AFP — Two US soldiers in Afghanistan died Thursday after separate insurgent attacks, NATO said, compounding the bloodiest year yet for American forces in the Afghan war. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said both had died following insurgent attacks, one in the country’s east, the other in the south.ISAF confirmed to AFP that both were Americans.A total of 326 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war in 2010, compared with 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website. Read Article
Epoch Times – A Qantas employee, removed from her job after being deported from China for practising Falun Gong, was likely targeted by Chinese spies, says a representative of Falun Gong in Australia. Mr. John Deller, spokesman for the New South Wales Falun Dafa Association, said that Falun Gong practitioner Sheridan Genrich, a Qantas flight attendant, was stopped and interrogated before she was searched during a stopover in Beijing. Read Article
The Independent – An apparent air strike by foreign forces killed six election campaign workers in Afghanistan’s north today, a government spokesman said, and NATO-led forces said hey were investigating the incident. Civilian casualties caused by foreign forces while hunting militants have been a major source of tension between President Hamid Karzai and Western nations. Violence across Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001. Today’s attack happened in the Rostaq district of Takhar, a relatively peaceful province in the north near Tajikistan, said a spokesman for the provincial governor, unlike areas in the south and east where the resurgent Taliban are mostly active. Read Article
Australian – China, which executes more people each year than any other country, said it is considering dropping capital punishment for economic crimes. A draft amendment to the country’s criminal code proposes cutting 13 “economy-related, non-violent offenses” from the list of 68 crimes punishable by the death penalty, the official Xinhua news agency reported. International rights groups have criticized China for its heavy use of the death penalty, saying it is excessive. It is not known when the draft will become law. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The Chinese now consume more than twice as much organic food as health-conscious Japan. The market is worth an annual 10billion yuan (£1billion) having quadrupled in the past five years. For comparison, the British organic market is worth roughly £2billion. Interest has been promoted by a series of scares including toxic beans, contaminated milk and pork, pesticide-laced dumplings, chemically-tainted chicken, and the growing presence of what is known as “sewage oil”. Read article
Reuters – Three bombs exploded at a Shi’ite procession in the Pakistani city of Lahore on Wednesday, killing at least 20 people and wounding over 170, piling pressure on a government already overwhelmed by floods. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his rival, powerbroker Ichiro Ozawa, have launched a leadership battle that threatens to divide the ruling party only a year after it took power. Read Article
Reuters – Pakistani government air raids have killed up to 45 militants, their family members and other civilians with no ties to the fighters, officials said on Wednesday. Three strikes on Tuesday night targeted Pakistani Taliban militants in one of their strongholds in the Tirah Valley in the northwestern Khyber region on the Afghan border. Read Article
Forbes – Rumors have circulated in China that People’s Bank of China Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan has left the country. The rumors appear to have started following reports on Aug. 28 which cited Ming Pao, a Hong Kong-based news agency, saying that because of an approximately $430 billion loss on U.S. Treasury bonds, the Chinese government may punish some individuals within the PBOC, including Zhou. Read Article
USA Today – Off-balance-sheet liabilities. Bad mortgage loans. Uncertain growth prospects. These issues, which nearly toppled the U.S. banking industry and triggered the financial meltdown, are increasingly threatening the stability of Chinese banks. Last week, a slew of Chinese banks – including Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China – reported strong profits. Read Article
AFP — The number of US soldiers killed in the Afghan war in 2010 is the highest annual toll since the conflict began almost nine years ago, according to an AFP count Wednesday. A total of 323 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war this year, compared to 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website. At 490, the overall death toll for foreign troops for the first eight months of the year is rapidly closing in the number registered in all of 2009, which at 521 was a record since the start of the war in late 2001. In all 1,270 American troops have lost their lives, out of 2,058 foreign military fatalities, since the conflict began with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Read Article
Epoch Times – Illegal organ harvesting has become worse under reforms put in place by the Chinese leadership to stop it, says a Canadian human rights lawyer. David Matas is in Australia to present a paper on the issue at a United Nations conference for non-government organisations (NGOs) involved with health in developing countries. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – A series of bomb attacks have badly hit US troops in eastern and southern Afghanistan in the past 48 hours, contributing to the toll. Violence is predicted to rise towards the September 18 parliamentary elections and as American troops begin operations west of Kandahar after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Deaths among the Nato-led coalition have reached 485 this year and are predicted to surpass 2009’s total of 521. Read Article
Reuters – The CIA is making payments to a significant number of officials in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s administration, The Washington Post reported. Citing current and former U.S. officials, the paper said the payments were long-standing in many cases and intended to help the agency maintain a source of information within the Afghan government. Some Karzai aides were CIA informants and others received payments to ensure their accessibility, the Post said, citing a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Read Article
ABC – The Bank of Japan has responded to government pressure to counter a strong yen by extending a multi-billion-dollar loan program, but the move has been viewed with disappointment by markets. The decision came after an emergency meeting was called in response to government pressure to try to curb the yen’s rise and support an economy mired in deflation after the unit hit a 15-year high against the US dollar last week. Fears for the health of the global economy have increased in recent weeks, and US Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke on Friday vowed to act if “unexpected developments” further threaten the shaky US recovery. Read Article
Hindustan Times – After a lull, a spike in US strikes within Pakistani territory since mid-August has meant that the number of unmanned drone attacks carried out by the Americans in the first eight months of 2010 has exceeded that for the whole of 2009. It also makes this year the most lethal since the drone strikes commenced in 2004. The latest strike was in the tribal agency of Kurram that targeted the Tehrik-e-Taliban or the Pakistan Taliban. That took the total for 2010 to 54 exceeding last year’s 53, according to figures from the Long War Journal, which tracks the strikes within Pakistan. Read Article
NY Times – During its decades of rapid growth, China thrived by allowing once-suppressed private entrepreneurs to prosper, often at the expense of the old, inefficient state sector of the economy. Now, whether in the coal-rich regions of Shanxi Province, the steel mills of the northern industrial heartland, or the airlines flying overhead, it is often China’s state-run companies that are on the march. Read Article
Tehran Times-Malaysia is considering releasing genetically modified mosquitoes designed to combat dengue fever, in a landmark field trial that has come in for criticism from environmentalists. In the first experiment of its kind in Asia, 2,000-3,000 male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes would be released in two Malaysian states in October or November. The insects in the study have been engineered so that their offspring quickly die, curbing the growth of the population -Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The US has broadened financial sanctions against North Korea, freezing the American assets of four North Korean citizens and eight firms in part to punish it for the sinking of a South Korean warship. Read Article
BBC – A roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan has killed four US soldiers, Nato said. AFP quoted spokesman James Judge as saying that a home-made bomb, one of the main weapons of the Taliban, was used in the attack. The attack comes a day after seven US soldiers were killed in two bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan. Read Article
Reuters – Thousands of Indonesians were evacuated from the slopes of a volcano on Sunday after it erupted for the first time in more than 400 years, spewing out lava and sending smoke and dust 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) into the air -Read Article
Press TV – China has said that its navy is preparing to hold a military exercise in the Yellow Sea next week, condemning recent and planned US-South Korean joint drills. A naval fleet will stage the drill this week from Wednesday to Saturday in the sea between China and the Korean peninsula, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the Chinese military as saying on Sunday. Read Article
PhysOrg.com – Eastern parts of India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh are ravaged by encephalitis each year as malnourished children succumb to the virus which is transmitted by mosquitoes from pigs to humans but this is one of the worst outbreaks, officials said.
The deaths of four more children on Saturday pushed the toll to 215, with hundreds sick, some two to a bed, in hospitals in Gorakhpur, a deeply neglected area of 14 million people, regional health officer U.K. Srivastava told AFP by telephone from Gorakhpur. Read article
Associated Press – Talk of the global economic recovery fizzling doesn’t faze Cho Byung-cheol, president of a small South Korean technology company that has already set up a branch in China and plans one soon in the United States. The company, which designs and makes semiconductor-based high-speed data storage and processing equipment, is planning to boost its South Korean workforce of nearly 60 by half, says Cho, who founded Seoul-based Taejin Infotech Co. in 1996. Sales, which totaled only 8.4 billion won ($7 million) last year, could swell fourfold this year and reach 100 billion won next year, he predicts. Read Article
Epoch Times – The Falun Dafa Information Center released a statement on Aug. 27 reporting that the Chinese police abducted a woman who died eight days later while in police custody. Yan Pingjun of Heibei, China is a 45-year-old Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) practitioner. According to the center, “Falun Gong is a traditional-style Buddhist “qigong” practice, with roots in the Chinese heritage of cultivating the mind/body for health and spiritual growth.” It is now practiced in over 100 countries. Read Article
