China briefly detained two prominent dissidents ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the men said yesterday, even as the government defended its record. Police seized veteran dissidents Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) and Zhang Zuhua (張祖樺) late on Monday night and only released them yesterday, Zhang said by telephone.
“They said we had been getting intellectuals’ signatures for a charter, and so they took us away,” Zhang said, referring to a document he had been helping draft calling for greater respect for human rights in China.
“It was a very constructive document,” he added. “We asked them which clauses were miswritten and they didn’t say. But tomorrow is international human rights day, so it’s natural to ask for respect for human rights at this time.”
Zhang quit the Communist Youth League once headed by late Chinese Communist Party chief and reformist Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦) in protest against the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square.
Meanwhile, a Chinese newspaper report alleging authorities locked up people in mental hospitals for criticizing the state and filing complaints about corruption focused rare attention on the usually taboo topic of psychiatric abuse in China.
An article in the Beijing News on Monday has been widely reproduced by other media and prompted a highly critical editorial yesterday in the English-language China Daily.
As the sun sets on another scorching Yangon day, the hot and bothered descend on the Myanmar city’s parks, the coolest place to spend an evening during yet another power blackout. A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted Southeast Asia this week, sending the mercury to 45°C and prompting thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes. Even before the chaos and conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup, Myanmar’s creaky and outdated electricity grid struggled to keep fans whirling and air conditioners humming during the hot season. Now, infrastructure attacks and dwindling offshore gas reserves mean those who cannot afford expensive diesel
Does Argentine President Javier Milei communicate with a ghost dog whose death he refuses to accept? Forced to respond to questions about his mental health, the president’s office has lashed out at “disrespectful” speculation. Twice this week, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni was asked about Milei’s English Mastiff, Conan, said to have died seven years ago. Milei, 53, had Conan cloned, and today is believed to own four copies he refers to as “four-legged children.” Or is it five? In an interview with CNN this month, Milei referred to his five dogs, whose faces and names he had engraved on the presidential baton. Conan,
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other