8 killed in Kashmir fight; India locks down cities

29 June 2010, SRINAGAR, India — Five suspected insurgents and three Indian soldiers died in a fierce gunbattle in divided Kashmir when the militants tried to cross over from Pakistan into the Indian-controlled portion, an army officer said on Tuesday.

Tension has been rising in Kashmir as government forces allegedly have killed at least eight other people over the past two weeks during protests demanding the region’s independence from India.

Thousands of police in riot gear patrolled the main city, Srinagar, on Tuesday, and shops, businesses and government offices were shut.

Police and paramilitary soldiers drove through neighborhoods warning people to stay indoors and not participate in pro-independence protests, said Afaq Wani, a Srinagar resident. He said it was almost a curfew-like situation.

Sajad Ahmed, a local police officer, said that no curfew has been imposed but that the state government has banned the assembly in public of more than five people. Troops also erected steel barricades and laid razor wire across main roads to prevent public gatherings.

“We’re imposing restrictions to avoid clashes,” Ahmed said.

Similar restrictions were also imposed in several other towns in the region. In the violence-torn town of Sopore, 35 miles (55 kilometers) northwest of Srinagar, an indefinite curfew was in force for the fifth consecutive day.

The gunbattle near the India-Pakistan frontier broke out on Monday when a group of suspected militants infiltrated into Indian territory in the Nowgam sector, Col. Vineet Sood, an army spokesman, said Tuesday.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan and India have fought two wars over Kashmir and, since 1989, Muslim militants have fought in Indian-controlled Kashmir for independence or merger with Pakistan.

India accuses Pakistan of funding and training militants in the Pakistani-held portion of Kashmir and helping them slip over to the Indian side to fight. Islamabad denies the charge.

More than 68,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict since 1989.

China fends off Obama pressure over North Korea

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Tuesday rejected President Barack Obama's suggestion that it was hiding from the risks posed by North Korea, and said it felt the dangers on the divided Korean peninsula more deeply than Washington.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang made the rebuke in answer to repeated questions from reporters about comments by Obama over the weekend.

A North Korean soldier guards the banks of the Yalu River near the North Korean town of Sinuiju June 29, 2010. (REUTERS/Jacky Chen)

Beijing has refused to take a firm position on who is to blame for the sinking of a South Korean naval ship, the Cheonan, in late March, killing 46 sailors.

South Korea and other powers say the ship was undoubtedly sunk by a North Korean torpedo, and Pyongyang should suffer consequences. Beijing has urged restraint in dealing with the North, a long-time ally and strategic buffer.

"Now, I am sympathetic to the fact that North Korea is on China's border," Obama told a news conference at the end of the G20 global leaders' summit in Toronto.

"And so when they adopt a posture of restraint, I understand their thinking. But I think there's a difference between restraint and willful blindness to consistent problems," he added.

Chinese spokesman Qin suggested that his government had to be more cautious in handling its neighbour, whose struggling economy depends on Beijing for aid and trade. He said China did not want to "pour petrol on the flames."

"China is a neighbour of the Korean Peninsula, and on this issue our feelings differ from a country that lies 8,000 kilometres distant," Qin told a regular news conference, referring to the United States.

"We feel even more direct and serious concerns," he added.

The North's secretive leader, Kim Jong-il, appears to be in poor health, and his ruling communist party has called a rare meeting in September to elect a new leadership, a move analysts said could formally set in motion succession plans for him to set in place his son, Kim Jong-un, as his successor.

Beijing fears harsh condemnation of Pyongyang over the ship sinking could erode its already-limited leverage over Kim Jong-il, dash any hopes of persuading him to abandon his nuclear weapons, analysts say.

China's 1,415-km (880-mile) border with North Korea could also be overwhelmed by an influx of refugees if the North suffers political and economic collapse.

"On the Cheonan incident, we don't play favourites with any side," said the spokesman Qin. "Conflict on the (Korean) peninsula would suit no sides' interests, and so on this issue, China's position and efforts are beyond reproach." (Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

China landslide: hopes fade for 107 trapped

• Associated Press in Beijing
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 June 2010 11.21 BST
• Article history

Soldiers evacuate residents from the site of a landslide in Dazhai Village, Guanling county in south-west China. Photograph: Chinafotopress/Getty Images

Hope of finding survivors was diminishing today as rescuers used heavy machinery including bulldozers to search for at least 107 people trapped under a landslide in south-west China.

Villagers huddled in tents set up at the site as rescuers searched for survivors.

But there appeared to be little hope, with no word by midday today, said Tian Maosheng, an official from Guizhou Communist party propaganda department, who is helping with the rescue.

"The number 107 remains unchanged, and there is still no sign of life here," he said.

Homes were buried when the landslide struck the village of Dazhai in Guizhou province yesterday afternoon after days of torrential rains. An official interviewed by state broadcaster CCTV said nearly half a hill had collapsed.

Makeshift tents were set up as first aid stations and soldiers waded through water and mud as they evacuated more than 360 residents.

Light rain this morning hindered rescue efforts, threatening to wash more mud down the slopes, but began to subside later in the day.

Large areas of southern China have been hit by flooding in the last two weeks, with at least 377 people killed and another 142 missing – not including those from Monday's landslide. More than 3 million people have fled their homes over the past two weeks, according to the ministry of civil affairs.

On Sunday floodwaters began receding in the south and workers finished repairing a dike breach that forced the evacuation of 100,000 people.

Mexico to press ahead with vote despite slaying

Play Video AP – Raw Video: Election violence plagues Mexico

AP – Army soldiers guard the crime scene after candidate for governor of the state of Tamaulipas, Rodolfo …

By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press Writer Olga R. Rodriguez, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 1 min ago

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico – Mexican politicians vowed to press on with elections despite the assassination of the leading candidate for governor of a border state, urging frightened citizens to vote and show they are not intimidated by drug cartels threatening the country's democracy.

Gunmen ambushed Rodolfo Torre's campaign caravan Monday less than a week before he was expected to win the governor's race in Tamaulipas, a state torn by a turf battle between two rival drug cartels. Four other people were killed: three of the candidate's bodyguards and a state lawmaker.

President Felipe Calderon called the attack an attempt drug gangs to sway Sunday's elections for governors and mayors in 12 states. He warned that cartels want "to interfere in the decisions of citizens and in electoral processes."

"Organized crime will never meet its objectives. It will not succeed in shaking our faith in democracy or undermine our confidence in the future of Mexico," Calderon said in a televised speech.

But the attack emptied streets in Ciudad Victoria, the Tamaulipas state capital where Torre was killed. Heavily armed federal and state police patrolled in caravans. Some parents rushed to pick up their children from schools.

"I am not going to vote because there is a lot of fear. The tension is very strong," said Maria Pilar Villegas, a convenience store clerk who said she was on the phone with her sister when she saw the news of the assassination on television. "I got chills when I saw the TV."

Torre, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is the first gubernatorial candidate assassinated in Mexico in recent memory. He is the highest-ranking candidate killed since Luis Donaldo Colosio, also for the PRI, was gunned down while running for president in 1994.

Torre's death was the biggest setback yet for the elections. Corruption scandals, threats and attacks on politicians have raised fears for months that Mexico's powerful drug cartels are buying off candidates they support and intimidating those they oppose.

Calderon's government did not say which gang was suspected in Torre's assassination or why he would be targeted.

Tamaulipas, which borders Texas, has become a battleground between the Gulf cartel and its former ally, the Zetas gang of hit men. Gangs have staged bold attacks on security forces, ambushing military patrols and setting up blockades near army garrisons.

Last month, gunmen killed Jose Guajardo Varela, a candidate for mayor of the Tamaulipas town of Valle Hermoso. Guajardo, of Calderon's National Action Party, or PAN, had received warnings to drop his campaign.

Leaders of the PAN and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, had said they could not find anyone to run for mayor in some towns in Tamaulipas because of drug gang intimidation. PAN and PRD leaders have insinuated that the PRI has ties to drug gangs in the state, noting that the party has had no trouble fielding candidates in towns where other politicians are too scared to run.

The PRI, which has long governed Tamaulipas, has dismissed such talk as tired campaign tactics.

Tamaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernandez said he didn't know of any threats against Torre, a doctor who had served as the state's health secretary. Hernandez said Torre didn't express any fear when the two met Sunday to watch the World Cup game between Mexico and Argentina.

"We couldn't see this attack coming at all," Hernandez said in an interview with Milenio television.

Torre, 46, was heading from Ciudad Victoria to the border city of Matamoros to accompany the PRI's mayoral candidates in the closing of their campaigns Monday.

Jorge Luis Navarro, president of the Tamaulipas state election institute, said the vote would go forward.

PRI national leader Beatriz Paredes urged supporters to go the polls. "Nothing is going to intimidate us," she said in a statement. There was no announcement on who the PRI candidate would be.

The PAN and the PRD said they would suspend campaigning by their own gubernatorial candidates in Tamaulipas.

Elsewhere in Mexico, campaigning continued, with candidates urging voters not to fear.

"They are not going to intimidate us. We are going to continue until Sunday with the same intensity," said Jose Francisco Olvera, the PRI candidate for the central state of Hidalgo.

The PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years until losing the presidency in 2000, is hoping that a strong showing in Sunday's elections will put it on the path to regain the presidency in 2012.

Polls had indicated that Torre would easily win the election in Tamaulipas.

The conservative PAN has formed uncomfortable alliances with the PRD to oust the PRI from several states, though not in Tamaulipas.

That alliance, however, was sorely tested by the worst corruption scandal of the election.

Cancun mayor Gregorio Sanchez, of the PRD, was arrested last month for allegedly protecting two brutal drug cartels, forcing him to drop his campaign for governor of Quintana Roo state. His leftist party has dismissed the allegations as a political ploy by Calderon's government.

Drug gang violence has rocketed since Calderon deployed thousands of troops and federal police across the country in 2006 to wage an all-out battle against cartels. Some 23,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence.

George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, said Torre's assassination would keep many voters home, but he expected the situation would only benefit the PRI.

"The ... climate of fear will dampen voter turnout on Sunday, which will help the PRI because they have the best political machine," he said.

Gregorio Linares, a waiter an at upscale restaurant where Torre and other politicians were frequent customers, said the city was growing accustomed to violence. Two months earlier, a shootout between soldiers and gunmen had erupted near the restaurant. But he said Torre's death would only encourage him to vote for the PRI's new candidate.

Cambodian children game their way to life-saving skills

Wed, 23 Jun 2010
By Robert Carmichael
DPA

Phnom Penh - It is a familiar scene in many countries: Children huddled around a computer game, chipping in with instructions, competing and encouraging each other.

But this is no ordinary game. In a Phnom Penh orphanage, a dozen children are testing a unique US-designed program its inventors hope would reduce deaths and injuries by landmines and unexploded ordnance.

Four decades of conflict have left Cambodia with an unenviable legacy of millions of such explosives. Last year, 47 Cambodians were killed and 196 injured by them. Around a third were children, most of them boys.

It would take decades to rid the country of mines, so educating people on how to recognize the risks they pose is vital. But these efforts are typically passive, using presentations or leaflets.

The computer game requires active participation, says Professor Frank Biocca of Michigan State University, where the game was developed.

Biocca was in Phnom Penh in June overseeing testing ahead of the game's expected launch there later this year. He says active involvement in the game, which is targeted at 6- to 15-year-olds, means the children retain more information.

Twelve-year-old Sin explains the game's purpose: Find food for his electronic dog while keeping a sharp eye out for landmines.

"We walk straight, and if we see the red danger sign, then we turn around and come back," he says. "Or we can turn left or right to avoid the landmine."

The on-screen landscape is comprised of photographs of Cambodia's countryside, which makes it both realistic for the children and cost-effective. The warning signs are also local: red signs with a white skull, a red-and-white striped pole, an inverted red triangle.

When the player gets it wrong, an explosion fills the screen, accompanied by a loud boom. Both the dog and child avatars cower but are deliberately uninjured, and a man in a Cambodian demining uniform appears on-screen, blowing his whistle and explaining what happened.

The game began its life as a request two years ago to the university in East Lansing, Michigan, by the Golden West Humanitarian Foundation, a charity that provides technical assistance for international demining operations.

The university's final-year project for one of its undergraduate programmes sees students building so-called "serious games" - games with a purpose beyond entertainment. The mine education game struck a chord.

"We decided this specific project was something to continue to pursue with a focus on making it work across different platforms and making sure it can be updated for different markets cheaply," Biocca says.

Allen Tan heads Golden West's regional office, which provided the developers with technical information and images for the game. Tan, a former bomb-disposal expert in the US Army, says the game has the potential to benefit dozens of countries.

"Certainly any post-conflict zone could be a target for this type of training and especially those with young populations that might not have been around when the conflict happened," he says.

The game runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux operating systems, the last of which is the standard operating system for the One Laptop Per Child initiative, the effort to get computers into the hands of children across the world at a cost of 100 dollars per laptop.

But Biocca says developers started off assuming it had to work on other platforms too, including the internet and mobile phones.

"We think that, ultimately, the true 100-dollar laptop is the cellphone - some version of the cellphone is becoming the Third World computational device," he says. "And those are selling for underneath 100 dollars."

He says that once the game has been launched in Cambodia, it would be adapted for other countries to reflect their culture, landscape, languages and even their landmine signs - all for 1,000 to 10,000 dollars per country.

Biocca says the game could even be altered to educate people about other health issues that require learning, such as influencing sexual behaviour or diet.

So much for the brains behind the development - what did the kids think of the game? Fourteen-year-old Lai loved it.

"If I were to go to the countryside and saw a landmine sign, then I would walk away from that place," he says. "I wouldn't go near it. I would take a different path."

Twelve-year-old Minea echoes those sentiments.

"Walk far away from that place," he says of the lessons learned from his 15-minute session. "Don't touch anything, and don't play anywhere near there."

Court issued an arrest warrant for opposition leader Sam Rainsy

Wednesday, 23 June 2010
By Khmerization Sources: CEN & RFA

A Phnom Penh court has issued a court warrant for the arrest of Sam Rainsy (pictured), leader of the opposition Sam Rainsy Party, in relations to charges of document forgery when he produced maps and documents showing Vietnam's encroachments of Cambodian borders.

Now, Mr. Rainsy is living in exile in Paris and there reports that court will send an arrest warrant to the French Embassy seeking his arrest. However, Mrs. Laurence Bernardi , a spokeswoman for the French Embassy, said that the Embassy has not yet received the warrant.

On 27th January, the Phnom Penh court convicted him of sabotage and destruction of public properties and sentenced him to 2 years jail. Soon after, he released a series of documents and maps alleging Vietnam's encroachments but the Cambodian authority said he faked the maps and the documents and charged him with forgery.

Hun Sen is the top divider among Khmer compatriots and King's visit to Vietnam likely serves the Vietnamese imperialism

Political Analysis Today:

Hun Sen is just the top divider among Khmer compatriots. He is a jerk of foreigner. All his speech is rational for Kmeng Wat and uneducated mad dogs only. His irritating speech to Surya Subedi, the representative of the UNs is unacceptable among Khmer intellectuals. But only those monkeys in the power who have applauded Hun Sen.

Op-Ed: Khmer Young

If the King didn't deliver any message from Chinese leader to Triet, King is certainly used by Triet to speed up his imperialistic attempt over Cambodia. It exactly through the propaganda of "friendship", "good neighbor" or "cooperation" etc.

The Triet's word about "good neighboring" is useful for Vietnam only as Cambodia has lost competitiveness to Vietnam in all fields:

1. Cambodia has no investors and contingents in Vietnam at all. But Vietnam has pursued full potential in both political, social and economical collateral in Cambodia.
2. Cambodian illegal immigrants to Vietnam have been repatriated mercilessly, but illegal Vietnamese immigrants in Cambodia have been taken care very well by the Cambodian authority, including seeking an appropriate land for them to resettle.
3. Khmer Kampuchea Krom people have been neglected by the King whose pseudonym is Father of all Khmer Children, but his trip to Vietnam left his children in Khmer Krom in a dark position.
4. King's visit to Vietnam is coincident to the pressing issue of border markers and border encroachment which opposition leader has been trialed as well as the farmers have been jailed...so indirectly King's visit this time is to intensify the punishment of those Khmer compatriots.
5. Every aspect of political changes in Cambodia is unusually favoring Vietnam at the expense of Khmer's death for its future such as "paying gratitude to Vietnamese soldiers who come to liberate Cambodians from Khmer Rouge" which this phrase has become a well-known propaganda in Cambodia among youths and some unknown people to vote for the CPP. Of course, the international communities and the UNs have already condemned that the presence of Vietnamese troops in Cambodia was the invasion, not the liberation.
   

All few aforementioned points critically displays the unfaithful "good neighboring" repeatedly mentioned by the Vietnamese leaders.

King Sihanouk and Hun Sen have been failed into this trap unconsciously. While King Sihanouk visited Vietnam, Hun Sen has been fooled by his intelligent advisers about the main cause of the war originated by Lon Nol's coup detat. Hun Sen's statement is just part of his blindness because he didn't realize that his speech is to make more divisions among Khmers, and it will benefit more to the foreigner.

Lon Nol has been already dead like Pol Pot, but why Hun Sen has used these two regimes as the pretext to the media and public curiosity? Of course, the coup detat was not Lon Nol only. It was the trend of the cold war, and Lon Nol had become a tool of this trend. If Sihanouk didn't escape to Russia and China, how can Lon Nol be able to defy him? If the US didn't confront with the China and Russia in that situation, how can Lon Nol be able to attain a coup? If Southern Vietnam didn't incorporate with Lon Nol, how could Lon Nol be able to accomplish the coup? -- all these critical thinking and seeking things outside the box must be inserted into Hun Sen's ears from right to left, and from left to right several times.

This example can apply well to the issue of Pol Pot. Pol Pot came to power because of the help from Vietcong and China. This is the fact! The atrocity committed by Pol Pot is not worse than those perpetrators whom created the Pol Pot at the beginning.

Hun Sen is just the top divider among Khmer compatriots. He is a jerk of foreigner. All his speech is rational for Kmeng Wat and uneducated mad dogs only. His irritating speech to Surya Subedi, the representative of the UNs is unacceptable among Khmer intellectuals. But only those monkeys in the power who have applauded Hun Sen.

The ignorance of Hun Sen will disclose more facts until the land of Angkor Borei are totally controlled by the smarter people.