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HONG KONG (Reuters) ? Thousands of residents of a south China village rallied on Wednesday in defiance of police who sealed off the area to contain a long-running feud over land grabs and anger over the death of a village leader in police custody.
The death of Xue Jinbo, 42, fanned tension in the small pocket of export-dependent Guangdong province and came after riot police fired water cannons and tear gas on Sunday to disperse thousands of stone-throwing villagers on the coast of the booming province.
Residents of Wukan village say hundreds of hectares of land have been acquired unfairly by corrupt officials in collusion with developers.
Anger in the village finally boiled over this year after repeated appeals to authorities over recent years to do something.
Relatives of Xue said he was the victim of police brutality and his body showed heavy bruising and other signs of abuse. They have rejected official accounts that he died of a cardiac arrest after being interrogated on December 9 and 10.
"The case is under further investigation," Zheng Yanxiong, the Communist Party boss of Shanwei city, which oversees Wukan village, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency.
"The government will strive to settle all related problems and hopes that the village will not be instigated into staging further riots."
Human rights group Amnesty International called for an immediate and independent investigation into Xue's death, adding that China was failing to protect citizens from forced eviction.
"Contrary to international human rights law and standards, Chinese citizens rarely have an opportunity for genuine consultation before eviction, rarely receive adequate information on the nature or purpose of the eviction and often receive little or no compensation," the group said in a statement.
The term "Wukan" was blocked on China's Twitter-like microblogging service Weibo on Wednesday.
"SOMETHING TO HIDE"
China's Communist Party leaders face thousands of small protests and riots every year that chip away at its authority at the grassroots. Land disputes are a widespread source of discord.
One expert on unrest, Sun Liping of Beijing's Tsinghua University, estimates there may have been more than 180,000 such "mass incidents" in 2010, nearly double the number often cited by academics and government experts.
According to a witness, villagers at the Wukan rally gathered in front of a poster of Xue and chanted slogans denouncing corrupt officials.
They also pressed for Xue's body to be returned for proper funeral rites, a request that authorities have refused.
"They clearly have something to hide," one resident told Reuters by telephone. "We will continue to fight for justice for Xue's death and we won't back down."
Riot police maintained a tight cordon around the village on Wednesday and barred almost all access to and from the area, while blocking some supplies of food.
Villagers have built makeshift defenses including cooking gas canisters and nail boards on roads leading into the village to guard against what many fear will be another imminent police crack down and wave of arrests.
"We beg the central government to save us," said another villager by phone. "Everything is black now."
(Reporting by James Pomfret; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Here's a question: why, as a major consumer electronics company, would you introduce just one software update in a day, when you could just as easily introduce two? Exactly. Apple has just pushed out a new duo that honestly have little in common, but if you're the owner of a second-generation Apple TV and an iPhone 4S, you've hit the jackpot. The former is reaching v4.4.4, which claims to bring an assortment of not-big-enough-to-pinpoint bug fixes; the latter, however, tweaks the iPhone 4S' 5.0.1 build ever so slightly. If you've noticed anything major from either update, do tell in comments below.Apple update twofer: Apple TV hits 4.4.4 (9A406a), minor iOS 5.0.1 bump comes to iPhone 4S originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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WARSAW, Poland ? She was a coloratura soprano who spurned opera for popular music, a Polish singer who became a cabaret star in Las Vegas, an artist trapped for years behind the Iron Curtain when she flew home to tend to her dying mother.
Singer Violetta Villas, 73, died late Monday at her home in Lewin Klodzki, a village in southern Poland, local police spokesman Pawel Petrykowski told The Associated Press. Prosecutors have ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death, he said Tuesday.
Villas was born Czeslawa Cieslak in 1938 to a Polish coal miner's family in Belgium.
A unique talent with a trademark cascade of curly blond hair, Villas had a voice that spanned four octaves. Rather then pursue an operatic career, she preferred popular music, a genre that brought her wide popularity in Poland ? where the family returned in 1948 after World War II ? and abroad.
She once said her career was launched in 1960 by the head of state Polish Radio, composer Wladyslaw Szpilman ? whose own story of survival during the Holocaust was the theme of director Roman Polanski's 2003 Oscar-winning movie "The Pianist."
From 1966 to 1969, Villas sang at the Casino de Paris at the famed Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas, performing with luminaries such as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Paul Anka and Eartha Kitt. She also recorded songs for Capitol Records.
Villas also appeared in movies, including 1969's "Paint Your Wagon" with Lee Marvin and "Heaven with a Gun" with Glenn Ford.
In 1970, she returned to Poland to tend to her ailing mother, but later the communist authorities refused to approve her passport. She was not able to return to the U.S. until 1987, when she had a tour, starting at New York's Carnegie Hall.
Villas was also known as a colorful personality who refused to bend to the requirements of a career. Since the late 1980s, she had given only occasional performances and sometimes failed to turn up for studio recordings.
In recent years she lived alone and ran a shelter for animals in her home yard, but the shelter had to be closed due to overcrowding and insufficient care.
Villas was married twice: in 1954 in Poland to Piotr Gospodarek, and in 1988 in Chicago to Ted Kowalczyk, a businessman of Polish descent. Both marriages ended in divorce.
She is survived by her only son, Krzysztof. No funeral arrangements were immediately known.
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SAN ANTONIO (AP) ? A woman who police say shot her two kids and then killed herself during a standoff in a state welfare office has been identified as a former Ohio resident who moved to Texas this summer.
Authorities on Tuesday identified the mother as Rachelle Grimmer. Laredo police investigator Joe Baeza said the 38-year-old formerly lived in Zanesville, Ohio, about 30 miles outside Columbus.
Grimmer's 12-year-old daughter, Ramie, and 10-year-old son, Timothy, remained in critical condition Tuesday at a San Antonio hospital.
State officials say Grimmer applied for food stamps in July but was denied because she didn't turn in enough information.
Authorities said Grimmer told negotiators about a litany of complaints against state and federal government agencies during the standoff at a Texas Department of Health and Human Services building.
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Nearly everyone and their mother has pointed out that Verizon's LTE-friendly Galaxy Nexus should be launching any day now, but here's a new set of photos for those of you looking for something a little different to ogle. Courtesy of robertlawson225 on the xda-developers forums, we now have our first look at what may be the Galaxy Nexus in its retail finery.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ReCJM38lT20/
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