US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton flew out of Asia yesterday after a trip dominated by significantly warmer ties with Myanmar as Washington looks to open the resource-rich former pariah to US firms.
She held landmark talks with Burmese President Thein Sein on Friday at a business conference in the Cambodian town of Siem Reap, two days after the US gave the green light to investment in the country, including in oil and gas.
She hailed changes in Myanmar as it emerges from nearly half a century of army rule and insisted that Washington had put in place “protections to ensure that increased American investment advances the reform process.”
US firms will have to report on accountability issues, but rights groups have raised concerns that Washington is moving too fast to cash in on Myanmar’s huge business potential.
Clinton’s southeast Asian tour also included a regional security forum, as the US seeks to bolster Asian alliances to balance China’s might, while avoiding overly antagonizing Beijing.
On Thursday Clinton and Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) pledged to work more closely together.
The US Secretary of State sought to avoid being drawn into a host of maritime territorial spats between Beijing and many of its neighbors, but did express alarm at the potential for escalating tensions.
The US called this week for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations bloc to unify to negotiate with China, but deep splits among member states saw the group’s regional summit end in failure to agree a joint statement.
Clinton was yesterday headed to Cairo, where she is due to hold talks with new Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, after he locked horns with the powerful military.
Earlier this week Clinton urged dialogue between all parties amid wrangling between Egypt’s new civilian leader and the generals who took charge after former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow early last year.
The Egyptian people should “get what they protested for and what they voted for, which is a fully-elected government making the decisions for the country going forward,” she added.
Morsi on Wednesday said that he would respect a court ruling overturning his decree for the dissolved Islamist-dominated parliament to convene.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
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CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the