Word: li
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...onetime Yangtze Hotel on Hankou Road - now called the Langham Yangtze Boutique - was built 75 years ago to cater for the city's Chinese élite. Designed by Li Pan, a popular architect of the day, it was an ostentatious project, costing 1.2 million silver dollars (or about $325 million in today's money) and featured a host of mod cons - like air-conditioning - that were then becoming standard in luxury international hotels but represented heady advances for locally financed properties. Tycoons, heirs, heiresses and film stars flocked to the Yangtze's opening. The hotel's nightclub, the Yangtze Dance...
...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. Their transgression? They were representing the family of Jiang Xiqing, a man who belonged to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. After a few hours of questioning, the Jiangjin district police released them around midnight. "We were...
...Violence has not stopped Li and his fellow human-rights lawyers from doing their jobs, but bureaucracy might. On June 1, the law licenses for Li and more than a dozen other prominent human-rights lawyers expired. The annual renewal is generally considered a formality - a matter of filling out forms and paying a fee. But this year Li and other top human-rights lawyers were shut out. They say they are being punished for simply doing their jobs. (See pictures of the Pakistani lawyers' movement...
...sensitive cases these lawyers have handled include illegal land seizures, representing victims of faulty products, like in last year's tainted-milk scandal, defending Tibetans accused of agitating for independence and, as in Li's case, defending followers of Falun Gong. "Lawyers no longer serve only as instruments of political control like how they were expected to perform from the 1950s to the 1970s," says Albert Ho, a Hong Kong solicitor and chairman of China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. "With the opening and liberalization of China, it needs to build a system of law and a sound legal system...
...sentenced to 12 years in prison by North Korea's highest court. Their crime: illegal entry into the country and "hostile acts." The sentence - "reform through labor" - raises the prospect that the two could be sent into North Korea's notorious system for political prisoners - the so-called kwan li so, which are infamous for their mistreatment of prisoners...