Group: Lawyers, Activists Harassed in China

BEIJING — China’s government is harassing lawyers and legal activists to control public dissent, Human Rights in China, a New York-based human rights advocacy group, said in a report issued yesterday. The report, which cited the case of activist Chen Guangcheng as an example of what the organization said was a “severe crackdown on the legal profession.” Mr. Chen was sentenced August 18 to four years and three months in jail for organizing women to protest against alleged forced sterilization and other abuses, state-run Xinhua news agency reported August 24. China has arrested more than 500 lawyers between 1997 and 2002 and dozens in the past four years, the report said.

— Bloomberg News

MP: Extremists Imperil Free Speech in Japan

TOKYO — An outspoken politician whose mother’s house was burned to the ground after he criticized Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to a war shrine warned yesterday that increasing intimidation by right-wing extremists is casting a chill over free speech in Japan. “There is less freedom than before to express one’s feelings,” a one-time senior member of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, Koichi Kato, said. Mr. Kato has become a target of hard-line nationalists for his criticism of Mr. Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 wartime leaders convicted of war crimes are enshrined. Many politicians, academics, and journalists have been cowed into silence by the threat of nationalist violence, suffocating a crucial debate on Japan’s relations with China, Mr. Kato said.

— Los Angeles Times

AIDS Killed 300,000 S. Africans Over Past Year

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — More than a third of a million South Africans have died of AIDS over the past year, the head of the country’s Medical Research Council said yesterday. An estimated 5.54 million South Africans are HIV-positive, or about 11.6% of the country’s population — the highest country total in the world. “Current data … estimates that round about the midpoint of 2006, something like 336,000 deaths in the preceding 12 months were AIDS related,” the council’s president, Anthony Mbewu, told a parliamentary committee. But he said many South African doctors — who certified about 80% of deaths in the country — were reluctant to write HIV or AIDS on a death certificate because of the stigma associated with disease.

— Associated Press

Art Authorities Protest Kirchner Handover

BERLIN — Art experts in Germany and Switzerland have criticized Berlin’s decision to hand back an expressionist painting to the heirs of the Jewish collector whose family sold it during Nazi rule in the 1930s. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting,”Berlin Street Scene,” is to be auctioned November 8 by Christie’s in New York, which estimates its value as between $18 million and $25 million. The work, depicting two brightly dressed women on a crowded street, was removed from the Brücke Museum at the end of July, where it had hung since 1980. It was handed over to the heirs of Alfred Hess, a Jewish shoe factory owner and art connoisseur, on the grounds that the family cannot be shown to have received payment after selling it under Nazi pressure.

— Associated Press

Hungarian Thieves Steal BBC Tapes

LONDON — Thieves in Hungary have stolen some tapes of the BBC’s new prime-time series “Robin Hood,” stalling completion of some of the 13 episodes, the broadcaster said. The British Broadcasting Corp. would not comment on a report in The Daily Mirror on Monday that the tapes were the only copies and that thieves were demanding payment of $1.9 million for their return. The series, due to air later this year in BBC1’s Saturday early evening slot, stars newcomer Jonas Armstrong in the title role, with Keith Allen as the Sheriff of Nottingham and Lucy Griffiths as Maid Marian. The series is partly funded by BBC America, the broadcaster’s American cable channel.

— Associated Press