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Deeper exchanges between the the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Kuomintang (KMT) party mirror a Taiwan Strait that is becoming more harmonious.

As Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou was elected chairman of the KMT on Sunday, Hu Jintao, CPC top leader, sent Ma a congratulatory message Monday saying that he hoped political trust would be deepened as the two parties continue to promote the “peaceful development” of cross-Straits relations.

Hu, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, also said that he hoped the two parties would continue to seek well-being for the people and realize the “great vitalization of the Chinese nation”.

In a reply message to Hu on Monday, Ma said the two parties should make continuous efforts in the future to cement peace across the Strait, rebuild regional stability, and advance the sustainable development and prosperity of the two sides.

This was the first direct exchange between Hu and Ma as top leaders of the two parties, marking an auspicious beginning in the new-round of party relations.

After Sunday’s election, Ma said he would propose at the 18th KMT Congress in September to continue to write the “common prospects for peaceful cross-Straits development” reached by the KMT and CPC into the KMT’s political guidelines.

Proclaimed in April, 2005, when Hu met the then KMT chairman Lien Chan, the “common prospects for peaceful cross-Straits development” was later written into the political guidelines of KMT.

Since then, former KMT chairmen Lien Chan and Wu Poh-hsiung had been implementing the agreement by holding talks between high-level leaders of the two parties and grassroots members.

Ma said after Sunday’s election that the agreement was “an important historic promise” and the KMT would “definitely honor it”.

Ma’s remarks had drawn media attention worldwide as they not just meant an inheritance to the past, but more of a promise for the future.

Future interactions between the two parties need, first and foremost, further mutual political trust based on objections to “Taiwan independence” and adherence to 1992 consensus.

So long as the two parties could solve this fundamental problem of mutual trust, they could properly deal with all kinds of problems and achieve more breakthroughs in cross-Straits relations.

The second most important work for the two parties is to further exchanges between top-level leaders.

Ma promised Sunday that KMT would continue to support the platform of exchanges with the CPC.

After Ma’s succession, the methods that had been proven successful in promoting cross-Straits exchanges, such as the Cross-Straits Economic, Trade and Cultural Forum, should be handed down and enriched in both form and content.

Still another important thing is that the two parties should deepen mutual understanding by facilitating exchanges between its grassroots members, which has far-reaching significance.

The two parties should draw experiences from exchanges between grassroots members in recent years and expand the participation in richer forms.

Shouldering the historic responsibilities, the CPC and the KMT should bear in mind the long-term development of the whole Chinese nation and contribute to peaceful development across the Taiwan Strait.

People hope that the two parties could write a new chapter in history by working for the solidarity, harmony and prosperity of the Chinese nation.

Silence is no gold, and prompt response may help head off a crisis, a major Chinese news portal told local officials after evaluating governments’ actions when confronted by online outcries after emergencies or troubles hit.

The public opinion monitoring office of people.com.cn, the website of the Communist Party of China’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper, released a ranking list on Friday marking local governments’ responses to online opinions concerning 10 incidents which occurred over the past few months.

Officials in Shishou City, central China’s Hubei Province, got a red warning with the lowest score of 2.65 minus for their failure to act instantly when online rumors about the death of a cook spread rampantly in the cyber world in June.

The 24-year-old cook, Tu Yuangao, was found lying dead at the gate of a hotel in Shishou on the evening of June 17. Police found no suspicious injuries and concluded the man had killed himself by falling from a high building. Tu’s family and the public, however, were not convinced, and online rumors emerged.

Shishou officials did not act until after about 80 hours of silence, fueling rampant rumors which resulted in an unrest when angry locals obstructed two streets, burnt the hotel and smashed several vehicles.

Experts from the Ministry of Public Security and Tongji Medical Institute carried out an autopsy and X-rays and tested for poisons, showing Tu committed suicide.

The highest score went to officials in Chengdu, capital of southwestern Sichuan Province, where a bus blaze last month killed 28 and injured dozens of others.

Many netizens guessed the cause of the fire after the accident, while some critics said in their online posts the lack of emergency-response equipment on the windtight airconditioned bus was to blame. Some rumors went that the bus was too old and caught fire itself, while there were also complaint which called for the government to care more for people’s life and urged bus companies to upgrade bus equipment for security reasons.

The municipal government held five news conferences within three days after the accident, answering netizens’ questions in details, and thus avoiding any possible public panic.

Police investigation has found that the fire was deliberately set by a 62-year-old man identified as Zhang Yunliang, who brought with him gasoline on board.

Timeliness and transparency were the two foremost factors when evaluating government actions in the cases, said Zhu Huaxin, head of the public opinion monitoring office.

Zhu said officials must release information as soon as possible after an incident occurs, especially in an era when netizens have become “a big pressure group.”

By July, China had 338 million Internet users, or 23.8 percent of the population, overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most netizen-populated country, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

Zhu said quick disclosure of facts is of vital importance in establishing government credibility.

“A late response or intentional silence will worsen the situation.”

Zhu said some local government’s public relation and governance capability does not suit the current situation as the Internet has provided a new platform for the public to voice opinions.

“We hope our evaluation could help officials become fully aware of the importance of online opinions,” he said.

The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday kept a key interest rate unchanged at a record low of between zero to 0.25 percent to support the world’s largest economy which has been in a recession since December 2007.

Information received recently suggested that “the pace of economic contraction is slowing,” the Fed said. But it also noted that “economic activity is likely to remain weak for a time.”
In recent month, conditions in financial markets have generally improved, said the central bank in a statement following its two-day policy-making meeting in Washington.

Meanwhile, “household spending has shown further signs of stabilizing but remains constrained by ongoing jobs losses, lower housing wealth, and tight credit,” it said.

“Businesses are cutting back on fixed investment and staffing but appear to be making progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales,” it added.

Although the recession is easing, the Fed believes that the economy will keep a lid on inflation.

“The prices of energy and other commodities have risen of late. However, substantial resource slack is likely to dampen cost pressures,” and the Fed “expects that inflation will remain subdued for some time,” the Fed said.

Against this backdrop, the Fed decided to hold the key interest rate, or federal funds rate, which commercial banks charge each other for overnight loans, unchanged.

The Honduran coup-government approved a general budget on Wednesday of 112.938 billion lempiras (5.6 billion U.S. dollars) for this year, at the first session of its Council of Ministers.

The approved budget represents a reduction of 10 percent of the central government spending and 20 percent at other institutions, for a total cut of 8.2 percent over the previous year, interim Finance Minister Gabriela Nunez said.

Ousted President Manuel Zelaya failed to submit the budget due last September, causing uneasiness in many government institutions.

Nunez said the budget was an effort to maintain state finance because of pending inherited debt obligations of 3.3 billion lempiras (173 million dollars).

Nunez said Zelaya’s government spent some 5.5 billion lempiras (some 289 million U.S. dollars) “without budget support.”

Since the coup against Zelaya on June 28, the international community has frozen various forms of economic aid to Honduras as a gesture of its disapproval.

On July 8, the U.S. government said that Honduras was in danger of losing aid amounting to 50 million U.S. dollars for the current year, as well as 130 million U.S. dollars in funds from the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) for achieving certain development goals.

The riots in Urumqi, capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, were instigated by outside forces, an official from the International Organization of the Federation of Asia and Africa Writers has said.

China has achieved much success in its development, but some political forces abroad collaborated with some elements at home to instigate unrests in some areas to sabotage China’s progress, Mohamed Magdy Morgan, chairman of the organization, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Morgan said that the riots in Urumqi were very strange because he had visited China for many times and witnessed harmony and tolerance among local people.

According to him, some forces representing foreign interests are behind the recent unrests in Xinjiang as China is a big country with a great potential.

“The Chinese government, like any other governments in the world, must punish the criminals supported by overseas forces according to the law,” Morgan said.

He stressed that those groups have threatened stability and security in China and the government has to take tough measures against them.

He suggested China hold culture seminars to raise the awareness of the youth and to open communication channels to discuss social, economic and political problems.

A Chinese citizen is Chinese no matter whether he is Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist or whoever, Morgan said.

The Chinese government has given favorable treatment to ethnic minorities in the country, but some Western media have made false reports about the actual conditions of the Chinese minorities, he added.

Historically, Xinjiang was known for its key status on the world- renowned Silk Road, which once connected the East and the West through trade and cultural exchanges.

The trade and culture on the Silk Road flourished in the Han and Tang dynasties more than 1,000 years ago when stability reigned. However, whenever turbulence gripped Xinjiang, businesses declined and cultural exchanges stalled, affecting the Central Asian region.

Xinjiang’s trade volume with its neighboring nations exceeded 14 billion U.S. dollars in 2008, and the regional capital of Urumqi has become the most prosperous city in Central Asia.

All of these achievements are based on long-lasting social stability, Morgan said.

Decades of stability in Xinjiang have not only contributed to the peace and well-being of all ethnic groups there, but also boosted the development of Central and South Asia as well as the whole world, he added.

The unrest in Urumqi has led to the deaths of at least 192 people. More than 1,680 were injured.

China has the ability to correct the false perception about what is going on in Xinjiang, Morgan said.

A bomb explosion struck Shiite pilgrims in central Baghdad on Thursday, wounding eight worshippers who were heading to the capital’s northern holy neighborhood of Kadhimiya to commemorate the death of a Shiite Imam, an Interior Ministry source said.

The attack took place in the morning near the Talaie Square in Hifa Street, while crowds of Shiite pilgrims were traveling on foot on their way to the tomb of Imam Musa al-Kadhim in northern Baghdad, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims converge every year from Iraqi cities and Shiite Muslim countries, particularly Iran, on the mausoleum of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, to mark the death of the seventh of the twelve Shiite Imams. The Shiite pilgrimage will reach a climax on Saturday.

Kadhim’s burial site is in the golden-domed mosque in center of the old part of the Kadhimiya district.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the country’s central bank, said on Thursday that it has suffered a net loss of 9.2 billion Singapore dollars (about6.43 billion U.S. dollars) in the last financial year ending March2009.

The loss represents about 3.5 percent of the central bank’s average total assets, the MAS said in a press conference to unveil its annual report. In the previous year, the profits stood at 7.44 billion Singapore dollars (about 5.2 billion U.S. dollars).

MAS attributed the loss to the current severe economic crisis which has “pared back about 80 percent of the gains in the preceding two years.”

Against the tumultuous external backdrop, the Singapore economy contracted sharply, posting an output loss of around 10 percent from its peak a year ago, the steepest decline in its history, by the first quarter this year, it added.

It also warned that despite improved performance in the second quarter, “The domestic economy is likely to witness slow and uneven growth, rather than sharp and decisive recovery.”

For the economy as a whole, Singapore has revised the official growth forecast for 2009 to between minus 6.0 to minus 4.0 percent.

MAS also said that given weak demand and easing domestic costs, inflation for the year is expected to come in between minus 0.5 percent and plus 0.5 percent.

Going forward, the central bank says it is aiming to strengthen Singapore’s financial system, of which one of the measures is to enhance the MAS standing facility to provide liquidity to financial institutions, adding that it will also review and intensify its supervision on financial institutions in the sale of investment products.

MAS also said it will continue to keep a strong balance sheet. It has increased its total capital and reserves to 28.74 billion Singapore dollars (about 20 billion U.S dollars), representing close to 11 percent of MAS’ total assets, to help Singapore navigate through a potentially volatile financial market environment and to help stabilize its financial system should the need arises.

Masked and hooded Belfast Catholics hurled gasoline bombs, fireworks and other makeshift weapons at police Monday as the most bitterly divisive day on the Northern Ireland calendar reached an ugly end.

Several rioters and at least seven officers were injured, none seriously, when Irish nationalists in Ardoyne, a militant Catholic enclave of north Belfast, tried to block a parade by the Orange Order, Northern Ireland’s major Protestant brotherhood.

Tens of thousands of Orangemen spent Monday mounting hundreds of similar parades across this British territory, almost all of them trouble-free, in an annual stress test for the province’s fragile peace.

More than 1,000 Orangemen and their accompanying bandsmen eventually did march down the main road past Ardoyne to the beat of a lone drum — but only after riot police fought an hourlong street battle backed by a surveillance helicopter and three massive mobile water cannons.

At one point, masked Catholic rioters on store rooftops directed a deluge of Molotov cocktails, bricks and golf balls on riot police below. The officers were protected with flame-retardant suits, helmets and shields.

Later, as the water-cannon gunners sought to take rioters’ legs out from under them, Catholics wearing scarves over their faces took cover behind low brick walls and post boxes. They threw rocks, bricks, bottles and even planks of wood that bounced harmlessly off the armored sides and metal-grilled windows of the water-cannon vehicles.

The Ardoyne Catholics’ showdown with police continued long after the Orangemen had passed through.

Police said a gunman fired at least one live round at police lines but missed. Rioters also stole at least two vehicles, set them on fire and pushed them toward police lines. Officers responded with plastic bullets.

A senior Belfast policeman, Assistant Chief Constable Alistair Finlay, condemned the anti-Orange rioters as offering “the worst possible face of Northern Ireland — a face of bigotry, sectarianism and intolerance.”

These were the worst riots in Belfast since 2005, when the same Protestant parade triggered much more intense and dangerous riots on the same road. Then, more than 100 police officers were wounded amid a hail of homemade grenades.

But the aftermath of that violence also illustrates how street clashes rarely rattle wider peacemaking politics in Northern Ireland. Weeks after those 2005 riots, the outlawed Irish Republican Army disarmed and renounced violence, paving the way for the 2007 formation of a new Catholic-Protestant government here.

Northern Ireland’s “Twelfth” holiday typically raises community tensions to their highest point of the year as British Protestants celebrate centuries-old victories over Irish Catholics.

The often elderly, conservatively dressed Orangemen are accompanied by so-called “kick the pope” bands whose hard-faced, tattooed members play an odd mix of Gospel and sectarian tunes on shrill flutes and deafening drums.

Monday’s parades were preceded by a string of overnight attacks northwest of Belfast that damaged two Orange halls and two Protestant homes, one of them gutted by fire. Catholic youths cheered the blaze and jeered the home’s elderly occupants, who vowed to leave behind their Catholic neighbors after 32 years.

And Catholic youths struck two departing Orangemen in the head with rocks in the village of Rasharkin. Three police officers were injured in subsequent scuffles with Catholics, who threw several Molotov cocktails. One rioter was arrested.

During another Orange parade in the city of Armagh, 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Belfast, police evacuated a major street called Friary Road after spotting a small bomb. It detonated, injuring nobody and causing little damage, before British army experts could defuse it using a remote-controlled robot.

No group claimed responsibility but police and politicians blamed IRA dissidents who reject the underground group’s 2005 disarmament. Analysts agree that the dissidents’ sporadic bombings and shootings stand no chance of forcing Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom, the traditional IRA goal.

Scores of Catholic youths later attacked police on Friary Road with Molotov cocktails and other thrown objects. They also hijacked and burned two cars on the road. Police arrested four rioters.

“The Twelfth” officially commemorates the July 12, 1690, triumph of Protestant King William of Orange versus his Catholic rival for the English throne, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne south of Belfast. This year the parades took place on the 13th because Orangemen — who march beneath banners depicting the British crown on an open Bible — refuse to hold the holiday on a Sunday.

Orangemen once marched wherever they wanted in Northern Ireland, a state created on the back of Orange power as the predominantly Catholic rest of Ireland won independence from Britain in the early 1920s.

Catholic hostility to Protestant parades helped ignite a conflict over Northern Ireland’s future that claimed more than 3,600 lives from the late 1960s to mid-1990s, when paramilitary cease-fires finally took hold.

At that time, the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party led protests blocking Orangemen’s traditional marching routes in several cities, towns and villages. The tactic brought Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war — and ultimately ended in broad defeat for the Orangemen, who refused to negotiate on their marching rights until it was too late.

Britain punished the Orangemen’s stubbornness by imposing bans on parades that encountered the heaviest opposition from Catholics. The Orangemen spent years mounting violent standoffs with British security forces in hopes of regaining lost ground, but eventually gave up.

The Crumlin Road beside Ardoyne is the only remaining parading point in Belfast that inspires recurring violence. There, the Orangemen have no obvious alternative way to march from their lodges to central Belfast and back again.

The Organization of American States (OAS) late Saturday suspended Honduras’ membership after the Central American country ignored an OAS ultimatum to reinstate coup ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

China would like to see a diversification of the international currency system in the future and believes it would be “normal” if the issue came up at the “8+5 summit” involving the Group of Eight (G8) and emerging powers, Deputy Foreign Minister He Yafei said Thursday.

But He, who is in charge of China’s G8 meeting preparations, said he was not aware of Beijing asking for a discussion of reserve currencies at the high-level meetings in Italy.

He was responding to a Reuters report Thursday that quoted G8 sources as saying China wanted to talk about a new global reserve currency.

That news pushed the dollar down to a three-week low.

The dollar is particularly sensitive to comments from China because bankers estimate China holds as much as 70 percent of its $1.95 trillion of official currency reserves in US dollars.

“I have not heard that China has this request,” He said. “I have not heard of China raising this for discussion.”

The dollar rebounded after He’s comments. He also said the dollar was the main global reserve currency and that he hoped it would be stable.

But he added that Beijing thought the reserve currency issue may come up at the three-day summit.

“The financial crisis has fully exposed some shortcomings in the international currency system,” he said. “Of course we hope that in the future, the international currency system can diversify.”

“I think this is an objective that the international community naturally wants to realize, and, as I just said, if in the meetings some leader raises this issue for discussion, that would be normal,” he said.

China’s central bank last week renewed its call for the creation of a super-sovereign reserve currency to reduce the dollar’s global domination - which the bank said contributed to the financial crisis.

The People’s Bank of China caused a stir when it first made the suggestion, in March, that the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Right (SDR) could eventually displace the dollar as the principal reserve currency.

The SDR is an international reserve asset allocated to IMF members. Its exchange rate is determined by a basket of currencies, including the dollar, euro, sterling and yen.

“At present, the US dollar is the main reserve currency,” He said. “We, of course, hope the exchange rate of the main reserve currency maintains stability.”

The International Monetary Fund this week unveiled its long-awaited plan for issuing debt denominated in SDRs. China has committed to purchase up to $50 billion of the notes, more than any other country.

Combating the global financial crisis tops President Hu Jintao’s issue list. He is expected to attend the upcoming 8+5 summit, the Foreign Ministry said.

The meetings, scheduled to take place between Wednesday and Friday next week in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, will focus on the global downturn and participants hope the session will boost cooperation between industrialized and developing countries, He said.

“We expect the 8+5 meeting will give a strong signal for further cooperation on tackling the financial crisis on the basis of the G20 summits,” He said, while calling for more input from developing countries in international affairs.

Be it G20, G8, or G5, “any system must be representative”, he said, noting that the G8 tends to be lacking in such representation.

Nations are also expected to talk about climate change, energy and food security, international trade and development issues at the summit.

“A group of some 200 Chinese businessmen will accompany Hu on his trip to Italy in a bid to promote trade and investment,” He said.