Category Archives: Asia Pacific

Scott Morrison says quick resolution of US-China trade dispute ‘unrealistic’

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PM says ‘substantial and difficult’ issues to be resolved in standoff after speaking with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 in Osaka

Scott Morrison says it is “unrealistic” to expect a quick resolution of the damaging trade dispute between the United States and China on Saturday at the G20 meeting in Osaka.

After conversations with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, Morrison told travelling reporters on Friday there was a determination to resolve the standoff but he was not “naive” about how quickly the two countries would come to terms because there were “real, substantial and difficult issues to be resolved”.

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Beijing will not rest until it controls Hong Kong. We must keep fighting | Joshua Wong and Johnson Yeung

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In Hong Kong, we have pushed back against the extradition bill. But China is finding other ways to attack our freedom

Let’s put it in plain words: the people of Hong Kong haven’t defeated the proposed extradition law to China yet – we have only earned a small window to catch our breath. And so have the hardliners in the administration and the Chinese government.

Related: Hong Kong protesters hold noisy rally outside police headquarters

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Australian student Alek Sigley reportedly arrested in North Korea

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Department of Foreign Affairs confirms it is providing support to family of a man detained

An Australian student has reportedly been arrested in North Korea. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed it is providing consular support to the man’s family.

South Korean and Japanese media identified the man as 29-year-old Alek Sigley, a university student living in Pyongyang.

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Former Manus Island detainee tells UN ‘human beings are being destroyed’

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Abdul Aziz Muhamat delivers a plea for urgent action to the Human Rights Council

Since Abdul Aziz Muhamat left Manus Island for the last time, he has climbed a mountain in his new home of Switzerland, and then returned to advocating for the resettlement of the hundreds of men and women he left behind.

The Sudanese refugee spent more than six years in Australia’s offshore processing and detention system in Papua New Guinea, before he was granted residency in the European nation earlier this month.

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Hong Kong protesters hold noisy rally outside police headquarters

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About a thousand people wearing masks and hats build barricades and obscure cameras with umbrellas

About a thousand people have held a noisy rally outside the police headquarters in downtown Hong Kong, calling for the release of protesters arrested during this month’s wave of political unrest, following a peaceful demonstration earlier on Wednesday.

The protesters, mostly dressed in black and many covering their faces with masks and wearing hard hats, occupied the streets around the police headquarters in Wan Chai after 10pm and chanted loudly “Shame on you” and “Release the righteous fighters” to the beating of drums.

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Hong Kong protesters call on foreign leaders to raise crisis at G20

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Demonstrators march on consulates to petition overseas governments to assist in fight against ‘authoritarian regime’

Hundreds have gathered at a rally in Hong Kong and marched to foreign consulates to lobby international governments about the city’s political crisis during the G20 summit this week.

President Xi Jinping of China and the US president, Donald Trump, are expected to meet at the summit in Japan amid heightened trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

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Timor-Leste rejects report it is taking $16bn loan from China’s Exim bank for gas project

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State-owned company seeks partners to develop $50bn of untapped reserves in Timor Sea

Timor-Leste’s state-owned gas company has rejected reports it is set to take a $16bn loan from China’s Exim bank to finance the Greater Sunrise project.

The Timor-Leste government recently took majority ownership of the project after buying out its former partners – ConocoPhillips and Shell – with the aim of ensuring the gas is piped to its shores instead of Australia’s.

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The Pacific is in danger of becoming a semi-narco region

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Caught in the middle of a drug trafficking route, island countries are in danger of falling under the control of drug cartels

Four years ago I stood in front of a top level security conference and warned that we have just a few years to get on top of the problem of drugs being trafficked through the Pacific region or it could turn into a semi-narco region, controlled by criminal syndicates.

In the four years since I gave that speech, things have gotten worse.

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Pacific nations are ‘victims’ of Australian and New Zealand appetite for drugs, experts say

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Australia urged to take action to stop cocaine and methamphetamine trafficking from Latin America through Pacific region

Australia and New Zealand have been urged to do more to fight the drug trade across the Pacific and take responsibility for the fact that the demand for drugs in cities such as Sydney and Auckland was having devastating effects on small Pacific nations.

Drug traffickers transport cocaine and methamphetamines through Pacific nations from the US and Latin America to Australia and New Zealand, where drug users pay the highest price per gram (about A$300 or £180) for cocaine and have the highest cocaine use per capita in the world.

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Paladin contract for Manus Island should be cancelled, PNG’s new PM says

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James Marape says foreign contractors should not be doing work that locals can do

Papua New Guinea’s newly appointed prime minister wants Australia to cancel its controversial contract with Paladin to deliver services on Manus Island.

James Marape, who became prime minister after the resignation of Peter O’Neill last month, told PNG’s parliament on Tuesday he would summon Australia’s diplomatic head of mission “to provide an explanation”.

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‘We have no other choice’: as China erodes democracy Hong Kong citizens prepare to leave

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The extradition bill, exorbitant house prices and high cost of living are driving a rise in emigration

Elisa Wong had always thought she would move away from Hong Kong when her seven-year-old daughter reached university age. But the recent political crisis has prompted her to reach for an application form to emigrate to Australia now.

“I must put in an application as quickly as possible,” the 45-year-old former manager at a bank said. “It’s hard to uproot your family and start again in a new country, but the upheavals in the past weeks have made up my mind.”

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‘I’ve seen terrible, terrible violence’: cocaine and meth fuel crime and chaos in Fiji

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The Pacific island nation best known as a holiday destination is grappling with a growing drug problem

In the early hours of a Saturday morning in the city of Nadi, on the west coast of Fiji’s main island, Isaiah* is sitting in a Burger King drinking Fanta through a straw and explaining how he became a drug dealer.

He started five years ago, aged 13, selling cigarettes and marijuana. Now he sells cocaine and methamphetamines.

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Humans v the city: the staggering scale of Chongqing – in pictures

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Chongqing’s population is estimated at just below 10 million but that rises to more than 31 million if the built-up surroundings are included. Belgian photographer Kris Provoost finds that in a city so large, individuals can get lost

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Wine and chauffeurs: ANZ under pressure after NZ boss’s $400,000 in expenses revealed

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Questions over how chief executive David Hisco was allowed to run up large expense accounts and over wife’s purchase of a bank property

Pressure is mounting on the ANZ bank board after New Zealand’s central bank ordered two independent reviews into the company’s conduct following the departure of its NZ chief executive who ran up expense accounts averaging more than $400,000 a year.

The bank’s chairman, former New Zealand prime minister Sir John Key, last week announced the departure of David Hisco, who is an Australian, after the company learned of his spending for “non-monetary benefits” including a personal chauffeur service and wine cellaring.

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Paws for effect: Japanese zoo stages unusual ‘lion’ escape drill

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Staff member in a lion costume helps zoo practise for the event of an escape, as real lions appear unimpressed

For one terrifying moment it looks like the lion is about to get the upper hand against its human nemeses.

The animal faces down its would-be captors – armed with a net and long poles - and, without warning, knocks one of them to the ground with its powerful paws. “Are you alright?” another zookeeper asks the prone victim.

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China will not allow G20 to discuss Hong Kong, says foreign minister

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Foreign powers have no right to interfere in ‘internal affair’, says Zhang Jun, as Beijing also calls for trade compromise

China has said it will not allow the G20 nations to discuss the Hong Kong issue at its summit this week, assistant foreign minister Zhang Jun said on Monday.

Millions of people demonstrated on the streets of the city this month against a bill that would allow people to be extradited to the mainland to face trial in courts controlled by the Communist party.

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The new drug highway: Pacific islands at centre of cocaine trafficking boom

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Explosion in number of boats carrying cocaine and meth from Latin America to Australia is causing havoc for islands on the way

• Cocaine used as washing powder: police struggle with Pacific drug influx

It is the drug route you’ve never heard of: a multibillion-dollar operation involving cocaine and methamphetamines being packed into the hulls of sailing boats in the US and Latin America and transported to Australia via South Pacific islands more often thought of as holiday destinations than narcotics hubs.

In the past five years there has been an explosion in the number of boats, sometimes carrying more than a tonne of cocaine, making the journey across the Pacific Ocean to feed Australia’s growing and very lucrative drug habit.

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Cocaine used as washing powder: police struggle with Pacific drug influx

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Under-resourced but undeterred, Fiji’s officers battle surge in trafficking – with just one boat

• The new drug highway: Pacific islands at centre of cocaine trafficking boom

Sitiveni Qiliho, Fiji’s police commissioner, says he doesn’t watch films any more because, since taking on Fiji police’s top job two years ago, his life has enough drama.

Over the past few months he has found himself scuba diving in search of multimillion-dollar stashes of cocaine stored in huge underwater nets, arresting drug traffickers on the high seas and informing remote islands communities that the mysterious packages washing up on their beaches are full of cocaine and shouldn’t be baked into cakes or put in tea.

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Hong Kong’s elite fear extradition law could harm their reputation

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Business leaders in the region take tentative steps in face of contentious bill

Days after Hong Kong’s first major protest against its stalled extradition law, a property firm decided to take a £2.5m hit and abandon an option to develop a slice of prime city land, blaming “social contradiction and economic instability”.

The decision by Goldin Financial Holdings was made after one of its directors, a pro-Beijing lawmaker called Abraham Shek Lai-him, called an urgent meeting to discuss whether to go ahead with the project on part of the old city airport.

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