Chinese police have denied bail to a prominent lawyer detained in Beijing last month ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Incident, which fell on Wednesday last week.
Police detained attorney Pu Zhiqiang (浦志強) early last month after he attended a small meeting at a Beijing residence to discuss the 1989 massacre.
Pu’s lawyer, Zhang Sizhi (張思之), yesterday said he does not think his client “will be released any time soon. A criminal charge is very likely, given the circumstances and the reasons of the detention,” but did not elaborate.
Pu was among dozens of activists detained or placed under house arrest across China as part of the authorities’ bid to deter any commemoration of the massacre.
Several others who attended the meeting in Beijing with Pu had also been detained, but were released last week after the June 4 anniversary passed, activists said.
As Chinese authorities step up a campaign against online “rumors” relayed on social media that was launched last year, police have arrested a female student for comments she made on Twitter apparently about the crackdown.
Beijing authorities arrested a 22-year-old surnamed Zhao (趙) for using Twitter to “spread news of law-breaking methods,” the China News Service said on Monday.
The details given in the report appeared to match the Twitter account of Zhao Huaxu (趙華旭), a student in Beijing who posted a plan to use a transmitting station to broadcast information about the Tiananmen massacre via SMS.
Twitter is blocked in China, although some users circumvent controls to use the service, but arrests for posts are rare.
State media yesterday also reported that police killed a suspect who was attempting to take over a primary school in the latest incident of violence targeting children to hit the country.
The unnamed suspect was shot dead yesterday morning after trying to seize control of a school in Qianjiang in central China’s Hubei Province, according to the provincial news Web site Jingchu.
Police believe the suspect may have left an explosive device on the campus, state broadcaster CCTV said, adding that teachers and students had been moved to a safe location.
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,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
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
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the