Chinese blogger jailed for 'disrupting traffic' fails to have sentence overturned
A female Chinese blogger who was jailed for nine months for "disrupting the traffic" has failed to get her sentence overturned on appeal, highlighting rising Chinese government fears over the power of online activism.
Wang Lihong was arrested last
April as China's government mounted a clampdown on activists, lawyers and
bloggers in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings Photo: AP
5:15PM BST 20 Oct 2011
Wang Lihong, 55, was a previously little-known activist who in recent years
had attracted a sizeable online following for her work publicising injustices,
land grabs and corruption by local government officials.
She was arrested last April as China's government mounted a
clampdown on activists, lawyers and bloggers in the wake of the Arab Spring
uprisings. In September she was jailed for nine months after what her lawyers
said was a peremptory hearing.
Her supporters say the charges of "disrupting the traffic" were trumped up
after she attended a peaceful protest outside a court in the southern city of
Fuzhou where three women whom she had supported were being tried for
'slandering' a government official.
Analysts say her case – which was brought to wider attention by the artist Ai
Weiwei, who was himself detained without charge for 81 days earlier this year –
hints at growing nervousness among China's security apparatus at the power of
the internet to magnify dissent.
Over the last two years China's online landscape has been transformed by the
explosion of interest in Sina Corporation's Weibo tool, a Twitter-like
microblogging service that has garnered 200m users in just two years.
Olympic judo gold medalist Uchishiba gets 5 years for rape
Masato Uchishiba was sentenced to five years in prison for the assault on a teenage member of a college judo club he was coaching, a court official said, after she drunkenly fell asleep in a Tokyo hotel.
Uchishiba, 34, was feted as a national hero after bringing home a gold medal from the 2004 Athens Olympics, an achievement he repeated at the 2008 Beijing Games.
Prosecutors said the incident occurred in September 2011, when the women’s judo club from Kyushu University of Nursing and Social Welfare had been on a visit to Tokyo.
After a night of drinking and karaoke, the teenager, whose exact age was not given but who was believed to have been 18 or 19 at the time, fell asleep in her hotel room and awoke to find Uchishiba raping her.
“When she became aware, she resisted by saying, ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ But he turned up the volume of the television and covered her mouth with his hand,” prosecutors said, according to NHK.
The victim is not being identified publicly because of the nature of the crime.
Uchishiba, who is married, pleaded not guilty and maintained throughout the trial that the sex with the teenage student had been consensual. He said he would appeal the decision.
The All Japan Judo Federation barred Uchishiba from all judo activities in January 2012.
The verdict comes after a torrid week for judo, in which the coach of the national women’s team resigned after admitting claims that he beat his athletes with a bamboo sword were “more or less true.”
Ryuji Sonoda, who took the team to the London Olympics, acknowledged allegations of violence against his charges, including face-slapping and verbal abuse.
Sonoda, a 39-year-old former world judo champion, told a tightly-packed press conference: “I would like to deeply apologize for causing trouble to all the athletes and people concerned with what I have done and said.”
The media storm that engulfed judo, a popular sport in Japan that is usually a reliable source of Olympic medals, comes as Tokyo launches its international campaign for the right to host the 2020 Games.
The nation’s education and sports minister on Thursday ordered swift action to contain a scandal that observers say could badly dent Japan’s chances of beating Istanbul and Madrid for the 2020 Olympiad.