Why The Case For China’s Lawyers Doesn’t Look Good

On May 13, Beijing lawyer Li Chunfu went to the southwestern city of Chongqing with a colleague to meet with the family of a man who died in a labor camp. While meeting with the family, Li and lawyer Zhang Kai were detained by police. Li was chained to a chair and punched, while Zhang, also roughed up during their arrest, was locked in a cage

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Layman-turned-relics hunter rescues China’s antiquities

Searching through the rubble of demolition sites across the 800-year-old capital of China, Li Songtang has unearthed a treasure trove of ancient relics. They include gate piers depicting Mongolians and the Han Chinese during the Yuan dynasty, a Buddhist carving that is more than 1,000 years old, and a Ming dynasty marble fish water tank. Li Songtang is neither museum curator nor antiques expert, but an ordinary man who did not want to see China’s rich history lost to modernization during the late 1970s.

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Anti-war campaigners slam ‘secret’ Iraq probe

Anti-war protesters have criticized a decision by the UK government to hold an investigation into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war behind closed doors. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the House of Commons on Monday the inquiry into the war would hear evidence in private so witnesses can be “as candid as possible.” He added that it would be held along the lines of the Franks inquiry into Britain’s war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the early 1980s.

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Interview with 99 Drams of Whiskey Author Kate Hopkins

People will do crazy things for the devil’s brew. Take the guy who, in 2005, spent more than $70,000 on a single bottle of Dalmore 62 Single Highland Malt Scotch Whisky — one of 12 bottles in the world — and then proceeded to consume it, in one sitting, with a few friends and an English bartender. It was this very story that inspired food blogger Kate Hopkins to trek across the globe, from a 200-year-old distillery in Scotland to Maker’s Mark House and Lounge in Kentucky, for her first book, 99 Drams of Whiskey.

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After 7 years at Gitmo, resettled Uyghurs grateful for freedom

Two of four Uyghurs relocated to Bermuda after seven years of detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, denied Friday that they had ever been terrorists, and expressed gratitude toward President Obama for working to free them. Asked what he would say to someone who accused him of being a terrorist, one of the men, Kheleel Mamut, told CNN’s Don Lemon, “I am no terrorist; I have not been terrorist. I will never be terrorist.

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