Scuffles as celebrated lawyer goes on trial in China
Police drag supporters away from Beijing courthouse as well-known rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang tried over online posts.
| Human Rights, China, Xi Jinping, Asia Pacific
One of China's most celebrated human rights lawyers went on trial over online comments critical of the ruling Communist Party, as police scuffled with supporters and journalists outside the courthouse.
Pu Zhiqiang, who has represented labour camp victims and dissident artist Ai Weiwei, was detained a year-and-a-half ago in a nationwide crackdown on dissent.
He faces a maximum of eight years in jail on charges of "inciting ethnic hatred" and "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", according to his lawyer Mo Shaoping.
Beijing's Number Two Intermediate People's Court considered the evidence - seven posts the lawyer made on Weibo between 2011 and 2014 - on Monday, Mo told the AFP news agency.
Weibo is a hugely popular Twitter-like social media platform in China.
Australian newspaper cartoon depicting Indians eating solar panels attacked as racist
Cartoon in News Corp paper by veteran Bill Leak described by critic as ‘shocking ... and unequivocally racist, drawing on base stereotypes of third world people’
A cartoon in the Australian depicting starving Indians chopping up and eating solar panels sent to the developing nation in an attempt to curb carbon emissions has been condemned as “unequivocally racist”.
Drawn by the veteran cartoonist Bill Leak, Monday’s cartoon was his response to the climate deal signed in Paris at the weekend. India is the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse emitter.
Amanda Wise, an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University, said in her view the cartoon was shocking and would be unacceptable in the UK, the US or Canada.
“This cartoon is unequivocally racist and draws on very base stereotypes of third world, underdeveloped people who don’t know what to do with technology,” Wise told Guardian Australia.
Shaker Aamer says Guantanamo was like Azkaban prison from Harry Potter novels
He said Guantanamo’s purpose was to make its inmates 'feelingless'
The last British resident held at Guantanamo Bay has compared the notorious US military facility to Azkaban, the fictional island prison from the Harry Potter novels where most inmates die from despair.
Shaker Aamer, 48, returned to the UK in October after finally being allowed to leave the US base in Cuba where he was held without trial for almost 14 years. In his first television interview since being released, he said Guantanamo’s purpose was to make its inmates “feelingless”.
Comparing the facility to the fictional prison from JK Rowling’s novels, Mr Aamer said his interrogators once told him they had his family and would rape his daughter if he did not talk, describing the experience as “worse than the beating” he received from guards.Thai schools ordered to improve scrutiny of foreign teachers after Walbran arrest
December 14, 2015 - 4:19PMLindsay Murdoch
South-East Asia correspondent for Fairfax Media
Bangkok: Thai authorities have ordered schools to carry out urgent background checks on the country's foreign teachers after Australian convicted paedophile Peter Dundas Walbran was discovered teaching children in north-eastern Thailand.
Education officials admit that some foreigners applying for teaching jobs falsify their credentials and many schools fail to carry out proper background checks on applicants.
Fairfax Media revealed last week that a simple Google search would have found that 59-year-old Walbran raped and sexually molested children as young as eight on the Indonesian island of Lombok over a nine-year period.
The Sydney man turned up teaching at Narinukun international school in Ubon Ratchathani, 630 kilometres from Bangkok, in April.
How the world learned its lesson and got a climate deal
PARIS |
It was an agreement born from a fear of failure, delivered by the smoothness of French diplomacy.
Six years earlier, countries had bitterly walked away from global climate talks in Copenhagen without a deal. The decision to reassemble in Paris to try again at getting almost 200 countries to sign a pact on cutting carbon emissions was a gamble: another collapse could the end world’s ability to forge a common approach to dealing with climate change.
And no political leader wanted his reputation stained by a repeat of the debacle in Copenhagen.
So there was no detail of hospitality too small for the French hosts this time, no country negotiator who would go unflattered by Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister who presided over the conference.
Firefighters wanted: S. Africa's record drought sparks recruitment drive
As South Africa battles its worst drought in three decades, efforts to protect its national parks are providing jobs for marginalized youth.
SUIKERBOSRAND NATURE RESERVE, SOUTH AFRICA — All through the southern hemisphere spring, Vusi Nkabinde waited for rain. But as first September, and then October slid by beneath hard blue skies, the sprawling grasslands here began to turn crisp and wither. Temperatures soared to record highs and the winds picked up, fast and searing.
Mr. Nkabinde had been a forest firefighter long enough to worry; this was the season when he and his crew typically caught a break after months of bone-dry prairie winter.
This year was different. By the time the storms came in mid-November, the region had gone nearly nine months without a drop of rain.
“It was very late, and it was very little,” he says. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”
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