Philippine President Gloria Arroyo called on Myanmar to release detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi at a recent meeting with Burmese Prime Minister Thein Sein, the foreign department said on Friday.
Arroyo asked Myanmar’s ruling junta to release Aung San Suu Kyi once the extension of her house arrest expires next month, urging it to reach out to political opponents for the sake of national unity.
The foreign department said Arroyo made her appeal when she met with the Myanmar leader on the sidelines of the planned ASEAN summit in Pattaya, Thailand, on April 10 at the request of Thein Sein.
Releasing Aung San Suu Kyi would result in “tremendous goodwill for Myanmar from the international community,” the department quoted Arroyo as saying.
“We only have your country and your people’s welfare at heart. This is the single, most concrete piece of advice and experience I can share with you,” Arroyo said.
In response, Thein Sein expressed “appreciation for the president’s valuable suggestions and said that his government would take them into account,” the department said.
He also reiterated his government’s firm commitment to take steps towards democratization and reconciliation through the adoption of a new constitution and the holding of general elections next year.
He added that Myanmar “considers its cooperation with the United Nations as the cornerstone of its foreign policy.”
Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in 1990 elections, but the junta never allowed it to take office. She has been under house arrest for most of the past 19 years.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema