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South Asia
Hemant Divate: Poetic butterflies from the garden of India
An email sent from a friend opened a whole new world for me. It happened when Ahmed Al Shahawi, the well known Egyptian poet, sent me his friend Hemant Divate’s poems, to introduce them for Arab readers. Mr. Hemant Divate is an internationally known Marathi poet from India, who lives…
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East Asia
Annual lantern festival under way with 30,000 lamps lighting up central Seoul
The annual Seoul Lantern Festival kicks off in central Seoul on Novemver 1, with 30,000 colored lanterns lighting up Cheonggye Stream in central Seoul. Seoul Metropolitan Government unveiled program details of the lantern festival to be held for 17 days from Friday. The organizing committee of the 2013 Seoul Lantern…
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South East Asia
Thousands of Thais gather in protest against government’s amnesty bill
An estimated 10,000 Thais demonstrated on Thursday near a Bangkok railway station in protest against a bill aimed to grant amnesty to those involved in previous mass protests. Organized by the opposition Democrat Party, the number of the anti-amnesty demonstrators who began to gather since late afternoon might increase twice…
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South Asia
Indo-Bangla power trading inaugurated
With the inauguration of the Bangladesh-India Power Transmission Center at Bheramara in the South-Western region of Bangladesh, the regional cooperation among the South Asian countries entered into a new era. The center was formally opened on October 5 and started supplying electricity produced in India to Bangladesh. Through this center,…
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East Asia
Chinese police follow 8 suspects of Tiananmen attack that killed 5 people
Chinese police are circulating a list of eight suspects wanted in connection with an apparent suicide car attack near Tiananmen Square in Beijing that killed five people and injured dozens, a hotel manager said Wednesday. Seven of the eight suspects on the list had names typical of the Turkic Muslim…
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Culture
The quest to restore China’s face
[Books] The quest to restore China’s face Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century By Orville Schell and John Delury | Random House | 2013 How did China after such a long, painful decline including civil war, revolution and foreign occupation recover from its impeding past and…
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South East Asia
Aung San Suu Kyi visits Rome to receive overdue honorary citizenship
Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has picked up an overdue honor from Rome, a city she fondly recalled enjoying, along with its gelato, 40 years earlier. The Nobel Peace Prize winner received Rome’s honorary citizenship Sunday night in City Hall on the ancient Capitoline Hill. In 1994, Rome had conferred…
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West Asia
Women in revolution
Women had an effective role in rebellions even in earlier revolutions like the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and even in Arab revolutions. Women’s participation in revolutions started much earlier than 1000 A.D.; Cleopatra II of Egypt led a rebellion against her brother Ptolemy VIII and drove him and Cleopatra III…
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South East Asia
[Photo Break] Be happy!
All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Leo Tolstoy
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South East Asia
Somdet Phra Nyanasamvara, Thailand’s Supreme Patriarch dies at 100
Thailand’s Supreme Patriarch, who headed the country’s order of Buddhist monks for more than two decades, died Thursday. He was 100. Doctors said that Somdet Phra Nyanasamvara (SOM-ded PRA YA-na-SUNG-WORN) died at Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in Bangkok, where he had been treated since being admitted for an illness more than…
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