Asia

Kabul– Afghan government should release the approximately 400 women and girls imprisoned for “moral crimes,” Human Rights Watch said in a new report released on 28 March. The United States and other donor countries should press Afghan government under President Hamid Karzai to end the wrongful imprisonment of women and girls who are crime victims rather than criminals.

…”And while she will have little power, the mere fact that she is there means there will be a lot more international attention on parliament itself and the decisions that it makes,” reports Al Jazeera’s Wayne Hay from Yangon on the election results portending success of the National League for Democracy after twenty years on the political backburner.

Yangon – As millions of Burmese go to the polls on 1 April, expectations are high for real change. Across this Southeast Asian nation and abroad there is an unprecedented sense of hope not seen in decades following a wave of political reforms now described by Myanmar’s own government as “irreversible”.

Twenty years ago, Rik Idema, a Dutch cyclist, first passed through Mongolia on a round-the-world biking trip, the country struck him as the most pristine place he’d ever seen, so later returned to explore it with a Mongolian friend. They started Tseren Tours together in 1994. Yet while business is thriving, the couple worries about Mongolia’s future as a tourist destination.

The violent political arguments that took place around the district of Kannur, in India’s Kerala State, often had their roots in silly disputes over pasting posters or wall graffiti by the various political parties, so writes Subin Mananthavady in the Deccan Chronicle. “People in Chalad have a different perspective about posers or writing slogans for scoring political points.”

Hong Kong chooses a new representative today – a Chief Executive as different from the British titled: Governor of Hong Kong – and the city’s elites will pick from two pro-Beijing candidates for the top job after weeks of campaigning infected by poor taste jibs. The ‘other’, a people’s man, democrat Albert Ho, is reckoned as a ‘no choicer’ and is in it for asemblance of choice.

While at least fifteen people fasted against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant and thousands protested, the work at the plant returned to normal Tuesday, 20 March. This was a day after the Tamil Nadu government gave the go-ahead to restart work on the stalled Indo-Russian project, with officials saying the first unit would be commissioned, ‘as soon as possible.’

Al-Akhbar blog published a report Friday, March 16, 2012 informing that Afghanistan’s president had suggested that more than one US soldier was involved in the massacring of the 16 Afghan civilians killed in two villages last week. Update to Terror, Trauma, and the Endless Afghan War, by Amy Goodman, featured on Pressenza.

We may never know what drove a U.S. Army staff sergeant to head out into the Afghan night and allegedly murder at least 16 civilians in their homes, among them nine children and three women. The massacre near Belambai, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, has shocked the world and intensified the calls for an end to the longest war in U.S. history.

Last week, money was raised to send three US Veterans for Peace to Jeju Island, they were not allowed to land; meanwhile, the South Korean authorities detained and began the process of deporting two international nonviolent peace activists, Angie Zelter UK Benjamin Monnet France. Reports from Veterans for Peace US and Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.