Month: September 2023

Activists Worried About Uganda’s China-Backed Oil Pipeline

Media Library

johannesburg —  Thousands of families displaced, wildlife habitats — home to vulnerable species such as elephants and chimpanzees — threatened, and carbon emissions increased. These are some of the risks from a planned oil pipeline stretching from Uganda’s Lake Albert to Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast, environmentalists say. Activists say these considerations have led to several Western banks ruling out financing the more than 1,400-kilometer (870 miles) East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), but they expressed concern over news this week that Chinese financiers Sinosure and the state-owned Export Import Bank…

Cambodian-American lawyer transferred to prison in capital

Media Library

Cambodian authorities have transferred an outspoken Cambodian-American lawyer and human rights defender from a remote jail to the country’s largest prison on the outskirts of the capital Phnom Penh, a Prison Department official said Friday.  Theary Seng, a 52-year-old American citizen, has been serving a six-year sentence in Preah Vihear Prison, in the north, since June 2022, when she was convicted treason, stemming from her failed efforts in 2019 to bring about the return to Cambodia of political opposition leader Sam Rainsy. The Ministry of Interior transferred her to Prey Sar II Prison,…

Hammered: Vietnamese gets 6 years after cursing Uncle Ho when drunk

Media Library

A 60-year old Vietnamese activist was sentenced to six years in prison for making a short drunken tirade video that cursed the Communist Party and revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, the country’s first leader, his lawyer told Radio Free Asia. The Hanoi People’s Court handed down the punishment Friday to Nguyen Minh Son, saying that the video he made on Dec. 31, 2021, was “anti-state propaganda.” In the live-streamed video, Son stood outside the same court, reacting the trial of activist and citizen journalist Le Trong Hung, who that day…

Cambodian court upholds verdicts in deadly 2014 garment strike

Media Library

Cambodia’s Appeals Court upheld verdicts on Friday against 10 garment factory workers and labor activists who were convicted in 2014 following a deadly worker strike crackdown. Appeals Court Presiding Judge Plang Samnang, however, dropped a lower court’s requirement that the 10 defendants pay fines between US$1,000 to US$2,500. The defendants were charged in 2014 with causing intentional violence and damaging property during fractious strikes and demonstrations for higher wages that took place in the Veng Sreng factory district of Phnom Penh between Dec. 25, 2013, and Jan. 3, 2014. The…

US Pacific Security Deal With Marshall Islands at Risk Over Nuclear Payments Description

Media Library

The United States struck security agreements this week with Pacific Island nations seen as a key part of U.S. plans to counter China’s territorial expansion. But after three years of negotiations, one of those Pacific nations — the Marshall Islands — still has not reached a deal with Washington. A member of the U.S. negotiating team blames the State Department’s legal team for the holdup, saying they object to how the agreement describes money for compensation from U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands some 60 years ago. The agreement…

US Company Pays Hundreds of Millions After Alleged Bribery in Asia   

Media Library

washington —  American chemical manufacturer Albemarle Corporation has agreed to pay more than $218 million to settle allegations of bribing officials at state oil refineries in three Asian countries, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday. The North Carolina company admitted to using “third-party sales agents” and foreign employees to bribe officials to win contracts with state refineries in India, Indonesia and Vietnam, the department said. The department said Albemarle received nearly $100 million in profits from the corrupt scheme. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States, it…

US trying to counter Chinese overtures to Paraguay, document suggests

Media Library

A document allegedly from the US embassy in Paraguay, outlining plans to influence President Santiago Pena and counter “strategic corruption”, suggests that Washington is trying to curb China’s increasing diplomatic presence in the country. The 13-page document, called “Paraguay Interagency Integrated Anti-Corruption Action Plan”, was allegedly sent by the embassy in Asuncion to the White House on July 27, three months after Peña won the country’s presidential election. First reported by the Argentine newspaper La Politica Online, the plan cites the political sway of Horacio Cartes, Paraguay’s former president and…

Laos: Belt and Road poster child – or problem child?

Media Library

The high-speed train streaks above bright green rice fields and zips through tunnels in mountains of rural Laos. It cuts what is normally a days-long journey by car from Yunnan province in southern China across Laos to the Thai border to just three hours – and allows travel in comfort. Few nations have been transformed as radically by China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, as Laos. The US$5.9 billion China-Laos railway has pushed the small, Southeast Asian country closer to its dream of being land-linked, not land-locked. Well-to-do Lao…

Indian conglomerate Vedanta to break up as debt crunch looms

Media Library

Receive free Vedanta Resources PLC updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Vedanta Resources PLC news every morning. Indian tycoon Anil Agarwal is pressing ahead with a plan to break up his energy and mining conglomerate into six companies, betting that the move will raise the valuation of a business empire trying to stave off a debt crunch. Vedanta said on Friday that it will split into six units — aluminium, power, base metals, steel and ferrous metals, oil and gas — in a sweeping…

As China Censors Homegrown Feminism, a Feminist Scholar From Japan Is on Its Bestseller Lists

Media Library

Advertisement In the last few years, China’s government has promoted increasingly conservative social values, encouraging women to focus on raising children. It has cracked down on civil society movements and made laws to drive out foreign influence. So a 75-year-old Japanese feminist scholar who’s not married and does not have children is an unlikely celebrity on the country’s tightly censored internet. But Chizuko Ueno, a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, is a phenomenon. She leapt to fame in China in 2019 with a speech that criticized social expectations…