The Internet giant Yahoo has asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the company of "aiding and abetting" torture by giving Chinese authorities information about dissidents that led to their imprisonment.
Yahoo on Monday filed the motion for dismissal, calling the case "political" and insisting that its Chinese subsidiary was compelled by local law to hand over information to authorities, including user registration information and e-mail content.
SOVEREIGN RIGHTS
"Free speech rights as we understand them in the United States are not the law in China," Yahoo said. "Every sovereign nation has a right to regulate speech within its borders."
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in San Francisco in April e-mailby Yu Ling (
The suit accuses Yahoo of helping Chinese officials track down her husband and of linking her husband and others to e-mail and online comments.
Yahoo said that the "plaintiffs' criminal judgments do not show that defendants divulged plaintiffs' identities, caused them to be investigated, or provided proof essential to their convictions."
The dissidents "assumed the risk of harm when they chose to use Yahoo China e-mail and group list services to engage in activity they knew violated Chinese law."
Yahoo was referred to 10 times in the 2003 Chinese court verdict that declared Wang guilty of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced him to a decade in prison.
The suit also involves Shi Tao (
POLITICS, NOT LAW
"This is a political and diplomatic issue, not a legal one," Yahoo spokeswoman Kelley Benander said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
"The real issue here is the plaintiffs' outrage at the behavior and laws of the Chinese government. The US court system is not the forum for addressing these political concerns," she said.
The suit filed under the auspices of the US Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act names Chinese Internet search engine Alibaba as a defendant along with Yahoo's operations in China and Hong Kong.
It asks for compensatory damages and calls on the court to order Yahoo to stop cooperating with requests by China to identify Internet users and to pressure the government there to release Wang and others imprisoned as the result of such shared information.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of