Emissaries for the exiled Dalai Lama and China showed little public sign of compromise as they prepared yesterday for their first talks in more than a year on restive Chinese-ruled Tibet.
The Dalai Lama’s two envoys will reopen the long-stalled negotiations with senior Communist Party officials on Saturday, the Tibetan government-in-exile said.
Ahead of the meeting, the exiled government said it hoped Beijing would reconsider a proposal to give Tibet and other Tibetan communities greater autonomy. Chinese officials rejected that proposal at the last meeting 15 months ago.
On Tuesday, Chinese government and party officials wavered little, saying China’s policy on the Dalai Lama has been “consistent and clear” and that it hoped the Tibetan spiritual leader would respond positively to Beijing’s requests.
Two envoys of the Dalai Lama arrived in China on Tuesday to resume talks on Tibet after the lengthy deadlock, said Chhime R. Chhoekyapa, the Dalai Lama’s secretary. The resumed talks came as a surprise after the acrimony and uncertainty that followed the last meeting in November 2008.
Chinese officials then refused to discuss the status of Tibet and insisted that they would only address the return of the Dalai Lama, who fled to exile in India in 1959.
At the last talks, the Dalai Lama’s envoys proposed a way for Tibetans to achieve more autonomy within the framework of the Chinese Constitution — a key demand of the minority community. But China apparently rejected the plan, saying it would not allow Tibet the kind of latitude granted to the territories of Hong Kong and Macau.
It was not clear why the discussions had resumed, but the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, said yesterday it hoped the two sides would be able to revisit the proposal for greater autonomy. The Dalai Lama’s office said on Monday the decision to send envoys Lodi Gyari and Kelsang Gyaltsen was made at the end of last week.
Beijing told the Dalai Lama on Tuesday to make the best of the talks, but publicly showed no sign of easing its hardline stance on their disagreements.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened