Newsdesk: Mourners of dead petitioner detained

In Shanghai, several hundred petitioners went to mourn petitioner Duan Huimin who died two weeks ago in police custody, RFA’s Cantonese service reports.

About 500 mourners were scooped up and pushed aboard buses to be taken to a makeshift detention center in a nearby empty school. They were allowed to leave after registering their personal details.
Friends [...]

RFA News: Detained Chinese Rights Lawyer on Hunger Strike

Extract from our latest news release. The full version is going out by e-mail. You can get the Web story and subscribe to our e-mail list here.

HONG KONG, Jan. 11, 2007—A prominent civil rights lawyer in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has refused food or water for 25 days because he says he [...]

Newsdesk: Land protesters on the run

Two villagers who went to Beijing to petition on behalf of 1,000 people from Zhanhuang county in the northern Chinese province of Hebei have been arrested and charged by the authorities.
Nine villagers made the trip–which is risky because local officials watch transportation links to make sure local residents don’t flood the capital with protests. The [...]

China detains Tibetan (UPDATE with official response)

China Detains Tibetan Who Saved Sheep
Chinese authorities in the western Tibetan county of Dhingri have detained a prominent local figure after he saved large numbers of sheep and goats from the slaughterhouse, sources in the region said.
The reason for the arrest of Pempa, who is known by a single name, was not immediately clear, the [...]

Singapore UFO sightings

Via Global Voices Online: “We were having dinner down near Sentosa Island at an al fresco restaurant tonight, and we saw the strangest green lights streaking across the sky,” writes Singapore blogger SquareCircleZ. “It was just after 8:00 pm, and the lights were traveling south, over the eastern part of Singapore.”
“At first I thought it [...]

Teachers’ strike photos pulled

John Kennedy at Global Voices Online has translated and bridge-blogged a series of posts, photos and commenters from Chinese netizens detailing a teachers’ strike in Huadu, a suburb of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. (via Interlocals.) Comments on major online forums and BBS sites were turned off within hours of the story going ‘live’ [...]

Burmese Independence Day

Burmese leader Gen. Than Shwe marked his country’s 59th anniversary of independence from British rule by warning the international community off what he called interference in Burma’s internal affairs. In a message (full English text) released to state-run media and carried on the blog nnseek, he said:
Today, certain powerful countries are interfering in the [...]

Plagiarism and the Cult of Kim

Gypsy Scholar has an illuminating post about plagiarism in academic circles, citing an email exchange with a student in his English Medieval Literature class at the Korea University. The student demonstrably uses whole phrases from online crib sheets in his appraisal of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but strongly contests his professor’s [...]