AUSTRALIA
Chinese dominate blacklist
Chinese and Indian citizens dominate the country’s border control blacklist, secret documents showed yesterday, with the majority of people singled out for national security reasons. The closely guarded Movement Alert List, released to the Australian newspaper under Freedom of Information laws, includes 34,189 Chinese citizens — 10 percent of the total 314,462 people who have been flagged by authorities. Indians were the second-largest group, with 21,643 citizens on the watch list, closely followed by New Zealanders (18,315) and Indonesians (16,271), June figures showed. Separate data from March showed almost half (49.24 percent) were on the list for national security reasons, with health concerns (11.08 percent) the next biggest group, primarily linked to respiratory illnesses like tuberculosis.
SOUTH KOREA
Minister travels to Russia
Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan left for Russia yesterday for talks focusing on North Korea and bilateral relations, a news report said. During his four-day trip, Kim will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow tomorrow and discuss North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, among other topics, Yonhap news agency said. He is accompanied by Wi Sung-lac, the chief envoy to the six-party talks on disarming the nuclear-armed North Korea. The meeting comes amid a flurry of diplomatic efforts to resume the stalled forum involving the two Koreas, Russia, China, Japan and the US.
JAPAN
Coast guard arrests Chinese
The coast guard has seized two Chinese fishing vessels and their captains for suspected illegal fishing in the Sea of Japan (East Sea), the Kyodo News agency reported. The trawlers were seized on Friday off Ishikawa Prefecture within the country’s exclusive economic zone, Kyodo quoted the coast guard as saying. It named the captains as Wang Fugui, 26, and Zheng Wenwu, 35, and said each of the ships had 17 Chinese citizens on board. Tensions have risen between the two Asian rivals over what Tokyo described last week as China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, where the two countries have conflicting territorial claims, and the Pacific Ocean.
CHINA
Traffic pileup kills 17
The state news agency says a pre-dawn pileup on a southern expressway has killed 17 people and injured four. Xinhua news agency said the accident yesterday in Jiangxi Province involved three trucks and a passenger van. It said the pileup was triggered when a truck rear-ended another vehicle, then flipped into a lane of oncoming traffic. Twelve people were declared dead at the scene and five others died in a hospital. Serious traffic accidents are common because of lax driving habits, overloaded vehicles and bad road conditions.
NORTH KOREA
Red Cross assesses floods
The Red Cross says nearly 4,000 homes in just one province were destroyed or damaged by extensive flooding spawned by torrential rains late last month. The report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says more than 28,000 people were affected in the 12 counties in South Hwanghae Province in the southwest. The report released this week gave no independent estimate on how many people may have died during the heavy rains from July 25 to July 27, but it cited a government death toll of 26.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
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
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees