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.''
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
RSS