A 104-year-old Chinese woman faces deportation from Australia after a government tribunal yesterday rejected her final appeal for a permanent visa.
Cui Yu Hu arrived in Melbourne to visit family in 1995 on a 12-month tourist visa but no airline would take her back to China because she was too old and frail.
The widow -- who received a letter of congratulations from Prime Minister John Howard when she turned 104 earlier this year -- remained in Australia illegally for another four years before she applied for an aged parent visa that would allow her to stay permanently and receive free health care.
Hu's family -- adopted daughter Motoko Otani and son-in-law Bing Sen Yang -- appealed the decision. But the Migration Review Tribunal found yesterday that she was not entitled to a visa because she overstayed her initial 12-month visa.
However, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has said she would be willing to consider using her ministerial discretion to overrule the tribunal on humanitarian grounds if Hu's family made a formal application.
Hu's spokesman Chap Chow said her family was confident Vanstone would allow her to stay.
``We are hopeful. We are, in fact, quietly confident this will be the case, there will be [a positive] outcome,'' Chow told ABC radio.
Chow said Hu had outlived her friends in China and deportation would ``kill her.''
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
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