A 104-year-old Chinese woman faces deportation from Australia after a government tribunal yesterday rejected her final appeal for a permanent visa.
Cui Yu Hu arrived in Melbourne to visit family in 1995 on a 12-month tourist visa but no airline would take her back to China because she was too old and frail.
The widow -- who received a letter of congratulations from Prime Minister John Howard when she turned 104 earlier this year -- remained in Australia illegally for another four years before she applied for an aged parent visa that would allow her to stay permanently and receive free health care.
Hu's family -- adopted daughter Motoko Otani and son-in-law Bing Sen Yang -- appealed the decision. But the Migration Review Tribunal found yesterday that she was not entitled to a visa because she overstayed her initial 12-month visa.
However, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has said she would be willing to consider using her ministerial discretion to overrule the tribunal on humanitarian grounds if Hu's family made a formal application.
Hu's spokesman Chap Chow said her family was confident Vanstone would allow her to stay.
``We are hopeful. We are, in fact, quietly confident this will be the case, there will be [a positive] outcome,'' Chow told ABC radio.
Chow said Hu had outlived her friends in China and deportation would ``kill her.''
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Japan is to downgrade its description of ties with China from “one of its most important” in an annual diplomatic report, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters, as relations with Beijing worsen. This year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, which Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is expected to approve next month, would instead describe China as an important neighbor and the relationship as “strategic” and “mutually beneficial.” The draft cites a series of confrontations with Beijing over the past year, including export controls on rare earths, radar lock-ons targeting Japanese military aircraft and increased pressure around Taiwan. The shift in tone underscores a deterioration
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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
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