Asia

Tens of thousands of protesters staged a spontaneous mass rally in New Delhi on Wednesday in support of a hunger strike by anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare. Organisers estimated the size of the crowd marching from the India Gate monument in central Delhi at between 60,000 and 70,000.

The greed of people as they accumulate wealth and resort to Riba (transactions involving usury and interest) are the causes of the current global credit crisis, according to an eminent and erudite Muslim and one of the leaders of the Muslim community in India.

Late Wednesday night (17 August, 2011) Anna Hazare’s team accepted Delhi police’s latest proposal for holding their protest against the government’s version of the Lokpal Bill, from August 16, at Jai Prakash Narayan Memorial Park, next to Feroze Shah Kotla grounds, New Delhi. The Humanist Party supported this campaign.

Police detained veteran anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare as he prepared to start a banned hunger strike against the government, provoking widespread outrage. Hazare, 74, was taken into custody by plain-clothes officers at an apartment in New Delhi early Tuesday morning, an hour before he was due to lead a parade to a public park where he was to begin a “fast unto death”.

Five Filipinos, two of them domestic helpers and two former helpers, are fighting in Hong Kong’s High Court for right of abode, which other immigrants can get after seven years in Hong Kong. The plaintiffs in three judicial reviews want the court to declare that the rule denying helpers residency contravenes the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.

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.