North Korea has opened its borders for goodwill gestures from South Korea and the United States. South Korean monks arrived in Pyongyang Saturday to help celebrate the creation of a religious relic important to Buddhists on both sides of the demilitarized zone. The 37 South Korean monks arrived by plane and were greeted at the […]
An accidental bomb explosion killed seven people, including two children aged 10 and 12, in a village in Burma’s western Arakan State on Sunday afternoon. Local witnesses said the bomb, which was believed to have been left behind from World War II, exploded when villagers in Thae Chaung village of Sittwe Township attempted to smash […]
TAIWAN – The National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) yesterday offered a public apology for mistakenly transplanting to five recipients the organs of an HIV-infected donor on Wednesday, putting them at a high risk of contracting AIDS. Tan Ching-ding, a medical affairs secretary of NTUH, and Hung Chien-ching, a physician-in-charge at the hospital, expressed the apology […]
Rome – A major resurgence of avian influenza was likely amid signs that a mutant strain of the bird flu virus was spreading in Asia and beyond, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned Monday. The FAO urged increased preparedness and surveillance against the variant strain of H5N1, the virus that has infected 565 […]
Court sources and observers in Cambodia say the genocide trial of four surviving Khmer Rouge is now likely to be delayed once again. That follows an acknowledgment by the Khmer Rouge tribunal that one of the defendants requires psychiatric tests to determine her fitness to stand trial. The court is no stranger to delay, but […]
A remote west China city is rounding up stray cats and putting them to work catching rats that infest pasture lands. China’s official Xinhua news agency says around 150 strays, dubbed by the media as the “cat army,” were turned loose on the range lands outside the city of Bole in May to fight what […]
Taiwan announced this week that its fertility rate had fallen below one baby per woman, worrying the government about its future supply of manpower and brain power. Taiwan’s rate of 0.9 is now the world’s lowest, but other developed Asian economies are close behind. Taiwan’s fertility rate of 0.9 puts the island in the same […]
News reports from western China say a Buddhist monk died Monday after setting himself on fire in an apparent protest against an ongoing Chinese crackdown on Tibetan monks. The death, confirmed by China’s official Xinhua news agency, occurred in an ethnic Tibetan area of Sichuan province known as Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. The London-based Free […]
