Communal violence has torn through Rakhine state since August 25, leaving hundreds dead and driving more than 410,000 of the Rohingya minority from Myanmar into Bangladesh.

Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate, has been decried for failing to speak up publicly for the stateless Rohingya or urge restraint from the military.

But in 30-minute televised speech Tuesday she reached out to her critics, deploying the soaring rhetoric that once made her a darling of the global rights community.

“Hate and fear are the main scourges of our world,” she said.

“We don’t want Myanmar to be a nation divided by religious beliefs or ethnicity… we all have the right to our diverse identities.”

While expressing her sorrow for “all” groups displaced by violence, she said her country stood ready “at any time” to take back refugees subject to a “verification” process.

It was not immediately clear how many of the estimated 410,000 Rohingya who have fled Myanmar would qualify to return.

But the subject of their claims to live Myanmar is at the heart of a toxic debate about the Muslim group.

Myanmar’s army has previously it will not take back people linked with “terrorists” — suggesting many came from the hundreds of Rohingya villages that have subsequently been burnt to the ground.

Inside Myanmar, supporters say the 72-year-old lacks the power to rein in the army, with whom she is in a delicate power-sharing arrangement.

The UN has accused Myanmar’s army of “ethnic cleansing” over a campaign of alleged murder and arson that has left scores of Rohingya villages in ashes.

The army denies that, insisting its operations are a proportional response to the late August raids by Rohingya militants, who they label “extremist Bengali terrorists”.

Since then just under half of Rakhine’s Rohingya population has poured into Bangladesh, where they now languish in one of the world’s largest refugee camps.

A further 30,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists as well as Hindus have also been displaced — apparent targets of the August 25 attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) militant group.

Suu Kyi skipped this week’s UN General Assembly in New York to manage the crisis at home and deliver her televised address — the biggest yet of her time in office.

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Analysts say Suu Kyi must walk a treacherous line between global opinion and Islamophobic anti-Rohingya views at home, where the military has curdled hatred for the Muslim minority.

While stories of weary and hungry Rohingya civilians streaming into Bangladesh have dominated global headlines, there is little sympathy for the Muslim group among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority.

Many reject the existence of a Rohingya ethnicity and insist they are “Bengalis” — illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

That narrative has justified the denial of citizenship for the estimated one million Rohingya who lived in Rakhine before the recent crisis.

Loathing for the Rohingya has brought the public, including prominent pro-democracy activists, into an unlikely alignment with an army that once had them under its heel.

A siege mentality has emerged in Myanmar with the UN, international NGOs and foreign media the focus of ire for apparent pro-Rohingya bias.

Many Facebook users changed their profile picture on Tuesday to carry a banner with a photo of ‘The Lady’ and saying “We stand with you Daw Aung San Suu Kyi” — using an honorific.

Tensions over the status of the Rohingya have been brewing for years in Myanmar, with bouts of anti-Muslim violence erupting around the country as Buddhist hardliners fan fears of an Islamic takeover.

Although the military stepped down from outright junta rule in 2011, it kept control of security policy and key levers of government.

Any overt break from the army’s policy in Rakhine could enrage the generals and derail Suu Kyi’s efforts to prevent a rollback on recent democratic gains.

Observers say the military may be deliberately destabilising her government with one eye on 2020 elections.

Commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing has emerged during the crisis as an unexpectedly popular figure, pitching himself as a defender Myanmar’s territorial integrity and the Buddhist faith.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho is expected to deliver a defensive stance on his homeland’s current nuclear drive at the upcoming United Nations General Assembly meeting that will be attended by global leaders.

The reclusive nation’s nuclear and missile provocations are likely to top the agenda of this year’s assembly, slated to launch Tuesday.

Ri is scheduled to take centre stage in New York on Friday to deliver a keynote speech, according to Yonhap News Agency, which cited unnamed sources from the world body. The speech, which comes after North Korea’s latest missile liftoff last week and its sixth nuclear test on Sept. 3, was initially expected to take place Monday.

The UN speeches by North Korea’s chief delegates have so far focused on defending Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programmes and have been peppered with criticism against the United States.

Possible signs of interaction between Ri and other global leaders at the meeting are expected to be closely scrutinized. South Korean President Moon Jae-in will deliver his maiden address Thursday, after his US counterpart Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday.

Ri’s South Korean and US counterparts Kang Kyung-wha and Rex Tillerson will also attend several back-to-back meetings, but it is unclear whether the two will meet with the Pyongyang official.

Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday that Kang is expected to engage in bilateral meetings and multilateral commitments in line with her key task of aiding President Moon throughout the trip.

However, despite the physical proximity of the foreign ministers of the two Koreas and the US, a UN source said it is “realistically difficult” for Tillerson and Ri to engage in a proper discussion under the current circumstances.

“It’s realistic to say that any form of contact between the US and North Korea is difficult at the moment with the North’s ongoing nuclear and missile provocations and its latest experiments,” said the source.

Seoul’s Foreign Ministry also said there is no plan for official talks between Kang and Ri.

Kang shared a brief encounter with Ri at the Asean Regional Forum meeting in Manila in early August, when she mentioned she was “looking forward to a swift response” regarding the North’s silence toward the South’s proposal of military and humanitarian talks. Ri, however, expressed a skeptical response, insisting that Seoul’s offer to revive dialogue “lacks sincerity.”

Tillerson, on the other hand , as noticeably absent at the banquet for foreign ministers and did not show any signs of contact with the North Korean minister throughout the forum.

The US Secretary of State said Sunday that Washington would continue to carry out a “peaceful pressure campaign” against the North, but warned that the “military option will be the only one left” if all diplomatic efforts fail.

Kang and Tillerson reaffirmed the South Korea-US bilateral alliance during a phone conversation last Friday, agreeing to take “powerful” and “stern” measures to bring North Korea to dialogue and make the country relinquish its provocations against the international community.

Meanwhile, the South Korean government has decided to refrain from questioning the eligibility of North Korea’s UN membership this year, reflecting Seoul’s current approach of dialogue and sanctions toward the North.

“The execution of new sanctions drawn by the United Nations Security Council is top priority,” a government official said Monday.

“Even the US is not discussing the issue of North Korea’s UN membership at the moment,” he said.

Under the previous administration, South Korea’s former Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se publically accused North Korea of “ridiculing” the authority of the United Nations and claimed it was time to reconsider its place in the “peace-loving UN,” during last year’s address to the UN General Assembly.

The accusation closely followed Pyongyang’s fifth nuclear experiment last September.

In a phone call the two men discussed “North Korea’s continued defiance of the international community and its efforts to destabilize Northeast Asia,” the White House said.

“The two leaders committed to maximizing pressure on North Korea through vigorous enforcement of United Nations Security Council resolutions.”

Trump is currently in New York for the United Nations General Assembly but Xi — who has a major Communist Party congress that will cement his leadership for the next five years — is not attending the event.

Trump is expected to make his first presidential visit to China in early November.

September has seen a significant ratcheting up of already sky-high tensions with Pyongyang.

Already North Korea has conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test and staged an intermediate-range missile test over Japan.

The UN Security Council last week imposed a fresh set of sanctions, though Washington toned down its original proposals to secure support from China and Russia.

The US president has not ruled out a military option, which could leave millions of people in the South Korean capital — and 28,500 US soldiers stationed in the South — vulnerable to potential retaliatory attack.

The US flew four F-35B stealth fighter jets and two B-1B bombers over the Korean peninsula on Monday in a blunt show of force.

China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said that during the phone conversation “Xi also expressed sympathy and solicitude to Trump and the American people for the hurricane attacks on the United States over the past few days.”

“The two leaders also exchanged views on the current situation on the Korean Peninsula.”

Suu Kyi’s refusal so far to defend the Rohingya over nearly a month of violence has baffled and enraged an international community that once feted her as the champion of Myanmar’s democracy struggle.

But inside Myanmar, supporters say the 72-year-old lacks authority to reign in the army, which stands accused of waging a campaign of murder and arson that has driven more than 410,000 Rohingya from their homes.

The violence erupted in late August when the army retaliated against co-ordinated attacks by Rohingya militants.

Since then just under half of Rakhine’s Rohingya population has poured into Bangladesh, where they now languish in one of the world’s largest refugee camps.

A further 30,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists as well as Hindus have also been displaced — apparent targets of the August 25 attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salavation Army (ARSA) militant group.

Nobel laureate Suu Kyi has been decried overseas for failing to condemn the generals, with whom she is in a delicate power-sharing arrangement.

With global pressure cranked high, Suu Kyi has skipped the UN General Assembly in New York to manage the crisis at home and deliver her televised address — the biggest yet of her time in office.

“She is going to tell the world the real truth,” her spokesman Zaw Htay told reporters ahead of the speech scheduled for 0330 GMT.

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But analysts say she faces the treacherous task of walking the line between global outrage and Islamaphobic anti-Rohingya views at home, where there is broad support for the army’s campaign.

“I’m worried that there is almost no possibility, given the political climate in Myanmar, for balancing the expectations of most of the country and the expectations of the international community,” said Richard Horsey, an independent analyst based in Myanmar.

While desperate scenes of weary and hungry Rohingya civilians streaming into Bangladesh have dominated global headlines, there is little sympathy for the Muslim group among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority.

Many reject the existence of a Rohingya ethnicity and insist they are ‘Bengalis’ — illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

On Monday several hundred people gathered in downtown Yangon to rail against the UN, international NGOs and foreign media, as a siege mentality grows inside Myanmar.

“I want Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to stand for the ethnic people of Myanmar and to remove the pressure from the international community by giving the speech tomorrow,” demonstrator Khin Khin Myint told AFP.

Tensions over the status of the Rohingya have been brewing for years in Myanmar, with bouts of anti-Muslim violence erupting around the country as Buddhist hardliners fan fears of an Islamic takeover.

When she makes her address on Tuesday, Suu Kyi must also tread carefully around a military that still looms large in the fragile democracy.

Although the army stepped down from junta rule in 2011, it kept control of security policy and key levers of government.

Any overt break from the army’s policy in Rakhine could enrage the generals and derail Suu Kyi’s efforts to prevent a rollback on recent democratic gains.

The temple was first built in 1882 on the outskirts of Shanghai. It is named for the two jade Buddha statues it houses. Destroyed by fire, it was reconstructed in 1918 at its current downtown location.

Abbots of the temple decided to relocate the saffron-painted Grand Hall three years ago because of safety concerns and to protect the wooden structure. The temple welcomes about 2 million visitors a year, and daily visitors on occasions such as Chinese New Year Eve can top 100,000.

A special ceremony attended by monks, abbots and thousands of Buddhist faithful was held on Sunday morning to celebrate the successful relocation of the hall after two weeks of work.

The 2,000-metric-ton structure was moved together with three clay Buddha sculptures and other relics it contained.

“The challenge was like walking and carrying a tray of tofu to a destination,” said Lan Wuji, founder of Evolution Shift, the company behind the project, which also handled the relocation of Shanghai Music Hall in 2003.

Lan said because the temple was built much earlier and there were no schematics, its move was a much more difficult job than the relocation of the music hall.

It was later found, through radar technology, that the foundation of the Grand Hall was made from rocks glued together with a mixture of lime and glutinous rice, rather than cement or steel.

Ten rails were created along which the hall was moved to its new site at a speed of 3 centimetres per minute. Forty-six hydraulic jacks were placed under the foundation to lift the entire structure off the ground.

Around 20,000 bricks will be used to fill the gap below the structure, as it is now 1 metre higher than before. Members of the public can pay 200 yuan ($30) to have their name inscribed on one of the bricks before the end of September, when they will be inserted.

After the new foundation is complete, a bell and drum tower, as well as a hall dedicated to Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, will be added to the Grand Hall to complete the temple’s function and architectural style, a typical Buddhist temple in East China.

The whole renovation is expected to be finished in the first part of next year.

At a weekend pop-up restaurant in Tokyo’s upmarket Roppongi district, those who ask for soup might get a salad, while those who order a hamburger could be served pasta.

There should, however, be no complaints at what is quirkily called the Restaurant Of Order Mistakes. Its team of wait staff comprises 17 dementia patients, and executive committee member Shiro Oguni, a television director, said he hopes to foster a spirit of tolerance, empathy and acceptance towards dementia patients.

Estimates show that almost one in five senior citizens in Japan suffers from dementia, with numbers set to rise as the nation grapples with a fast-ageing population.

This is the three-day pop-up restaurant’s second run, following a similar event in June. Limited tickets have been set aside for walk-in customers, with the bulk reserved for donors in an online fund-raiser that collected almost 13 million yen (S$158,000) – nearly 5 million yen more than the initial target.

The event ends today as Japan marks Respect For The Aged Day with a public holiday.

The Statistics Bureau, in data released yesterday in line with Respect For The Aged Day, said the proportion of the elderly to the total population stands at 27.7 per cent.

Japan defines its elderly as those aged 65 and above.

This figure, a new high, is projected to reach 35.3 per cent by 2040. Those who are 90 years old and above also crossed the two million mark for the first time.

Last Friday, the Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry said the number aged 100 years and above has risen to a record 67,824 people, of whom nearly nine in 10 are women.

Japan’s oldest woman, Ms Nabi Tajima, 117, was born in August 1900 in Kagoshima in the south-west. Last Saturday, she took over the title of the world’s oldest woman after the death of Jamaican Violet Mosse-Brown, who was born in March 1900.

Its oldest man, Mr Masazo Nonaka, 112, hails from northern Hokkaido and was born in July 1905.

The data showed that nearly 12 per cent of Japan’s workforce are seniors who choose to continue working. Most Japanese firms require full-timers to retire at 60, but they can extend for five years on a contractual basis with reduced terms.

As of last Friday, there were some 7.7 million seniors in the workplace. Three in four of them are so- called “irregular workers” who do part-time or contractual work.

These numbers, too, are set to rise as the elderly look for ways to spend their time and to supplement their household savings.

Two geriatric groups are now lobbying Tokyo to add 10 years to its definition of elderly. Japan’s life expectancy last year was 87.1 years for women and 81 years for men.

Their rationale, as Dr Yasuyoshi Ouchi, 68, told a recent briefing, is for Tokyo to acknowledge the “rejuvenation” of Japan’s seniors in their physical and intellectual health amid advancing medical care, nutrition and sanitation standards.

But critics of the plan are concerned that any rise in the elderly age definition would lead to a delay in pension payouts and affect those on social assistance.

Sociologist Emi Kataoka of Tokyo’s Komazawa University told The Straits Times: “An old man who is able to work will have to continue to pay taxes, and if the plan is realised, it means a shift towards a system in an ultra-ageing society where social security support is propped up by other elderly (citizens).”

Social safety nets must be enhanced before such a proposal can be considered, she said, adding: “If pension annuities are not paid out until 75, there is the risk that those aged from 65 to 74 who are ill or are unable to work will be left in limbo.”

The campaign will have a particular effect on the United States, which makes widespread use of lethal cocktails for capital punishment, and also China, Iran and Saudi Arabia — the world’s top executioners.

The United States is under fire for its use of body-worn electric shock devices like stun belts that are widely used by law-enforcement officials.

“Even when such devices are worn but not activated, they constitute ill-treatment, maintaining the wearer in constant fear of instant pain for as long as they are worn,” according to a report by the Omega Research Foundation, an independent group based in London.

The European Union was joined in leading the campaign by Argentina and Mongolia. Canada and major Latin American nations including Brazil, Chile and Mexico also signed the non-binding statement on the torture trade.

Participation from other regions was slim but the statement was also backed by Armenia, Madagascar and the Seychelles.

The European Union, which has made combating torture and the death penalty a foreign policy priority, has taken steps since 2005 to outlaw trade of these goods.

Five years ago, it imposed strict controls on exports of drugs that can be used in lethal injections.

Last year, it ordered a ban on the transit of torture equipment on the territories of the 28 EU countries and through European ports.

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EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom maintains the measures are having an impact, with a drop in manufacturing of these items in Europe.

A halt in the production of chemicals used in lethal cocktails has led to a price increase, making their use costlier.

But she distanced the plan from the debate on capital punishment in the United States, saying: “It is not targeted against any country.”

“We see that this has effect but we need to go global — that’s what we are doing today,” she said.

“Torture is banned by international law; still we know it’s happening and sometimes it’s happening in the name of the fight against terrorism,” she said.

The countries that join the alliance commit to restricting exports of these goods, to monitoring trade routes and sharing information on new products that turn up on the market.

The ultimate goal is to draft an international convention banning the trade of goods used for torture and for capital punishment.

“These products serve no other purpose than inflicting terrible pain and killing people. We should never permit that they are traded like any other commodity,” said Malmstrom.

“It’s time for concrete action to shut down this despicable trade.”

Hours before Suu Kyi delivers a national address Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called a meeting on the crisis on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Johnson, at the meeting attended by US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Myanmar’s deputy foreign minister, warned that the violence in Rakhine state was “a stain on the country’s reputation” so soon after its transition to democratic rule.

“For this reason, Burma should not be surprised to find itself under international scrutiny and on the Security Council’s agenda,” Johnson said, using the former British colony’s earlier name.

“As I have repeatedly said, no one wants to see a return to military rule, so it is vital that Aung San Suu Kyi and the civilian government make clear these abuses must stop,” he said in a statement.

Haley called Monday’s meeting “productive” but voiced alarm at the lack of progress on the ground.

“The United States continues to urge the Burmese government to end military operations, grant humanitarian access, and commit to aiding the safe return of civilians back to their homes,” she said.

Other countries represented at the meeting were Bangladesh, the chief destination of fleeing refugees, as well as Australia, Canada, Denmark Indonesia, Sweden and Turkey, according to Britain.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking earlier to the BBC ahead of the week’s meetings, also said that Suu Kyi had “a last chance” to change course in her address Tuesday.

Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch, called the British-led meeting “a first step, but it can’t be the last.”

With world leaders visiting for the UN General Assembly this week, Charbonneau urged work on a Security Council resolution that would impose targeted sanctions, including an arms embargo on the commanders leading the campaign against the Rohingya.

Western officials and human rights groups have been especially disheartened as they had campaigned for years for the freedom of Suu Kyi, who spent the larger part of two decades under house arrest by a military junta until her release in 2010.

Suu Kyi’s electoral triumph two years ago had been hailed as a victory for democracy. But the civilian leader, who has a complicated relationship with Myanmar’s army, has been nearly silent after troops drove more than 410,000 Rohingya out of the country.

The United Nations has said that the campaign, which witnesses say has included the burning of villages and rape, amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Rohingya, who are predominantly Muslim, are reviled by many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.