A Chinese father-turned-activist imprisoned for protesting a tainted milk scandal is seeking medical parole, state media said yesterday in what might be a deal with authorities hoping to tamp public anger over his harsh sentence.
Zhao Lianhai (趙連海), whose son was among children sickened in one of China’s worst food safety scandals, was sentenced earlier this month to two-and-a-half years in prison for inciting social disorder. Zhao campaigned for compensation for families of those killed or sickened because of the adulteration of milk and milk products with the industrial chemical melamine.
He first vowed to fight his conviction, said he would go on a hunger strike and last week signed legal forms for the appeal. However, he has since been under apparent pressure not to appeal.
Xinhua news agency said in a report early yesterday that Zhao’s application for medical parole had been accepted by judicial authorities. Zhao’s lawyers said they were unable to confirm the report.
A woman who answered the telephone at the Daxing district People’s Court in Beijing, where Zhao was convicted, said she was unclear about Zhao’s case and unable to check whether he had applied for medical parole.
One of Zhao’s lawyers, Li Fangping (李方平), said he never discussed the possibility of medical parole with Zhao and was not aware of any health problems he might have.
In a sign that Zhao’s stance was changing, the prison told his lawyers last week that Zhao did not want to see them. On Monday, Zhao again refused to see his lawyers and dismissed them via a handwritten note, said Peng Jian (彭劍), his other attorney.
“It certainly creates a suspicion that some sort of a deal or other sort of inducement has led to his decision not to appeal,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, the Hong Kong-based senior research manager for the Duihua Foundation, which advocates on behalf of political and religious prisoners in China. “It’s quite possible that they are looking for ways to defuse the situation without admitting that they were wrong to sentence him in the first place.”
Beyond the pressure on Zhao, Peng said on Monday that he was detained over the weekend for about 48 hours at a guest house north of Beijing by four plainclothes police who asked him to respect the court’s initial verdict.
Zhao’s conviction comes amid stepped-up efforts by Chinese authorities to silence dissent. Environmentalists, AIDS activists and lawyers who took on sensitive cases have disappeared, been locked up, or otherwise harassed, while this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, dissident writer Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), is serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion handed down after he co-authored a call for widespread reform of the authoritarian, one-party political system.
Meanwhile, state media said on Monday that authorities in Hubei Province were searching for 50 packages of a corn-flavored dairy drink found to have been laced with melamine.
The government had said after the 2008 scandal that it destroyed all tainted milk powder, but reports of melamine-laced products have regularly re-emerged.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
RSS