Amnesty International today urged the Chinese authorities to release a woman sentenced to a year in a labour camp for retweeting a supposedly anti-Japanese message.
Chinese online activist Cheng Jianping was sentenced to one year of ‘Re-education Through Labour’ on Monday for “disturbing social order”, having retweeted a satirical suggestion on October 17 that the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo be attacked.
Cheng disappeared ten days later, on what was to be her wedding day, her whereabouts unknown until it emerged this week ...
BEIJING — In a case that has galvanized the Chinese arts community, a prominent artist who helped lead a short-lived demonstration along the nation’s most politically hallowed thoroughfare went on trial Wednesday on assault charges that supporters say are aimed at punishing him for his political activism.
The defendant, Wu Yuren, 39, is accused of assaulting a group of police officers at a Beijing police station last May. He had gone to the stationhouse with a friend who was seeking to file a complaint against his landlord, but Mr. Wu ended up in a verbal confrontation with several officers after they grabbed his cellphone, the friend, Yang Licai, said.
The police officers say Mr. Wu attacked them. Mr. Wu claims ...
Oh, lady, you just earned our 15 bucks. Rihanna will sell millions of copies of Loud, her fifth album, and she'll deserve every penny of it -- not because it's a dependably excellent club-shaker, though it is, but because no woman should have to endure the kind of pick-up line Drake shoots her way on "What's My Name," the record's second single. "I heard you good with those soft lips / Yeah you know word of mouth," purrs the Canadian rapper (and Ri-Ri's rumored fling). "The square root of 69 is 8 something, right / 'Cuz I been trying to work it out."
Woof. But while Casanova rolls over in his grave, Rihanna smirks and takes it in stride. Drake may open the track, but she reigns in their shared world -- with a coquettish flip, she glides into a chorus that leaves no doubt: "Hey boy, really wanna see / If you can go downtown with a girl like me." In the video, she struts happily around New York's Lower East Side in a zebra-striped jacket, a nod to the actual animal she sat atop in the video for last year's "Rude Boy" -- with her bodysuit covered in Keith Haring-esque graffiti to match the floor and walls, like Haring himself was bodypainted to melt into his own squiggly backdrop in Annie Liebovitz's 1986 portrait. "Rude Boy," from last year's defiantly terse but uneven Rated X, was released when the young pop star was still struggling to overcome her well-documented romantic difficulties with boyfriend Chris Brown, and seemed about to melt into the tabloid stories.
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