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BANGKOK: Scorching weather and lack of rain
has left more than eight million people in Thailand, the world’s
top rice exporter, suffering a drought that is ruining their
farmland, officials said Sunday. The drought has hit 58 of
Thailand’s 76 provinces, the government department responsible for
disaster prevention and management said in a statement. Most of them
are in the north of the country, a region only just recovering from
a choking haze caused by forest fires. The department said about
114,000 rai (45,000 acres) of farmland had been affected, along with
8.23 million people. --AFP
SEOUL: South Korea on
Sunday issued a nationwide warning against yellow dust blowing in
from China and Mongolia, advising citizens to stay indoors to avoid
the choking mix of sand and pollutants. Officials at the Korea
Meteorological Administration said the dust had blanketed much of
the country on Sunday, with visibility in the capital Seoul at just
three kilometers (two miles). Yellow dust—fine sand from
Mongolia’s Gobi Desert which sometimes includes toxic chemical
smog emitted by Chinese factories—usually hits South Korea in the
spring. It can cause respiratory disorders.--AFP
NARATHIWAT, Thailand:
Suspected Islamic separatists operating in Thailand’s
insurgency-torn south have shot and killed two Muslim men in
separate attacks, police said Sunday. A villager, 29, was shot dead
Saturday night as he traveled home from a local mosque in Narathiwat,
one of three southern provinces where more than 2,000 people have
been killed in three years of separatist unrest. On Sunday morning,
a 30-year-old volunteer solider was killed when a group of militants
opened fire on his motorcycle as he drove to work in the same
province. The violence in the Muslim-majority southern provinces
bordering Malaysia has worsened since a coup last year, despite a
series of peace initiatives by the army-installed government.--AFP
BEIJING: After a wave of
top party postings, Chinese President Hu Jintao appears to be in
full command as he grooms a successor to lead the ruling Communists,
who are bent on keeping their grip on power. With the 17th Communist
Party Congress to begin late this year, the process of naming top
provincial leaders has been in full swing with a series of new
postings announced in the past few days. The most important was Xi
Jinping, 53, appointed the top party official of Shanghai, China’s
economic and financial center and most populous city with 17 million
people.--AFP
COLOMBO: Sri Lanka plans
to hold a referendum on whether to maintain a fragile five-year-old
cease-fire between government troops and separatist Tamil Tiger
rebels, a state-run newspaper said Sunday. The government of
President Mahinda Rajapakse hopes to “soon” hold the vote on the
controversial February 2002 truce arranged and put in place by
Norway, the Sunday Observer said. “The president is interested in
looking at the proposed abolition of the ceasefire agreement in a
democratic manner, enabling the voters to decide on the fate of the
ceasefire agreement [CFA],” the Observer said.--AFP
SYDNEY: Australian Foreign
Minister Alexander Downer insisted Sunday that Canberra had no role
in the sentence that keeps Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks behind
bars until after this year’s federal election. The case of the
31-year-old Australian, jailed Friday for nine months, had been
brewing as an election issue, with Prime Minister John Howard’s
government criticized for not ensuring US officials brought him to
trial sooner. Downer said the sentence handed down to Hicks, who has
spent more than five years at Guantánamo without charge, was
determined purely by US authorities.--AFP
TEHRAN: President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad on Saturday again called for Britain to apologize after
15 British sailors were seized by Iran in the Gulf, the state news
agency IRNA reported. “The arrogant issue statements and issue
demands against the Iranian people, instead of apologizing and
expressing regret over the British sailors entering Iranian
waters,” he said. Iran has defied international calls to release
the 15 British navy personnel it seized on March 23 for alleged
illegal entry into its territorial waters. Britain insists they were
operating in Iraqi waters --AFP
COLOMBO: A little brown
mouse dressed in bright orange and blue is the mascot of a Sri
Lankan family business successfully resisting the rat race of mass
production and carving a lucrative niche overseas. In sharp contrast
to Sri Lanka’s $2.6-billion textile and apparel export industry
which depends on mass assembly line manufacture, the toys and
handloom fabrics earn a tiny fraction of that amount.
Seventy-eight-year-old Barbara Sansoni has resisted mechanization to
focus on the labor-intensive cottage industry that gives jobs to
poor rural women and is carving a lucrative niche overseas.
--AFP
PARIS: The only centrist
minister in the French government has decided to support rightwing
candidate Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidency instead of his party
leader Francois Bayrou. Education Minister Gilles de Robien, who was
Bayrou’s campaign manager in the 2002 election, said in a
newspaper interview published Sunday that the centrist candidate has
failed to spell out a clear strategy for governing France.
--AFP
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