shocked the world. But in China today, the events are all but forgotten, reports Clifford Coonan

Twenty years after Chinese troops brought the massive pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square to a bloody end, Beijing is in lockdown.

Active dissidents have been confined to their homes or forced to leave the city and their mobile phones have been shut down. Social networking and image-sharing websites such as Twitter and Flickr have been closed to prevent discussion of the anniversary. Near the square itself, workmen have been preparing Chang'an Avenue, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, for a huge parade to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party's accession to power, but the 4 June massacre will be marked with tight-lipped silence and a steadfast official refusal to revisit the events of that day.

Twenty years ago Tiananmen Square was full of frantic students wearing headbands and lobbying for democratic change. Today it is full of tourists eager to get their photograph taken in front of the Forbidden City with its huge portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong. Shiny Mercedes and Buicks now swish along the road at the point on the avenue where a lone, unknown protester stood in front of the tanks with his shopping bags 20 years ago, and briefly halted the advance of the People's Liberation Army. The Communist Party has forbidden discussion of the events of that day 20 years ago, and the official line is that the crackdown, officially called "the political incident", was necessary to ensure stability. The student movement that drove the democracy activism in late 1980s China has largely evaporated, its leaders all in exile or no longer active.

David McNeill | Davao, The Philippines | May 31

The Independent - They came to kill her children one by one. First was Richard in 2001, then his brother Christopher. Bobby was taken from her the following year, and Fernando in 2007. Now Clarita Alia lives in fear that Arnold, her remaining son, is next. And far from protecting her shattered family, it is the police who are behind the killings, she says.

“The police said, ‘We will take your sons one by one’,” recalls the 54-year-old grandmother at the graveside of her murdered brood in the southern Philippine city of Davao. “They may kill me too, but I am not afraid to die. I’m already old.”

Insects hum in the humid tranquillity of this pauper’s graveyard. Below, the city of 1.3 million people, a tourist hub for some of the most spectacular scenery in south-east Asia, sprawls toward the Pacific Ocean. Mayor Rodrigo Duterte boasts that he has made this the safest urban zone in the country, but Davao’s motto, “love, peace and progress”, is belied by a killing spree that has claimed nearly 900 lives, including dozens of children.

The mayor of the country’s second-biggest city says they all deserved to die. “What I want to do it so instil fear,” he told reporters earlier this year. “If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination.”

Chris Buckley | Beijing | May 31

Reuters - Twenty years after China's pro-democracy crackdown, dissidents contend with a Communist Party that has in many ways strengthened its hold on power, defying their hopes it would crumble along with the Soviet bloc.

That has forced dissidents to rethink their tactics after their goal of democratic reform was dashed when the Party ordered tanks and troops to quell huge protests centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989, killing hundreds.

For Li Baiguang, spending 37 days in a foul Chinese prison cell in 2004 was enough to convince him the Party would not collapse.

Li, now a human rights lawyer living in Beijing, was detained for helping farmers try to oust local officials they accused of corrupt land grabs, ending up in a police cell packed with dozens of men accused of robbery, rape or graft.

"We thought that after 1989 the Party would immediately collapse," said Li, 40, who plunged into student protests in his home province of Hunan and in Beijing 20 years ago.

Instead of being tossed from power like their ideological brethren in the former Soviet bloc, as many critics predicted, China's Communists launched market reforms and honed new ways to counter discontent, said Teresa Wright, a political scientist at California State University, Long Beach.

"To shift the balance in favor of the dissidents now, something would have to change fundamentally, such as an economic crisis or a split in the upper echelons of the Party," said Wright, whose forthcoming study, Accepting Authoritarianism, examines the Chinese government's success in maintaining authority. "There are no signs of either," she added.

May 29

Spiegel Online - 'Men Live Better Where Women Are In Charge'

How does a matriarchy really work? Argentinian writer Ricardo Coler decided to find out and spent two months with the Mosuo in southern China. "Women have a different way of dominating," the researcher told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are men raised to be incompetent?

Coler: For the Mosuo, women are simply the more effective and reliable gender. However, they do say that the "really big" decisions -- like buying a house or a machine or selling a cow -- are made by the men. Men are good for this kind of decision-making as well as physical labor. The official governmental leader of the village, the mayor, is a man. I walked with him through the village -- nobody greated him or paid him any attention. As a man he doesn't have any authority.

Wild

Peter Ford | Beijing | May 28

CSM - Twenty of China's most courageous and outspoken civil rights lawyers face being disbarred next Monday, as judicial authorities reject or delay their applications to renew their professional licenses, according to three of the lawyers affected.

Forbidding them to practice after a May 31 deadline would, at a stroke, decapitate the budding "rights protection movement" that is at the heart of activists' efforts to build a civil society in China.

"If these 20 lose their licenses it would be the biggest step back in legal reform for 20 years," warns Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher with Human Rights Watch based in Hong Kong. "It would be really very dramatic."

The lawyers who have reported problems having their annual licenses renewed have all represented plaintiffs or defendants in politically sensitive cases over the past year, such as members of the banned Falun Gong religious group, parents of children killed at their school desks in the Sichuan earthquake last May, and people arrested in the March 2008 crackdown in Tibet.

What they have in common, says Jiang Tianyong, who recently successfully represented a Tibetan monk charged with concealing weapons, is that "we do not take orders from the [government's] Judicial Affairs Bureau" about which cases to take.

Bert Wilkinson | Georgetown, Guyana | May 27

IPS - Since the year began, China has given the clearest signals yet that Latin America and the Caribbean will be its new commercial and strategic focus, as it doles out billions in soft loans and grant aid, and ties up sweet trade agreements with countries ranging Brazil to finance-starved Cuba.

The march of the Chinese has so unsettled political watchers in the United States that earlier this month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as "quite disturbing", contending that China is cultivating "very strong economic and political connections" in Latin America and the Caribbean for its own geopolitical reasons.

She warned that it would be dangerous and not in the interests of Washington "to turn our backs on countries in our own hemisphere," an unheeded point several regional leaders have been making for years.

Her remarks were designed to defend the policy of the Barack Obama administration in reaching out to states like Cuba and Venezuela. Just days later, Beijing and South American economic powerhouse Brazil offered confirmation of China’s strategic march through the hemisphere, signing off on a slew of trade and economic agreements including a 10-billion-dollar loan to state energy company Petrobras that virtually ensures oil supplies for years to come.

Washington | May 27

DPA - The United States offered 2.5 million dollars Tuesday in rewards for information leading to the capture or conviction of three Filipinos with alleged ties to the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.

The US State Department will pay up to 1 million dollars for Radullan Sahiron, an alleged senior leader of the Philippine-based Abu Sayyaf, which has ties to al-Qaeda, and Abdul Basit Usman, a suspected bomb-making expert who is suspected of links to an Indonesia-based regional terrorist group known as Jemaah Islamiyah.

The State Department offered 500,000 dollars in connection with Khair Mundos, accused of providing financial help to Abu Sayyaf by transferring al-Qaeda funding.

May 24

BBC -
A man threatening to commit suicide by jumping from a Chinese bridge was approached by a passer-by who shoved him over the edge, local media say.

Lai Jiansheng, 66, said he was fed up with the desperate man's "selfish activity" which caused huge traffic jams in Guangzhou, southern China.

Chen Fuchao fell 26ft (8m) on to an air cushion and is recovering in hospital, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Xinhua said Mr Lai was "taken away by police", but gave no further details.

The drama unfolded when Mr Chen climbed on to Haizhu Bridge in Guangzhou on Thursday and threatened to jump.
..
"I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish," the newspaper quoted Mr Lai as saying.

"Their action violates a lot of public interests. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."

May 21

BBC - A large number of goats in Taiwan may have died of exhaustion because of noise from a wind farm.

A farmer on an outlying island told the BBC he had lost more than 400 animals after eight giant wind turbines were installed close to his grazing land.

The Ministry of Agriculture says it suspects that noise may have caused the goats' demise through lack of sleep.

The power company, Taipower, has offered to pay for part of the costs of building a new farmhouse elsewhere.

A spokesman for the company said the cause of the goats' deaths still needed to be investigated, but that it doubted the goats died from the noise.

Gary Duffy | Sao Paulo, Brazil | May 20

BBC - The meeting between the Presidents of Brazil and China in Beijing on Tuesday brings together two powerful forces among the world's developing nations.

Against the background of the economic crisis, and strengthening bonds between the two countries, Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Hu Jintao will have much to discuss.

China has been a "strategic partner" of Brazil for some years, but the high expectations surrounding this relationship have not always been fulfilled.

At a difficult time for economies everywhere, however, the last few months have brought some encouraging news for South America's biggest economy.

Despite fears about the impact of the crisis, Brazilian exports to China have grown 64.7% in the first four months of 2009 when compared with the same period last year.

During March and April, for the first time, China became Brazil's biggest trading partner, displacing the United States.