A Cambodian court on Friday gave additional charges to a detained opposition leader, a move that will likely prevent him from campaigning ahead of July’s general elections. Sporting a shaggy white goatee he grew while in detention, Thach Setha stepped out of the prison van wearing orange prison garb. The 69-year-old smiled and waved to reporters and supporters as he entered the Phnom Penh Municipal court to finish his bail hearing. In July, he was charged with writing false checks. On Friday, Thach Setha, vice president of Cambodia’s main opposition…
Month: April 2023
Hong Kong’s Economy Is Recovering, But Not Its Freedoms
HONG KONG — Like most people in Hong Kong, taxi driver Leung Tat-chong says it feels like the city is recovering after years of protests, crackdowns and pandemic restrictions, while it also has changed forever. He’s earning almost as much as he did before the pandemic. But, Leung said, the city has been divided since the 2019 protests, in which hundreds of thousands of people marched, and many battled with police, in opposition to a government they saw as a proxy for Beijing. For the first time since the start…
Chinese students in US on a ‘political coming out’ still must manage risks
“Evan,” a Chinese grad student at Columbia University in New York, looks around a campus coffee shop anxiously as he explains why he’s helping form a group to challenge the orthodoxy of his government back home. “We can do something we can’t do in China,” he says, a black Yankees cap pulled low. But as Evan’s demeanor suggests, doing “something” carries risks even here, 7,000 miles from Beijing. He speaks more forcefully about the motivation behind the Columbia White Paper Society when there aren’t as many Asian students – potential…
Sister of imprisoned Tibetan businessman again detained after public protest
The sister of a businessman who is serving a life sentence has again been arrested and beaten for publicly protesting for her brother’s release in front of the high court in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. Gonpo Kyi and her husband were removed by Chinese police from the area in front of the court on Monday, according to a source who spoke to Radio Free Asia. Police covered her with a large black banner as they took her away, the source said. Kyi and her husband were arrested on Wednesday and detained…
Can China’s shipbuilding tech catch up with South Korea, and what role is the environment playing?
A fishing boat sails past liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers under construction at the Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. shipyard in Geoje, South Korea, on Friday, June 5, 2020. Qatar has signed a deal worth around $20 billion with South Korean shipbuilders to help cement its position as the world’s largest producer of liquefied natural gas. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg South China Morning Post
Screams from abducted Vietnamese blogger heard on Thai security camera video
The images on the 38-second video show only a knocked-over traffic cone, a parked car and some concrete paving – but the bursts of high-pitched screams from just off-camera are believed to have come from abducted Vietnamese blogger Thai Van Duong. Thai vanished from the streets just north of Bangkok, in Thailand’s Pathum Thani province, on April 13. Activists went to the area several days later to search for clues, attempt to track down security video and interview witnesses who saw what they believed to be Thai’s kidnapping. It was…
China is bulldozing parks and “green belt” around Chengdu to create more farmland
Reversing years of expensive work, Chinese bulldozers are tearing up parks and gardens in the “green belt” around the southwestern city of Chengdu to create more farmland as Beijing pushes ahead with a food security strategy that some are calling “New Great Leap Forward.” Before the pandemic, authorities had started to plow billions of dollars into the signature project, touted in state media as a sign of a greener future for China. The green belt was home to the Tianfu Greenway around the city of nearly 10 million, and linked…
Zelensky says he asked China’s Xi Jinping for help with Ukrainian children ‘kidnapped’ by Russia
President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday he had asked his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to help bring back Ukrainian children deported by Russia. “We need to involve everyone … to put pressure on the Russian aggressor and the terrorists who kidnapped so many of our children,” Zelensky said. “The UN, many others want to do something, but so far the results have been poor. So I have appealed to the leader of China,” he said. Xi and Zelensky spoke by phone on Wednesday, the first known call between the two…
Detained Uyghur student awaits outcome of probe into her case in Xinjiang
A Uyghur college student who supported the “white paper” protests in China is being detained in Xinjiang pending an investigation into her communication with her brother who lives in the United States, a state security agent said. Kamile Wayit, a 19-year-old preschool education major at a university in China’s Henan province was detained in December after posting a video about November’s “white paper” protests across China. When she returned to her home in Atush, the capital of Xinjiang’s Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture, for winter break, city police apprehended her, her brother…
Is India doomed to chair the most impotent G20 in modern times?
So, the G20 can be a lame duck and do nothing as countries play “nuclear chess”. Or India can deliver an ultimatum: G20 nations will ban trade with any country fuelling nuclear proliferation (that is, stationing nukes outside their borders or sharing them). Does India have the guts to do this? Then there is the next economic crisis. As reverberations from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse spread, Australia and New Zealand Bank CEO Shayne Elliott has warned of a global recession. And with war in Ukraine hard on the heels of…