Results tagged “amnestyinternational”

Amnesty International's website is unreachable for journalists covering the Olympics one day after the organization issued a harsh report criticizing China's failure to make good on promises to improve human rights leading up to the Olympics. A more practical complaint from the press room — the internet is sloooooooooow. Welcome to our nightmare, guys. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, while admitting that websites for certain "cults" will indeed be blocked, blamed other inaccessibility issues on foreign web hosts. “There are some problems with a lot of websites themselves that makes it not easy to view them in China,” Liu Jianchao said. Hmmmm. [Source]

A new ad campaign for Amnesty International has Chinese Netizens seeing red, according to The Wall Street Journal. The campaign, designed by TBWA Worldwide, features Chinese athletes being tortured by Chinese authorities. It reads at the bottom: "After the Olympic Games, the fight for human rights must go on." WSJ reports bloggers demanding the boycott of all TBWA ads, as well as suggesting that all Chinese employees at TBWA resign from the company. Amnesty International allowed TBWA to run the ads once so that they could be entered in the Cannes competition, where they won a bronze award. According to Blogging for China, Amnesty has now claimed no involvement with the dissemination of the ads, pointing out that its web address was incorrectly listed on the ad (it is Amnesty.org, not Amnesty.com). However, according to Blogging for China's DJ, the organization knew the wrong web address was a minor error.

• Gothamist went to the scene of the Trump Soho construction collapse, which left one construction worker dead and others injured (an indirect culprit - Manhattan's hot real estate market, causing rushed construction jobs).
• Shanghaiist is confused by media reports as to whether Playboy will be available in China during the year of the Olympics.
• LAist got fugged in an interview with the Go Fug Yourself girls.

It is no secret by now. China executes more people than the rest of the world put together (yes, even more than the Islamic world). In fact, Amnesty International says China carries out about 80 percent of the world's total capital punishments, if not more (1,770 people in 2005). The recent UN vote for a moratorium on executions saw a fractious two-day debate between the anti-execution camp led by Italy and the pro-execution camp led by Singapore, which has the ignominious honour of having the highest number of executions per capita in the world (coming from there, we are ashamed). The result of the vote: 104 for, 54 against and 29 abstentions. Opponents of the moratorium included the United States, China and Iran (one rarely finds these three countries in the same camp).

Disgruntled Shanghaiist critics will have a fit when they realize that the prison in question is in the Philippines. To which I reply, "Black or white, Chinese or Phils: Jack-o knows no borders."

It is said that the first step toward recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Of course, this begs the question: recovery from which problem? Whatever the impetus for these changes, China has finally admitted to taking the organs of executed prisoners. Does this mean an end of the free-flow, all-you-can-afford, buffet-bonanza on the virile organs of hapless young peasants executed under one of China's 70 capital crimes?

It's good news for those of you who stand accused of one of the nearly 70 offenses that are punishable by death in China. Under legislation enacted on Tuesday, as of January 1, all death sentences handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by China's Supreme People's Court. This reverses a 1983 law which gave such powers to the provincial courts in an effort to crack down on rising crime and corruption that occurred early under the reforms implemented under Deng Xiaoping. However, such liberal use of the death penalty in the world's most populous country and in a poor legal environment led predictably to large numbers of death sentences, many of them carried out on innocent people. Last year, a woman in Hunan reappeared 16 years after her accused killer had been executed for her murder.

Which is a good thing. If we didn't, she would quite possibly tear us limb from limb. If this Shanghaiist was not British, he would probably say "she don't take no shit", and possibly "you go girl!", but British people just sound silly when they try to talk American slang. She started yesterday's press conference with no fuss, no muss:

The first case they are profiling in that of jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Visit irrepressible.info or observer.co.uk/amnesty/ for more information.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Chinese children are being so unfilial these days that they have to fine them in order to get them spend more time with their elderly parents:

Because they will kill you. Seriously. In a move that would make even the craziest Texan cringe, southern Guangdong has "introduced the death penalty for purse-snatching":