AKSU, China (AP) — Outside a mosque in China’s restive west, a government-appointed Muslim cleric was dodging a foreign reporter’s question about why young men of the Uighur ethnic minority don’t have beards when one such youth interrupted. “Why don’t you just tell them the truth?” he shouted to the cleric under the nervous gaze of several police officers who had been tailing the reporters all day in the oasis city of Aksu. “It’s because the government doesn’t allow beards.”
BEIJING (AP) — China’s Defense Ministry rejected U.S. accusations that a Chinese fighter jet’s intercept of a U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft off the southern Chinese coast was dangerous, and blamed Washington for mounting large-scale and frequent close-in reconnaissance operations. Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun said the Chinese pilot conducted operations that were “professional and the Chinese jet kept a safe distance from the U.S. planes.”
MACAU (AP) — Activists in the Chinese casino capital of Macau kicked off an informal poll on Sunday to gauge support for democratic reforms, inspired by a similar vote in Hong Kong that had a big turnout but was denounced by Beijing as an illegal farce. The former Portuguese colony, like nearby Hong Kong, is a semiautonomous Chinese region with a leader hand-picked by an elite Beijing-friendly committee.
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — On the outskirts of the slums of Pakistan’s biggest city, protesters burning tires and throwing stones have what sounds like a simple demand: They want water at least once a week. But that’s anything but in Karachi, where people go days without getting water from city trucks, sometimes forcing them to use groundwater contaminated with salt. A recent drought has only made the problem worse. And as the city of roughly 18 million people rapidly grows, the water shortages are only expected to get worse.
BEIJING (AP) — China has executed eight people convicted on terrorism charges in the restive western region of Xinjiang, including three men authorities say were behind a deadly attack in the heart of Beijing in which an SUV plowed through a crowd, state media reported. Last year’s attack, in which the driver died alongside his mother and wife as passengers as well as three bystanders, was a sign that the violence the government blames on ethnic Uighur (pronounced WEE’-gurs) separatists was spilling out of the far western region — home to the Muslim, Turkic minority.
BEIJING (AP) — Chinese authorities blocked an annual independent film festival from opening Saturday, seizing documents and films from organizers and hauling away two event officials in a sign that Beijing is stepping up its already tight ideological controls. Li Xianting, a film critic and founder of the Li Xianting Film Fund, the organizer of the Beijing Independent Film Festival, said police searched his office and confiscated materials he had gathered over more than 10 years. Li and the festival’s artistic director, Wang Hongwei, were detained by police Saturday night but later released, according to their supporters.
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Divers stand on the edge of a small wooden fishing boat gazing at the murky, choppy waters below. After receiving blessings from Buddhist monks, they lower their masks and plunge one-by-one into the mighty Yangon River, clinging to garden hoses that will act as primitive breathing devices during their dizzying descent into darkness. From the shoreline, thousands of spectators look on, some peering through borrowed binoculars, praying the men will find what other salvage crews have not: The world’s largest copper bell, believed to have been lying deep beneath the riverbed for more than four centuries.
SRINAGAR, India (AP) — India and Pakistan traded gunfire in the disputed Kashmir region on Saturday, killing two villagers on each side and wounding several others, officials said. Dharmendra Pareek, a top official with India’s paramilitary force, said Indian forces retaliated after Pakistani troops fired guns and mortar rounds on more than a dozen Indian border posts and at least three villages in the Ranbir Singh Pura region.
GAUHATI, India (AP) — Police re-arrested a frail Indian activist who has been on a hunger strike for nearly 14 years to protest alleged military brutality in India’s remote northeast, her attorney said Saturday. Police again charged 42-year-old Irom Sharmila with attempted suicide on Friday, two days after she was released from detention by a court order and the charge against her dropped, said attorney Khaidam Mani.
LONDON (AP) — Police have charged two truck drivers with people-smuggling after an Afghan migrant was found dead, along with 34 survivors, in a shipping container at an English port. Stephen McLaughlin and Timothy Murphy, both from Northern Ireland, have been charged with conspiring to facilitate illegal entry into Britain. They are due in court Saturday.
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The Philippine government said Saturday that it would bring home its peacekeeping forces from the Golan Heights amid the deteriorating security in the region and withdraw its troops from Liberia because of the Ebola outbreak. The 331 Filipino U.N. troops in the Golan Heights will be sent home after their tour of duty ends in October and the 115 peacekeepers in Liberia will be “repatriated as soon as possible,” Department of National Defense spokesman Peter Paul Galvez said.
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Tens of thousands of people holding colored boards gathered in Nepal’s capital on Saturday in an attempt to break the record for the largest human national flag. The crowd comprised mostly students, but other participants included doctors, government workers, politicians and business executives — all of whom stood for hours in an open area in the heart of Katmandu.
BANGKOK (AP) — Interpol said it has launched a multinational investigation into what Thailand has dubbed the “Baby Factory” case: a 24-year-old Japanese businessman who has 16 surrogate babies and an alleged desire to father hundreds more. Police raided a Bangkok condominium earlier this month and found nine babies and nine nannies living in a few unfurnished rooms filled with baby bottles, bouncy chairs, play pens and diapers. They have since identified Mitsutoki Shigeta as the father of those babies — and seven others.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Carried by soldiers and draped in the national flag, coffins carrying Malaysian victims of Flight MH17 returned home Friday to a country still searching for those onboard another doomed jet and a government battling the political fallout of both tragedies. The bodies and ashes of 20 victims from the Malaysia Airlines jet that was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July were given full military honors and a day of national mourning was declared, the first for civilians in the country’s five-decade history.
HEXIGTEN, China (AP) — Deep in the hilly grasslands of remote Inner Mongolia, twin smoke stacks rise more than 200 feet into the sky, their steam and sulfur billowing over herds of sheep and cattle. Both day and night, the rumble of this power plant echoes across the ancient steppe, and its acrid stench travels dozens of miles away. This is the first of more than 60 coal-to-gas plants China wants to build, mostly in remote parts of the country where ethnic minorities have farmed and herded for centuries. Fired up in December, the multibillion-dollar plant bombards millions of tons of coal with water and heat to produce methane, which is piped to Beijing to generate electricity.
