Posts Splited Into different issues
according to wsj:
China’s government this week expanded a pilot program that grants a 13% subsidy to farmers for the purchase of certain basic household appliances, including: washing machines, cell phones, color TVs, and refrigerators. The government wants rural households to be able to catch up with their urban peers, as part of a longer-standing national plan to achieve “balanced development” between the rural and urban centers.
American military officials are continuing to press for alternative transport routes to Afghanistan, with senior commanders exploring the feasibility of a rail route through the Caucasus and Central Asia, reports Eurasianet.org.
Vietnam was determined to finish planting markers along the border with China ahead of the December 10 deadline.Over the past seven years, the taskforces from both countries had finished demarcation along 1,400km of the common border, with almost all locations for border markers fixed and some 1,800 markers planted, said the Vietnam News Agency.
North Korea’s Kim Jong Il paid visits to machinery and soap-making factories, state media reported, the latest in a series of dispatches in recent weeks about public appearances by a leader believed to be recovering from a stroke.
Kazakhstan’s lower house of Parliament approved controversial legislation Wednesday to increase government control over religious groups, drawing criticism from a major international group Kazakhstan is to lead in 2010, according to the AP.
Rights groups say the amendments to the country’s law on religion will hinder religious minorities in the sprawling Central Asian country and could force some of them out of existence.
Kazakhstan, where Muslims and Christians each make up about 45 percent of the population, has sought in recent years to cast itself as an active promoter of religious tolerance. But some Christian communities — including Baptists and Lutherans, largely from the ethnic German population — have come under government scrutiny.
Beketov’s fate is a graphic illustration of the dangers of working as a journalist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. His story is depressingly typical: according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Russia is now the third most dangerous place in the world to work as a reporter, after Iraq and Algeria.
reports the Guardian
from the nytimes:
North Korea said this week it would be expelling South Korean officials and some business managers from the park in Kaesong, just north of the border, on December 1 in anger at South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s policy to get tough on Pyongyang.
“On the afternoon of November 28, they will cross the Military Demarcation Line and pull out to the South,” Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told a news briefing, referring to government workers stationed at the industrial park.
According to the New York Times, the Chinese government reacted angrily on Monday to what it called a slanderous United Nations report that alleges systemic torture of political and criminal detainees. The government said the authors were biased, untruthful and driven by a political agenda.
The report, issued Friday by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, documented what the authors described as widespread abuse in the Chinese legal system, one that often gains convictions through forced confessions.
The report recounts China’s use of “secret prisons” and the widespread harassment of lawyers who take on rights cases, and it criticizes the government’s extralegal system of punishment, known as re-education through labor, which hands down prison terms to dissidents without judicial review.
The Associated Press reports:
China’s border police have significantly beefed up their presence at the base of Mount Everest amid rising visitor numbers and increasing cases of theft, prostitution and gambling, state media reported Tuesday.
The influx of people to the area has brought increased crime to the north face of Everest, and Chinese authorities last year pledged to boost the police presence following reports of thefts of food, oxygen tanks and climbing gear.
No real surprise here, Chinese authorities call new album “venomous” and block access to band’s website.