YANGON: Myanmar yesterday shrugged off US President Barack Obama’s decision to renew some sanctions against the country to spur continued reform, in a move that highlighted fears over continued rights abuses.
Obama said sanctions restricting certain investments should be renewed because the former junta-run nation still poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” in a letter to Congress on Thursday. But the US leader, who made a ground breaking visit to Myanmar in 2012, also noted that the country had made significant progress on key reforms, which have swept the country onto the international stage since a quasi-civilian government replaced outright military rule in 2011.
Three knifed to death in Xinjiang
BEIJING: Three Chinese officials were knifed to death and their bodies dumped in a lake, in the latest incident of violence in the restive far western region of Xinjiang, Radio Free Asia reported.
The report said the officials were killed during a visit to Xinjiang by President Xi Jinping, in an incident that also featured in the state-backed Global Times newspaper on Friday. The government has blamed violent incidents in Xinjiang on Islamist militants and separatists seeking to form an independent state called East Turkestan. But exile groups and rights activists say China’s heavy-handed policies in the resource-rich region have sowed the seeds of unrest. The officials were county-level representatives, Radio Free Asia said in its report yesterday, but did not name them. It said the attackers slit the throats of two victims and stabbed the third 31 times, before pushing the trio into the lake. AGENCIES
