A Chinese activist who questioned why so many schoolchildren died in last year’s massive earthquake has been charged with subversion and will stand trial in the middle of this month, his lawyer said yesterday.
Tan Zuoren’s (譚作人) trial is to begin on Aug. 12 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, where a devastating earthquake last year left nearly 90,000 dead or missing, said lawyer Pu Zhi-qiang (蒲志強) of Beijing’s Huayi Law Firm.
Tan is accused of inciting to subvert state power, but it was not immediately clear what evidence will be brought against him, Pu said by telephone from Chengdu.
Beijing routinely uses the charge of subversion to imprison dissidents for years.
COLLAPSE
Following the 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan, Tan tried to investigate the collapse of school buildings in the quake and the number of schoolchildren killed, estimating at least 5,600 students were victims.
Tan had hoped to complete his investigation before the May 12 anniversary of the quake, but he was detained in late March, Hong Kong-based activist network Chinese Human Rights Defenders said earlier.
In May, the government finally released its own count of students killed in the disaster, putting the official toll at 5,335.
Critics allege that corruption-enabled shoddy construction caused several schools to collapse while buildings nearby remained intact — a politically sensitive theory that the government has tried to quash.
FORCE
Officials blame the sheer force of the quake as the main cause of the number of flattened schools.
Pu said the charges appear to be linked to Tan’s quake investigation as well as essays he wrote about the 1989 student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that ended in a deadly military crackdown.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS