No-Waitor News

Police fatally shot two Uighur men Monday and wounded a third in western China, where violence has persisted despite the massive numbers of troops sent to restore calm more than a week after deadly ethnic rioting.

The midafternoon shooting sent frightened residents scurrying into homes and shops for cover and bystanders hitting the ground. The incident underscored how far authorities are from imposing order between the Muslim Uighurs and the Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group.

It was the first time the Chinese government has acknowledged that its security forces opened fire since communal violence hit Urumqi, the capital of the restive Xinjiang region, on July 5. At least 184 people have been reported killed and another 1,680 wounded.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the United States had officials in the region but was still gathering information about what was happening.

Despite the tens of thousands of security forces sent into Urumqi, they have yet to end the violence.

He called on China not to put restrictions on Uighurs’ religious activity.

“We are urging China to handle the situation as they go forward in a transparent manner,” Kelly said. “As they work to restore order, we believe that it’s important that they respect the legal rights of all Chinese citizens.”

“The police fired into the air for warning, but it’s not effective. Therefore, the police shot them, according to law,” Fan said. Two of them died on the spot while the wounded man was taken to the nearby People’s Hospital, where his condition was unknown.

An official with the Urumqi city government, who gave his surname as Fan, said police on patrol about 2:55 p.m. had seen three Uighur men attacking a fourth Uighur with long knives and batons. When they tried to break up the fight, the three turned against the officers, he said.

Zhang Ming, a construction worker at a building site near the incident, said he saw three men with knives come out of a nearby mosque and attack a group of paramilitary police standing in a cluster along the road. Riot police then chased them, beat them and fired shots, he said.

The gunfire near one of the city’s main Uighur neighborhoods shattered the relative calm of the afternoon. Witness accounts corroborated some of the police report but also differed in details.

Photos show one policeman raising his rifle to strike a man. Lying at their feet, the man, who was wearing a blue shirt, had blood on his right leg. Police quickly formed a ring around him and raised their guns skyward toward surrounding buildings as if worried about retaliation.

An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw police in bulletproof vests wielding pistols, shotguns and batons chasing down a man who appeared to be a Uighur. They surrounded him and began kicking him and beating him with batons. Gunfire was heard before and during the brief incident, though it was unclear if the man had been shot.

A few hours later, a splotch of blood was still on the street, the stain faded from apparent scrubbing.

An armored personnel carrier and paramilitary police arrived, and police waved their guns and shouted for people to get off the streets.

“This is obviously not something that will end in just one, two or three days,” he said, not wanting to give his name for fear of government retaliation. “There are no human rights in China. They catch Uighurs and beat them and take them away and nobody knows.”

A Uighur man, who was visiting his mother in the neighborhood, said he heard the gunfire but did not see the incident. He said he had no doubt that there will be more violence.

The Uighurs, who number 9 million in Xinjiang, have complained about an influx of Han Chinese and government restrictions on their Muslim religion. They accuse the Han of discrimination and the Communist Party of trying to erase their language and culture.

China’s leaders have sought to play down tensions between ethnic groups, dispatching Politburo member Zhou Yongkang to spread the message that stability in Xinjiang was the “most important and pressing task that has overwhelming priority,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The distrust remains a crucial barrier.

Han Chinese, many of whom were encouraged to emigrate here by the government, believe the Uighurs should be grateful for Xinjiang’s rapid economic development, which has brought new schools, highways, airports, railways, natural gas fields and oil wells to the sprawling, rugged region the size of Texas.

“I suspect there’s going to be quiet resentment. I think really what we’re going to see for the next bit is kind of lockdown they go into martial law,” he said.

Gardner Bovingdon, a Uighur expert at Indiana University, said he doubts the Uighur community will mount a major protest in the next few days, given the government’s current clampdown.

The July 5 violence began when Uighurs who were protesting last month’s deaths of fellow factory workers in a brawl in southern China clashed with police. Crowds scattered throughout the city, attacking ethnic Han Chinese and burning cars.

Since last week, tens of thousands of Chinese troops have poured into Urumqi and other parts of Xinjiang to impose order. Checkpoints have been set up and police searched buses for any suspects.

Some of the tension had just begun to lift in Urumqi on Monday, but the afternoon gunfire changed that, said Ehsanjiang, a 37-year-old Uighur.

Of the 184 reported killed July 5, the government has said 137 were Han Chinese and 46 were Uighurs, along with one minority Muslim. Uighurs say they believe many more from their ethnic group died in the government crackdown.

“In the past few days, everything seemed peaceful and safe, and then this afternoon something had to happen again,” he said, holding his 2-year-old son. “I wonder when it will be safe again.”

Japan lifted a ban on organ donations from children, reversing a restriction that created such a dearth of small organs in the country that young patients were forced to seek transplants abroad.

Until 1997, Japan barred organ donations from even adults who were brain dead. A law enacted that year lifted the ban but continued to prohibit children from donating, citing their inability to make such a mature decision. It also only authorized organs to be taken from patients who specifically gave their consent contributing to a severe shortage in the country.

The law will allow children, defined as those under 15, who are brain dead to donate their organs a sea change in this country, where organ donation is sensitive because of Buddhist beliefs that consider the body sacred and reject its desecration.

Keiichiro Nakazawa, whose 1-year-old child died in the U.S. this year while waiting for a heart donor, said the law came too late for his son, but “opened a new big door for other patients who are in need.”

The law passed Monday will give relatives the authority to consent to donations in cases where the patient’s own intentions were unclear, according to the document, which was posted on the legislature’s Web site. It will take effect in the summer of 2010, a parliamentary official said on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

“WHO welcomes this,” said spokesman Joel Schaefer, calling it “a very positive step by Japan.”

The new law brings Japan more in line with World Health Organization guidelines, though it still places more restrictions than some countries that consider consent for organ donation the default in the absence of specific instructions that the body be left intact.

Largely because of its historically stringent laws on organ transplant and donation, Japan performs only a tiny fraction of the number of transplants that the U.S. and Europe do. Since 1997, just more than 2,100 transplants were performed in Japan, according to the Japan Organ Transplant Network, the country’s only organ donation coordinator. By contrast, the U.S. performs thousands and many European countries perform hundreds each year.

“The new law opens the way for Japan to progress towards self-sufficiency in organ transplantation, and this will improve access to organ transplantation for Japanese people from Japanese society,” he said.

The reform was expedited this year after the Japanese branch of the international Transplantation Society adopted the group’s policy calling for every country to achieve organ self-sufficiency in a move to reduce “transplant tourism.” Several countries, including Germany, have rejected Japanese patients seeking transplants there.

Despite years of campaigning by activists, the legal revision has long been on hold because of sensitivity over the definition of death in Japan, where many believe one is alive until the heart fails. Though for the past decade Japan has allowed donations from brain dead patients, the new law goes further, defining brain death as legal death for the first time.

Associated Press writer Eliane Engeler contributed to this report from Geneva.

The legal saga of John Demjanjuk neared its final chapter as prosecutors set the stage for one of Germany’s highest-profile war crime trials in years formally charging the retired U.S. auto worker with involvement in the murder of 27,900 people at a Nazi death camp.

For Germany, the decision to try Demjanjuk was swift: formal charges relating to his alleged time as a Sobibor guard in 1943 were filed just two months after Demjanjuk landed in the country after a lengthy but fruitless court battle to avoid deportation from the U.S.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was once sentenced in Israel to death, then acquitted by the country’s Supreme Court in 1993 of being the notorious guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp. Now the 89-year-old stands accused of being part of the death machine at another camp in Poland Sobibor and a Germany more than 60 years removed from World War II will revisit the demons of its past once again.

“The effort to bring Demjanjuk to justice sends a very powerful message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrator,” said the top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, who described the charges as “an important step forward.”

Filing charges typically takes several months in Germany. Monday’s move underlined authorities’ determination to move forward with efforts to exact justice for Nazi-era atrocities.

Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., described the charges as “a farce” and raised anew concerns over whether the 89-year-old’s frail health would allow him a fair trial. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

The Munich state court must now decide whether to accept the charges typically a formality and set a date for the trial. Court spokeswoman Margarete Noetzel said the trial was unlikely to start before the autumn.

Demjanjuk Jr. said his father is suffering from an incurable leukemic bone marrow disease.

“As long as my father remains alive, we will defend his innocence as he has never hurt anyone anywhere,” he told The Associated Press in an e-mail. “They have hurried to justify the deportation and the violation of his legal and human rights with sensational charges but it is all a farce and could never withstand the test of litigation.”

Elderly, frail Nazi suspects with health problems have stood trial in the past: in 2001, Anton Malloth, an 89-year-old former guard at the Theresienstadt fortress in then-occupied Czechoslovakia, sat through his trial in Munich in a wheelchair, connected to an IV drip. He was sentenced to life in prison for beating a Jewish inmate to death, and died a year later.

However, doctors earlier this month determined that Demjanjuk (dem-YAHN’-yuk) was fit to stand trial so long as court hearings do not exceed two 90-minute sessions per day. He has been in custody in Munich since his arrival May 12.

Demjanjuk, who became a U.S. citizen after the war, had his citizenship revoked in 1981 after the U.S. Justice Department alleged that he hid his past as “Ivan the Terrible,” a guard at Treblinka.

Legal wrangling over Demjanjuk and his alleged role in the Nazi death machine goes back to the 1970s.

Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship was restored but again revoked in 2002, based on fresh Justice Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps from immigration officials.

He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court after evidence emerged from Soviet archives that “Ivan” was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.

Demjanjuk maintains that he was a Red Army soldier who spent the time as a prisoner of war and never hurt anyone.

A U.S. immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. The case moved a decisive step forward when Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.

In their March arrest warrant, prosecutors accused Demjanjuk of being an accessory to murder in 29,000 cases, representing the number of people who arrived there while he was alleged to be a camp guard. Some 250,000 people died in the camp’s gas chamber from when it opened in 1942 until it was razed to the ground 18 months later.

But Nazi-era documents obtained by U.S. justice authorities and shared with German prosecutors include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at Sobibor and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki, also in Nazi-occupied Poland. U.S. and German experts have declared the ID genuine.

Winkler’s office is handling the case because Demjanjuk spent time at a refugee camp in the Munich area after the war.

However, that number was reduced in the charges because, of the people transported to Sobibor, “many did not survive the journey,” said Anton Winkler, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors.

In Munich, 90-year-old German former army officer Josef Scheungraber is being tried on charges that he ordered the killings of 14 Italian civilians in 1944.

Alongside Demjanjuk’s upcoming trial, other cases of alleged Nazi war crimes are working their way through the German legal system.

“This isn’t about revenge. It’s not about tormenting an old man it’s about justice, it’s about determining guilt,” said Dieter Graumann, vice president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews.

And last week, judges in western Germany ruled that 88-year-old Heinrich Boere, accused of murdering three Dutch civilians during World War II, will go to court after prolonged wrangling over whether he is fit for trial.

“Now, at a time when there are so many Holocaust deniers … it’s all the more important that in such a trial it’s made clear once again what happened, what took place,” he said.

More important than whether Demjanjuk ultimately is sentenced to prison time is “that the guilt is determined, that it’s discussed,” Graumann said.

Associated Press Writer Patrick McGroarty contributed to this report from Berlin.

As of Monday, July 13, 2009, at least 4,324 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The AP count is two fewer than the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Monday at 10 a.m. EDT.

The figure includes nine military civilians killed in action. At least 3,460 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers.

The latest deaths reported by the military:

The British military has reported 179 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia and Georgia, three each; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, one death each.

The latest identifications reported by the military:

A soldier died of a medical condition Monday in Baghdad.

No new identifications reported.

Ousted President Manuel Zelaya, clearly frustrated with stalled negotiations aimed at resolving the country’s political crisis, issued an ultimatum to the interim government Monday: Reinstate me or else.

At the same time, the de facto government installed by leaders of the coup that forcibly exiled Zelaya on June 28 tried to return life to normal, successfully urging tens of thousands of Honduran teachers and students to return to class Monday.

Zelaya delivered his message at a news conference in Nicaragua, where he arrived Sunday night following a brief trip to Washington.

At the swearing-in ceremony of a new foreign minister Monday, Micheletti said his team of delegates was “ready for another meeting.”

Interim President Roberto Micheletti said a Honduran negotiating team could return to the bargaining table as early as this weekend to try to end the stalemate caused by the coup. Two previous rounds of talks mediated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias failed to produce a deal.

If the interim government does not agree to reinstate him at the next round of negotiations, he said, “the mediation effort will be considered failed and other measures will be taken.” He did not specify what actions he might take.

But Zelaya said Monday that he was “giving the coup an ultimatum.”

Members of Micheletti’s administration did not immediately respond to Zelaya’s comments.

Zelaya accused the Micheletti government of “using” the talks “as a means to distract attention,” and said the interim regime had “systematically increased repression” against demonstrators, journalists and others.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly reiterated U.S. support for Arias’ mediation efforts.

Arias, the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his role in helping end Central America’s civil wars, was expected to announce the date for new talks on Monday, said a Costa Rican government official, who was not authorized to give his name.

Despite Kelly’s comments, Washington has clearly been playing an influential role in the negotiations: It was U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who invited Arias to mediate and Zelaya supporters have been urging the United States in particular to take firm action that they say would force the interim government to back down.

“It is not a process that’s being led by the United States of America. We just have to give time for this process to work. And I’ll just say, we’re standing firmly behind President Arias,” Kelly said.

Honduras’ Supreme Court, Congress and military say they legally removed Zelaya for violating the constitution. They accuse him of trying to extend his time in office, but Zelaya denies that.

The coup has drawn international condemnation and nations have urged that Zelaya be restored to his post as the democratically elected president.

Former Honduran Foreign Minister Carlos Lopez, a Micheletti representative at the talks, said his side had not ruled out the possibility of early elections as a way out of the crisis.

Both Zelaya and Micheletti, the congressional president who was appointed by lawmakers to serve out the final six months of Zelaya’s presidential term, met separately with Arias last week but they refused to talk face to face.

High school director Alejandro Ventura said that thousands of teachers decided to go back to school because there is no solution in sight for the political crisis. “We cannot keep acting irresponsibly with our children,” he said.

As the crisis drags on, the interim government has urged people to resume their lives as usual in Honduras. About 38,000 teachers heeded a request to return to class Monday but more than 20,000 remained on strike to protest the coup.

Zelaya supporters have said the interim government is trying to restore normality to the nation with the hope of sapping the energy of the protest movement and staying in power until the November presidential election.

Most of the children affected by the walkout also returned to class, said teacher’s union leader Eulogio Chavez.

“Each day fewer people come and our leaders are disorganized,” said Rosaura Izaguirre, one of about 300 Zelaya supporters blocking a main road connecting the Caribbean coast to the capital for two hours Monday.

Daily demonstrations for and against the forcibly exiled Zelaya continue in the country, but are steadily losing steam. Turnout at demonstrations has fallen from several thousand to only a few hundred this week.

The new government had ordered Hondurans to stay inside from 11 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. a restriction that briefly extended from sunset to sunrise when Zelaya tried to return and the military kept his plane from landing by blocking the runway at the capital’s airport a week ago.

Micheletti’s administration said Sunday a nighttime curfew that had been in effect for two weeks was no longer needed because it had met its goal of restoring calm and curbing crime.

“During all these days we had problems because we did not work. Our family depends on this work. This is our life,” said Fredy Rivera, a musician.

Early Monday, cars could be seen on the streets once again as people visited bars and vendors and street musicians returned to work downtown.

As of Monday, July 13, 2009, at least 660 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Monday at 10 a.m. EDT.

Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 68 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, three were the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Jordan; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Philippines; Seychelles; Sudan; Tajikistan; Turkey; and Yemen.

Of those, the military reports 492 were killed by hostile action.

The latest deaths reported by the military:

There were also four CIA officer deaths and one military civilian death.

The latest identifications reported by the military:

A soldier died Sunday in an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan.

Marine Cpl. Matthew R. Lembke, 22, Tualatin, Ore.; died Friday of wounds sustained June 24 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan; assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.

A British girl who had a donor heart grafted onto her own after suffering cardiac failure as a baby has had the transplant removed and is living a healthy life with her own heart, doctors said Tuesday.

“The possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic,” said Professor Magdi Yacoub of Imperial College London, who treated Hannah from the beginning and co-authored the journal paper.

The case of Hannah Clark is thought to be the only one in the world where a childs failing heart recovered enough for the donor organ to be removed, the British surgeons told reporters ahead of their report in The Lancet journal.

Hannah, now 16, suffered as a baby from severe heart failure due to cardiomyopathy, a problem with the muscle of the heart, and in July 1995, when she was two years old, doctors transplanted a donor heart next to hers.

“A heart which was not contracting at all at the time we put the new heart to be pumping next to it and take its work, now is functioning normally.”

However, she suffered from a type of cancer known as EBV PTLD, a common side effect of the drugs given to transplant patients to stop their immune systems rejecting new organs.

The new organ soon took over much of the functioning of her own heart and Hannah, from near Cardiff in Wales, began to recover.

In contrast however, her own heart recovered and began functioning normally.

She was treated with chemotherapy and other drugs but the cancer kept returning. Doctors reduced her dosage of immunosuppression drugs to stem the disease, but as a result, her transplanted heart began to fail.

Thirty-nine months later, Hannah has completely recovered from the cancer and her heart is functioning normally.

In February 2006, the team decided to remove the donor organ so the immunosuppression could be stopped — something that had never been done before.

The reports co-author Victor Tsang, a consultant at Great Ormond Street childrens hospital in London, noted the research was also useful in the development of temporary artificial hearts for children suffering from cardiomyopathy.

Yacoub and the team responsible for her remarkable treatment said her case offers vital clues to the study of transplantation, heart recovery and malignant disease.

“This is an important piece of knowledge as we are now gaining more experience with mechanical support for the failing heart in children.”

“It is possible for the patients own heart to make a full recovery if it is given adequate support to do so,” he said.

“I wouldnt be here if it wasnt for any of this,” she told reporters.

Hannah has just completed her GCSE exams and is heading into the final two years of high school where she plans to study childcare. She goes out with friends, plays sport and has a part-time job working with animals.

At one point her family were told she would not survive the next 12 hours, and Yacoub praised her courage and that of her family, saying: “The lesson is — dont give up.”

Hannah had to take about seven tablets morning and night for the immunosuppression treatment, went through several rounds of cancer treatment, suffered kidney failure and at one point was left barely able to breath.

Her mother Liz thanked the donor family whose five-month-old baby daughter provided the transplant heart, saying: “They lost a child, weve gained our child — how can I ever thank them?”

Her father Paul told reporters: “It was very worrying and stressful, but we kept on, saying come on Hannah, you cant give up, youve got to keep going.”

An American photographer working for The New York Times was briefly detained by agents from the security detail of a Venezuelan state governor, who seized his camera and erased his photos.

She said the agents tried to push Dalton into a public bathroom, and that when he resisted, “they took his camera and erased all of the photos on it, before returning the camera.”

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said Monday that the incident occurred while photographer Scott Dalton was shooting photos at a public event on Thursday where Barinas Gov. Adan Chavez the eldest brother of President Hugo Chavez was speaking.

Officials in the governor’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Taiwanese authorities say a 6.3-magnitude earthquake has struck off the east coast of the island, rattling buildings in Taipei, but causing no casualties or damage.

Earthquakes frequently rattle Taiwan, but most are minor and cause little or no damage.

The Central Weather Bureau says the quake struck at 2:05 a.m. Tuesday (1805 GMT Monday). It was centered about 36 miles (57 kilometers) off the eastern city of Hualien, some 85 miles (135 kilometers) southeast of the capital.

However, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake in central Taiwan in 1999 killed more than 2,300 people. And in 2006 a 6.7-magnitude tremor south of Kaohsiung severed undersea cables and disrupted telephone and Internet service to millions throughout Asia.

WASHINGTON Long-suspended talks between the U.S. and Cuba will resume Tuesday, the latest signal of the Obama administrations efforts to revive ties between the two nations.

The U.S. delegation will be headed by Craig Kelly , the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs . Dagoberto Rodriguez , a Cuban Foreign Ministry official and the former head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington , will lead the Cuban delegation.

The State Department wouldnt confirm the resumption of the talks, but several members of Congress said they were scheduled to be held in New York , for one day.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen , R- Fla. , said the agenda for the meeting is solely migration issues, including the ability of U.S. diplomats to follow up on the status of Cubans returned to the island; U.S. access to deepwater ports for repatriation purposes; and Cubas willingness to take back criminals and others expelled from the U.S.

The State Department said in May that it hoped to “use the renewal of talks to reaffirm both sides commitment to safe, legal and orderly migration.”

“It is unfortunate that, once again, the Cuban regime is being rewarded with overtures from the U.S. government despite its ongoing atrocities against the Cuban people and policies that undermine U.S. security interests and priorities,” she said.

However, Ros-Lehtinen criticized the resumption of the talks, saying that the Cuban regime has failed to honor the migration accords.

Noting that the Bush administration scuttled talks “because of the Cuban regimes failure to live up to its commitments,” Martinez said the administration should require the regime Havana to meet its obligations, particularly allowing U.S. officials to check on Cubans who are returned to the island.

Sen. Mel Martinez , R- Fla. , called for the administration to “push for firm commitments from the Cuban government, now headed by President Raul Castro .

Former President George W. Bush suspended similar talks in 2003, saying the Cuban government was uncooperative.

The talks come as the administration looks to improve relations with Havana and months after President Barack Obama lifted some travel and gift restrictions for those with relatives on the island.