Category Archives: Asia Pacific

Thailand’s pro-democracy protesters clash with police

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Paint thrown and bangs heard after Bangkok’s Democracy Monument draped in red cloth

Youth activists protesting against laws forbidding insult to Thailand’s powerful king briefly clashed with police on Saturday after draping Bangkok’s Democracy Monument in red cloth.

Protesters threw paint at police and several small bangs were heard during a standoff near a city shrine after the demonstration had moved from Democracy Monument and the main leaders had called for it to disperse.

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Japan: 7.1-magnitude earthquake strikes near eastern coast

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Quake strikes at a depth of 60km in the Pacific off Fukushima but no tsunami warning has been issued

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake has taken place off the eastern coast of Japan, but no tsunami warning has been issued, Japanese authorities have said.

The quake on Saturday produced powerful shaking along parts of Japan’s eastern coast, and was felt strongly in Tokyo, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

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‘My mother begged me not to go’: the Japanese women who married Koreans – and never saw their family again

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Mitsuko left Japan in 1960 for a new life in North Korea. Once there, she realised she – and hundreds of others like her – could never go back

It has been six decades since Mitsuko Minakawa boarded a ferry on the Sea of Japan coast, bound for a new life in North Korea. But the anguish of that sunny day in the spring of 1960 has never left her.

Two months earlier, Minakawa had married a Korean man, Choe Hwa-jae, a contemporary at Hokkaido University, where she was the only woman in a class of 100 students. Minakawa, then 21, and Choe were part of the mass repatriation of ethnic Korean residents of Japan – many of them the offspring of people who had been brought from the Korean peninsula by their Japanese colonisers to work in mines and factories.

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The Good American review: Bob Gersony and a better foreign policy

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Robert D Kaplan’s outstanding book makes a strong case for US engagement based on human rights and helping refugees

What adjective should describe “the American” active in foreign policy? Graham Greene chose “quiet”, as his character harmed a country he did not understand. Eugene Burdick and William Lederer used “ugly”.

Robert D Kaplan, one of America’s most thoughtful chroniclers of foreign affairs, proposes “good” to describe Bob Gersony, who in “a frugal monastic existence that has been both obscure and extraordinary” has devoted his life to using the power and treasure of the US to serve others through humanitarian action.

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Hong Kong: alarm over proposed law that could ban anyone from leaving

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Barristers say proposal would give head of immigration ‘unfettered power’ to stop people leaving the city without any court process

The influential Hong Kong Bar Association has spoken out against a government proposal that could give “apparently unfettered power” to the immigration director to stop anyone leaving the city.

The Hong Kong Bar Association (HKBA) expressed alarm on Friday in a paper submitted to the city’s legislative council about the proposed law, which could bar any individual – whether resident or not – from boarding a carrier out of the financial hub.

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Patient diagnosed with Covid-19 dies in New Zealand hospital

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Case is not being included in official Covid-19 death toll pending further investigations

A patient diagnosed with Covid-19 has died at a New Zealand hospital, the Ministry of Health has confirmed, after being transferred from a managed isolation facility for treatment of a separate, serious health condition last week.

The person, whose death was not yet being included in New Zealand’s official Covid-related death toll, was diagnosed with the virus after their admission to North Shore hospital in Auckland.

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Opportunists and smugglers: illicit trade in sacred Māori greenstone thrives

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Covid hardships mean pounamu is increasingly being targeted for its value, Indigenous leaders say

The rugged west coast of New Zealand is home to many secrets. Rivers that run flush with gold, beaches that conceal ambergris, and waterways dotted with boulders of the sacred Māori stone, pounamu.

Imbued with spiritual significance to New Zealand’s Indigenous tribes, pounamu – otherwise known as greenstone or New Zealand jade – is highly prized. For centuries Māori have fashioned it into jewellery, tools and even weapons, which could denote status or be used as ceremonial objects or symbols of peace agreements.

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‘Too good to be true’: the deal with an Isis-linked Australian family that betrayed PNG’s most marginalised

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A sustainable forestry project established to develop some of PNG’s most marginalised communities has become mired in an international corruption scandal

“There is always the stench of corruption around a deal that is too bad to be true or too good to be true,” a full-page advertisement in Papua New Guinea’s Post Courier baldly declared in May 2018.

“Usually, because it’s not true.”

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Japanese lose taste for Valentine’s ‘obligation chocs’ under Covid

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Growing numbers of women ditch giri choco custom of ‘forced giving’ of gifts to senior male colleagues

Shifting gender politics and the coronavirus have combined to spell the possible end of the Japanese Valentine’s Day custom of women giving chocolates to male colleagues.

Traditionally, women are expected to buy gift-wrapped chocolates for the men in their working lives – usually senior colleagues and others who have helped them during the course of the year – as part of a tradition called giri choco, literally “obligation chocolates”.

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New Zealand Covid vaccines to arrive one month early, border staff to be inoculated next week

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Jacinda Ardern says vaccination of the wider population will begin in the second half of the year

New Zealand’s first Covid-19 vaccines will arrive in the country ahead of schedule in a win for the government, which has been criticised for being too slow to procure them.

In a surprise announcement on Friday, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said hundreds of thousands of vials of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine would be arriving early, and vaccinations for border staff would begin next Saturday.

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China bans BBC World News in retaliation for UK licence blow

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China has been critical of BBC reports on Xinjiang, while Ofcom recently revoked CGTN licence

BBC World News has been banned from airing in China, a week after Beijing threatened to retaliate for the recent revocation of the British broadcasting licence for China’s state-owned CGTN.

In a statement published at midnight Beijing time on Friday, China’s National Radio and Television Administration said BBC World News’s coverage of China had violated requirements that news reporting be true and impartial and undermined China’s national interests and ethnic solidarity.

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At least 331 human rights defenders were murdered in 2020, report finds

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Two-thirds of those killed worked to protect environmental, land and indigenous peoples’ rights, while those providing Covid relief also faced reprisals

At least 331 human rights defenders promoting social, environmental, racial and gender justice in 25 countries were murdered in 2020, with scores more beaten, detained and criminalised because of their work, analysis has found.

Latin America, the most dangerous continent in the world in which to protect environmental, land and human rights, accounted for more than three-quarters of all the murders of human rights defenders in 2020. In Colombia, where activists are routinely targeted by armed groups despite a 2016 peace deal, 177 such deaths were recorded, more than half of the global total. The Philippines was the second deadliest country with 25 murders, followed by Honduras, Mexico, Afghanistan, Brazil and Guatemala.

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Tokyo 2020 Olympics president expected to resign over sexist comments

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Yoshiro Mori had insisted for days he would not quit but Japanese media say he will step down amid a growing tide of anger over his remarks

The president of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics organising committee, Yoshiro Mori, is expected to resign after derogatory comments he made about women caused an international uproar less than six months before the Games are due to open.

Mori, who has led the organising committee since 2014, will step down after insisting for days that he would not resign, the Fuji News Network reported on Thursday.

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Biden raises Taiwan and human rights with Xi Jinping in first phone call

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The conversation came hours after the US president announced a new Pentagon taskforce on China

Joe Biden has affirmed the US’s tough line on China’s human rights abuses and regional expansionism in his first phone call with president Xi Jinping since taking office.

Xi defended China’s policies as matters of sovereignty, but told the US leader confrontation would be “a disaster”, and called for the two sides to re-establish the means to avoid misjudgments, according to state media.

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New Zealand male MPs no longer have to wear ties after Māori MP ejected

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Speaker says ties will not be required ‘appropriate business attire’ despite a committee meeting failing to reach a consensus

New Zealand’s male MPs will no longer be required to wear ties in parliament, following a row over the item of clothing that involved the speaker ejecting Māori party co-leader Rawiri Waititi from the chamber for refusing to wear one.

New Zealand parliament speaker Trevor Mallard made the announcement after a meeting on Wednesday of the standing orders committee held to discuss the issue and hear a submission from the Māori party.

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Indonesia plane crash: Sriwijaya Air jet throttle may have been faulty, says report

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Automatic throttle may have caused Sriwijaya Air jet pilots to lose control of Boeing 737-500

A malfunctioning automatic throttle may have caused the pilots of a Sriwijaya Air jet to lose control, leading to the Boeing 737-500’s plunge into the Java Sea last month, Indonesian investigators have said.

National transportation safety committee investigators said on Wednesday they were still struggling to understand why the jet nosedived into the water minutes after taking off from Jakarta on 9 January, killing all 62 people on board.

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China birthrate slumps as experts blame changing attitudes

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One-child policy fallout and rejection of marriage said to be among reasons for drop of about 15% in 2020

Fallout from decades of its one-child policy and changing social attitudes about family and marriage are driving a plummeting birthrate in China, experts have said, after preliminary figures this week showed a drop of about 15% in 2020.

Demographers and social commentators have said the reasons for the low birthrates include the high costs of housing and education, and growing rejection of marriage among young women. In 2019 the marriage rate hit a 14-year low.

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Tokyo governor to boycott Olympics meeting over sexism row

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Yuriko Koike says attending meeting with under-fire Games chief would not send positive message

The governor of Tokyo has said she will not attend a key meeting of Olympic officials next week, as the row over sexist comments made by the head of the 2020 Games’ organising committee intensifies.

Yuriko Koike, who became the city’s first female governor in 2016, said she saw no merit in attending the meeting between the committee head, Yoshiro Mori, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, and Japan’s Olympics minister, Seiko Hashimoto.

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Dead Pigs review – winding tale of life in cash-crazed Shanghai

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Cathy Yan’s sprawling drama uses a real-life discovery of 16,000 porcine corpses to pick away at Chinese commercialism

A breezily westernised style of Chinese movie is on offer in this 2018 debut feature from Chinese-American film-maker Cathy Yan, who two years later went to Hollywood to direct Birds of Prey, starring Margot Robbie. Dead Pigs is an ensemble dramedy set in Shanghai that satirises – in a distinctly lenient way – the commercialism eating away at China’s heart. It is inspired by a real-life incident in which thousands of dead pigs were found in the city’s Huangpu river, dumped by poverty-stricken farmers who couldn’t pay the disposal fees; the pig symbolism reminded me a tiny bit of Alan Bennett’s A Private Function.

Related: 52 perfect comfort films – to watch again and again

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