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SEOUL: Communist North Korea has demanded pay rises for workers in
South Korean factories at a joint industrial zone in the North,
officials said Wednesday.
Pyongyang proposed a 30-percent rise for
university graduates working at the Kaesong estate and 10 percent
for those with lesser college qualifications, the officials at
Seoul’s Unification Ministry said.
“However, South Korean firms have rejected the
demand as workers are doing the same work on assembly lines
regardless of their educational background,” an official told AFP
on condition of anonymity.
“Since then, the North has made no further
demand for wage hikes,” he said.
Currently, some 13,000 workers are employed by
22 South Korean companies, which produce labor-intensive products
such as garments and kitchenware.
--AFP
ISLAMABAD: Nearly 1,500 Pakistanis held fresh
protests against military ruler Pervez Musharraf Wednesday as the
country’s top judge attended a hearing into misconduct charges
laid by the president.
Lawyers and opposition supporters shouted “Go
Musharraf, Go” and waved flags outside the Supreme Court in
Islamabad as Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry arrived to a
hero’s welcome.
A lone pro-Musharraf man who appeared holding a
picture of the President on Wednesday was roughed up by female
opposition workers outside the court building, an AFP reporter said.
The man was thrashed by the women who surrounded
him, snatched Musharraf’s poster and tore it to pieces. He was
later rescued by plain-clothed security men.
But the turnout was lower than the five previous
appearances by Chaudhry. Last Friday more than 3,000 people turned
out, while on March 16, a week after the sacking, police fired
rubber bullets to contain angry demonstrators.
--AFP
HONG KONG: A senior Hong Kong civil servant is
hoping to use the courts to challenge his government bosses after
they blamed him for a bodged music festival, the judiciary said
Wednesday.
Mike Rowse has applied to the southern Chinese
territory’s courts for leave to apply for a judicial review of
disciplinary proceedings against him.
Rowse, who heads the city’s investment
promotion agency InvestHK, was singled out for blame by an official
inquiry into the dismal failure of the 2003 Harbour Fest concerts,
which cost taxpayers 100 million Hong Kong dollars (US12.8 million).
The monthlong festival featured shows by rockers
the Rolling Stones and Neil Young, as well as gigs by local pop
stars including Twins.
It was designed to boost the city’s
international profile after a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
outbreak brought Hong Kong close to economic collapse.
--AFP
TIELING, China: At least 32 workers were killed
Wednesday and two injured when they were showered by molten steel at
a metal factory in northeast China, state press said.
The accident happened in a workshop of the
Qinghe Special Steel Corp. in Tieling city in Liaoning province, a
center of heavy industry, Xinhua news agency reported.
It was triggered when a steel ladle used for
pouring molten steel sheared off from the blast furnace and fell
onto workers below, spilling molten metal, according to Xinhua.
--AFP
MAJURO: Residents from a Marshall Islands atoll
exposed to fallout from US nuclear tests have been awarded more than
$1 billion of compensation, but may never receive a cent of it.
The Marshall Islands-based Nuclear Claims
Tribunal, which issued the ruling Tuesday, has virtually no money to
pay the award and has labeled United States-provided compensation
“manifestly inadequate.”
The ruling was issued more than 15 years after
the claim was first filed by leaders from Rongelap, a low-lying
western Pacific coral atoll engulfed in snow-like nuclear fallout
from the 1954 Bravo test at nearby Bikini atoll.
Bravo was the biggest ever US nuclear test and
was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs, which
devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
--AFP
KATHMANDU: Nepal’s anticorruption commission
has summoned 10 royalist former ministers to answer allegations they
misused power and state funds during King Gyanendra’s rule,
officials said Wednesday.
The demand comes amid mounting pressure on the
Himalayan nation’s monarchy, which faces dissolution after
mainstream political parties split from royal policy and struck a
peace deal with fiercely-republican Maoist rebels last year.
“We have issued letters to ten former royal
ministers and one regional administrator to appear before the
commission in the next seven days for interrogation,” antigraft
chief Lalit Bahadur Limbu told AFP.
Those called in by the Commission for the
Investigation of Abuse of Authority include former foreign minister
Ramesh Nath Pandey and Tulsi Giri, a former vice chairman of the
council of ministers.
--AFP
COLOMBO: Sri Lankan authorities have issued a
thinly veiled death threat against a newspaper editor for reporting
on military excesses and human rights abuses, a media rights group
said Wednesday.
The local Free Media Movement (FMM) said Sri
Lanka’s defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse, the younger brother
of President Mahinda Rajapakse, threatened Champika Liyanarachchi,
the editor of the Daily Mirror on Tuesday.
The FMM, which comprises journalists and rights
activists, said Rajapakse had also said that the editor should not
expect any security from the government to protect her.
“Given the volatile situation in the country,
the FMM also fears that this threat sends a chilling message to the
media community at large in Sri Lanka,” the group said.
--AFP
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