The day Zhao Wei disappeared: how a young law graduate was caught in China's human rights dragnet
‘They must be torturing her,’ says Zhao’s mother as she desperately searches for the daughter who vanished seven months ago
It was a warm summer’s day when Zhao Wei, a 23-year-old legal assistant, kissed her parents goodbye and set out in search of her dreams.
She left her small-town home in central China and headed east to the train station past a Communist party propaganda poster in which president Xi Jinping posed beside the slogan: “If the people have faith … the country will be strong”.
From there Zhao caught a bullet train to the Chinese capital where she planned to sit the national bar exam she hoped would pave the way for her to become a top human rights lawyer.
“She looked well,” her tearful mother, Zheng Ruixia, recalls of their final moments together, in May last year. “She was so happy when she got on that train.”
Seven months later the would-be lawyer’s dreams are in tatters.
Prisoner refuses to leave Guantanamo as two depart for Balkans
Latest update : 2016-01-25
A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who protested his indefinite confinement with a hunger strike turned down a chance to finally leave the U.S. base in Cuba, rejecting an offer to be resettled in an unfamiliar new country.
Muhammad Bawazir, a 35-year-old from Yemen, refused to board a plane as two other prisoners were being flown out for resettlement in the Balkans, his lawyer, John Chandler, said Thursday. Since returning to his homeland was not an option, he insisted on being sent to a country where he has family.
Chandler said he spent months trying to persuade Bawazir to accept the resettlement in another country he declined to name. But the prisoner, who was 21 when captured in Afghanistan, apparently decided at the last minute he couldn’t do it.
"It’s a country I’d go to in a heartbeat," the Atlanta-based attorney said. "I can’t help you with the logic of his position. It’s just a very emotional reaction from a man who has been locked up for 14 years."
Indonesia cracks down on 'deviant sect' Gafatar after village burned down by mob
Jewel Topsfield and Amilia Rosa
Kalimantan, Indonesia: A so-called "deviant sect" living in a remote farming community are besieged by a mob who burn their settlement to the ground. Hundreds of suspected members are taken to transit centres. The government deploys warships to transport them back to their home villages, where they will be "re-educated" by religious leaders.
It may sound like a B-movie script but these extraordinary scenes have played out over the past week in Indonesia, in a country still jumpy after the Jakarta terror attacks.
A little-known religious minority group called the Fajar Nusantara Movement, or Gafatar, recently came to public attention when a doctor and her six-month-old son disappeared from Yogyakarta in December. She was found two weeks later, living in a Gafatar community in West Kalimantan that had been established four months ago.
Obama to push to clear leftover Vietnam-era bombs
Updated 0334 GMT (1134 HKT) January 25, 2016
Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Laos on Sunday ahead of a major push by the Obama administration to fix a decades-old wrong: clearing up leftover Vietnam-era U.S. bombs.
Kerry's visit will help usher in a new partnership with a former wartime foe and end a dark American legacy that has lingered since the end of the Vietnam War. It also comes ahead of next month's summit in Sunnylands, California, between President Barack Obama and 10 Southeast Asian leaders, and a landmark trip by the President to Laos this fall.
While there, the President is expected to announce a major initiative to help clear leftover Vietnam-era bombs, aides told CNN.
Should Greek islanders win a Nobel Peace Prize?
Nearly 300,000 people have petitioned to nominate residents on Greek's Aegean Islands for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing volunteer efforts to care for more than 800,000 migrants who arrived this year alone.
If the signatories to a popular petition have their way, Greek islanders who have put aside their own country's economic crisis to care for more than 800,000 migrants during their first hours in Europe will be nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.
Ordinary Greek citizens have "opened their homes and hearts to save refugee children, men, and women fleeing war and terror," reads the petition on Avaaz.org, which had attracted more than 290,000 signatures by Sunday afternoon:
With their actions, they drowned fear and racism in a wave of compassion and reminded the whole world that we one, united humanity, above races, nations and religions. Now we have a massive opportunity to help them shine their light even brighter, and show governments that people care and demand urgent action.
The swagger of khaki shorts
A distant relative of my family, an ardent supporter of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would often tell us that every time he heard the incantation Bharatmata ki jai he was overcome by a rush of emotion so strong that he would do anything to prove his love for the country. If listeners looked askance, he would ask rather ingenuously, “What is wrong with being patriotic and saying India is Hindu?” It was a question that defied any answer.
It was only recently that he admitted that his adrenaline rush of nationalism came from being a regular at the daily shakha (branch) meetings of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in his youth and childhood. Bharatmata was apotheosised as a crowned goddess holding a trident in one hand and a flag in the other in his imagination. She had to be protected at all costs by men of stern principles and undying loyalty to the nation. But for decades there was a reticence in talking about the shakha, possibly because RSS had been banned several times — for its role in the killing of Mahatma Gandhi and in communal flare-ups across the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment