Police in the China’s eastern Shandong Province have arrested a group it said organized mass protests in an attempt to sway court cases and influence sentences, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The group paid a “relatively regular” group of people to stage protests, ostensibly about protecting the rights of petitioners and lawyers working on their behalf, Xinhua said late on Sunday.
It named two of the people police detained as Zhai Yanmin (翟巖民), 54, who paid people to stage the protests, and lawyer Liu Jianjun (劉建軍), who hoped to influence judges trying his cases with the protests, the report said.
“The group was close-knitted with specific assignments for its members, and their activities were seen in heated cases across the country,” Xinhua said, in a report that was also posted on the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Web site.
The protesters held up banners and signs, shouted slogans and “hyped up” what was happening on Chinese and overseas Web sites, it added.
Tens of thousands of “mass incidents” — the usual euphemism for protests — occur each year in China, triggered by corruption, pollution, illegal land grabs and other grievances, unnerving the stability-obsessed ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Many people try to use “petitions” to bypass the legal system and directly bring complaints to the attention of government officials in a system that dates back to imperial times, although some cases do end up in court.
However, few cases ever get resolved, and petitioners can stage noisy protests out of frustration.
Despite international criticism, petitioners are often forced home or held in “black jails,” unlawful secret detention facilities where detainees can be subjected to beatings, sleep and food deprivation and psychological abuse.
China has made a series of efforts to reform the system by cracking down on illegal imprisonment of petitioners and pushing for the process to go online. The government does not formally acknowledge that black prisons exist.
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
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
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
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS