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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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