Asia

Thousands of protesters faced off with riot police in northeast China to demand a chemical plant be relocated after a toxic pollution scare sparked urgent evacuations, state media said. Residents in the port city of Dalian gathered in front of the municipal government’s office, shouting demands as hundreds of police looked on, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

India’s embattled prime minister said his government was taking the “strictest possible action” to stamp out corruption after a string of recent scandals. “We are taking the strictest possible action in cases of corruption that have surfaced,” Manmohan Singh said from the ramparts of New Delhi’s 16th-century Red Fort in an Independence Day speech on Monday.

Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi is on Sunday set to make her first political trip outside her home city since she was freed from house arrest, despite a government security warning. Suu Kyi, who was released from seven straight years of detention days after a controversial election last November, will visit the Bago region, about 80 kilometres north of Yangon.

In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co, although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go

In an unprecedented move, top four military commanders in Turkey stepped down from their posts on 29 July 2011. Chief of General Staff Gen. Işık Koşaner, Land Forces Commander Gen. Erdal Ceylanoğlu, Naval Forces Commander Adm. Eşref Uğur Yiğit and Air Forces Commander Gen. Hasan Aksay asked to be retired with immediate effect.

Gangjeong on Jeju Island, a pristine Unesco-designated ecological reserve where elderly Korean women sea divers, haenyo, continue to forage for seafood. It is also the site of a fierce resistance movement by villagers who oppose the construction of a South Korean naval base on the island that will become part of the US missile defense system ‘to contain China’.

Negotiators from Vietnam and China have reached consensus to resolve their maritime dispute in the East Sea, according official. Spokesperson for the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry Nguyen Phuong Nga confirmed the positive result of talks held between representatives of both governments to overcome recent tensions.

‘Pakistan’s government should immediately end widespread disappearances of suspected militants and activists by the military, intelligence agencies, and the paramilitary Frontier Corps in the southwestern province of Balochistan.’

Extremists would have the best chance to take possession of Pakistani nuclear weapons following the breakdown of the South Asian state’s government, the U.S. Congressional Research Service concluded in a report in July, 2011.

An icon of Mui Wo village on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island has ‘gone to the further shore’ and his popular product, Sweet Tao Fu (J. Tofu) or Soy Custard, will be sorely missed by so many people – local and visitors alike – Mok Kau Moon, aged 79, died 11 July, 2011, after only one night in hospital.There is no one to take up his business.