China to Free Jailed New York Times Employee

By JIM YARDLEY
Published: September 14, 2007

BEIJING, Sept. 14 -- Zhao Yan, a Chinese research assistant for The New York Times, is expected to be freed Saturday morning after serving three years in prison on a fraud conviction that sparked international outrage and brought criticism on China's legal system.

Prison officials in Beijing told Mr. Zhao's older sister that he would be released before 9 a.m. on Saturday. The sister, Zhao Kun, said today that her brother, who suffered health problems during his incarceration, planned to undergo a physical examination in Beijing before leaving the city to attend a family wedding in northeastern China.

"We are very happy," she said after arriving in Beijing from her home in the northeastern city of Harbin.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, also expressed satisfaction about Mr. Zhao's pending release. "We're looking forward to welcoming Zhao Yan," Mr. Keller said in a statement.

Mr. Zhao, 45, completed his full sentence. His case was marked by legal irregularities and at one point a Beijing court even withdrew all charges against him.

But Mr. Zhao was never released, and the charges were reinstated without explanation. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lobbied on his behalf with President Hu Jintao of China.

Human rights groups and journalism advocacy organizations criticized his arrest as politically motivated and without merit.

Mr. Zhao has strongly maintained his innocence. At an appeal held before the High Court of Beijing last December, witnesses said Mr. Zhao retorted sharply when asked by the judge if he had anything to say.

"What kind of judge are you?" Mr. Zhao replied, according to witnesses. "Is this how you use the power the country gave you?"

Mr. Zhao was working as a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The Times when State Security agents detained him in September 2004. He would eventually be charged with disclosing state secrets to The Times, an accusation linked to an exclusive Times article about the inner workings of China's top leaders.

The Times denied that Mr. Zhao ever disclosed any state secrets. Months later, investigators would add a lesser, unrelated fraud charge dating from 2001 when he worked as a reporter for a Chinese magazine.

He was tried on both charges in June 2006, and Mr. Zhao's lawyers were not allowed to call witnesses on his behalf.

Two months later, the Beijing court issued a split verdict: The more serious state secrets charge was dismissed, in a rebuke to the State Security agents handling the case. But the court convicted him on the fraud charge.

Mr. Zhao had earned a national reputation as a muckraking journalist before he joined The Times in April 2004. The fraud charge involved accusations by an official in Jilin Province who asserted that Mr. Zhao promised to use his position as a journalist, as well as his political influence, to help the official in a legal matter. In exchange, the official accused Mr. Zhao of accepting a cash payment.

At the trial, Mr. Zhao's lawyers were not permitted to cross-examine witnesses for the prosecution. In an unorthodox motion, Mr. Zhao asked the court to subject himself and witnesses against him to a polygraph test. The court refused.

Mr. Zhao's sister said court officials had given her no indication if any restrictions would be placed on her brother upon his release.

On Thursday, Reporters Without Borders, the journalism advocacy group, said Mr. Zhao should face no restrictions after his release.

"Mr. Zhao should have all his rights restored, including the right to work as a journalist," the group said in a statement. "The government showed no clemency towards Zhao, who was a scapegoat in an affair of state in which he was not involved."

Mr. Zhao remains an employee of The Times's Beijing bureau.

How Capitalism Is Killing Democracy
By Robert B. Reich

September/October 2007

It was supposed to be a match made in heaven. Capitalism and democracy, we've long been told, are the twin ideological pillars capable of bringing unprecedented prosperity and freedom to the world. In recent decades, the duo has shared a common ascent. By almost any measure, global capitalism is triumphant. Most nations around the world are today part of a single, integrated, and turbocharged global market. Democracy has enjoyed a similar renaissance. Three decades ago, a third of the world's nations held free elections; today, nearly two thirds do.

Conventional wisdom holds that where either capitalism or democracy flourishes, the other must soon follow. Yet today, their fortunes are beginning to diverge. Capitalism, long sold as the yin to democracy's yang, is thriving, while democracy is struggling to keep up. China, poised to become the world's third largest capitalist nation this year after the United States and Japan, has embraced market freedom, but not political freedom. Many economically successful nations-from Russia to Mexico-are democracies in name only. They are encumbered by the same problems that have hobbled American democracy in recent years, allowing corporations and elites buoyed by runaway economic success to undermine the government's capacity to respond to citizens' concerns.

Of course, democracy means much more than the process of free and fair elections. It is a system for accomplishing what can only be achieved by citizens joining together to further the common good. But though free markets have brought unprecedented prosperity to many, they have been accompanied by widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and environmental hazards such as global warming. Democracy is designed to allow citizens to address these very issues in constructive ways. And yet a sense of political powerlessness is on the rise among citizens in Europe, Japan, and the United States, even as consumers and investors feel more empowered. In short, no democratic nation is effectively coping with capitalism's negative side effects.

Ex-Klansman Is Sentenced To Life for Killings in 1964

By JERRY MITCHELL AND BRENDA GOODMAN
Published: August 25, 2007

Calling the crime "unspeakable because only monsters could inflict this," a federal judge on Friday sentenced a former member of the Ku Klux Klan to three life terms
in prison for his role in the 1964 kidnapping and murder of two black teenagers in Mississippi.

The case was one of several that focused a spotlight on white supremacist violenceduring the civil rights era.

The victims, Henry H. Dee and Charles E. Moore, both 19, were hitchhiking in Meadville, Miss., when a group of Klansmen, including James Seale, picked them up and took them to a wooded area, where they were beaten and their weighted bodies thrown into the Mississippi River. Both young men drowned.

Their bodies were not recovered until later that year in a high-profile search for three civil rights activists whose deaths generated widespread revulsion against the racial violence in Mississippi

"The pulse of this community still throbs with sorrow," Judge Henry T. Wingate of Federal District Court said as he imposed the sentence, which will effectively keep Mr. Seale, who is 72 and has cancer, behind bars for the rest of his life.

Judge Wingate asked Mr. Seale, who was shackled and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, if he wished to comment, but Mr. Seale declined. His lawyer, Kathy Nestor, said her client planned to appeal his conviction on kidnapping and conspiracy charges.

The main prosecution witness, a former Klansman who was granted immunity, testified. at Mr. Seale's trial that the defendant had told him he killed Mr. Dee and Mr. Moore. Mr. Seale was not charged with murder.

At Friday's sentencing, Mr. Moore's brother, Thomas, of Seattle, who has pushed for justice in the case since 1998, was given the opportunity to address Mr. Seale.

"When you took away Charles Moore, you took away my best friend," Thomas Moore said. "I cried when I thought about how hard they suffered at your hands."

Mr. Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, said her brother's killing "hurt us so bad I had to get a psychologist."

At a news conference after the sentencing, Assistant Attorney General Wan J. Kim said that some 100 cold cases from the civil rights era were awaiting investigation and possible prosecution, including 30 in Mississippi.

Judge Wingate said that he took into account Mr. Seale's advanced age and poor health. "But then I had to take a look at the crime itself, the horror, the ghastliness of it," he said, adding that he would agree to the defense recommendation that Mr. Seale serve his sentence at a medical facility.

The New York Times

MACON, Miss., Aug. 31 -- The scene in the tiny Noxubee County jail on a rainy afternoon has become almost commonplace. Kennedy Brewer, sentenced to death and locked up for 15 years for the rape and murder of a 3-year-old, was released on the strength of a DNA test showing that the semen in the rape kit was not his.

The bail bondswoman snapped a Polaroid.

Mr. Brewer's sister, Martha, smiled and said, "I ain't got to mow the lawn no more."

Back home on Highway 388, two of Mr. Brewer's nieces sketched out a T-shirt design to read "Welcome Home Kenny."

But Mr. Brewer is not free and clear. He is only out on bail.

In a move that appears to be novel, prosecutors intend to retry him for the crime.

Virtually no effort has been made to find the man who raped the girl, Christine Jackson, and dumped her body in a creek in Noxubee County, one of the most rural in the state.

This is the first time prosecutors have sought a new capital murder trial after a conviction was overturned by DNA evidence, said Peter Neufeld, director of the Innocence Project, a legal aid group based in New York that has used DNA testing to exonerate the wrongly convicted since 1992. Usually such cases are simply dropped.

But prosecutors are not convinced of the innocence of Mr. Brewer, a black laborer who is mildly retarded. Forrest Allgood, the district attorney who first tried the case, said his theory then was that Mr. Brewer, who was the boyfriend of the victim's mother, acted alone.

At the trial, Mr. Allgood argued that the couple's bedroom was "the killing field," although traces of human blood found there were so small that they could not be tested.

His view has changed.

"I perceive that Kennedy Brewer assisted someone else in the killing of the child," Mr. Allgood said. "Whether he actually penetrated that child or not functionally doesn't make any difference if he was aiding, assisting and encouraging in her death."

Mr. Allgood declined to offer a new theory of what occurred the night Christine disappeared, saying only that Mr. Brewer was the baby sitter that evening and that there was no sign of forced entry at the house. [. . .]

The state's star witness was Dr. Michael West, a dentist from Hattiesburg who had become a controversial expert in the identification of bite marks. Dr. West's findings have been contradicted by DNA evidence in at least two other cases.

At the time of the trial, Dr. West had been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology and had resigned from the American Academy of Forensic Science and the International Association of Identification, pending expulsion.

He testified that he had found 19 human bite marks on Christine's body, all made just by upper teeth, and that at least five of them were made by Mr. Brewer.

A defense expert, Richard Souviron, testified that the wounds were not human bite marks.

"Have you ever bitten off a piece of meat with just your top teeth and not used your bottom teeth?" Dr. Souviron asked. "t doesn't make any sense at all."

In 2005, Mr. Allgood informed the defense that a jailhouse informer had come forward, saying Mr. Brewer had told him that he was forced at gunpoint to bite Christine.

We won it all, folks! First Place in the Third Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival, hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. We are going to London and Stratford-Upon-Avon for the Shakespeare tour as only one of the several wonderfully generous awards bestowed upon Beiwai's "Othello." I cannot even begin to tell you how proud I am of the three BFSU student-actors--Othello (Cui Xinyu), Desdemona (Li Jing) and Emilia (Liang Xingyi)--who gave this rapidly aging director a chance to finally get "Othello" right after almost four decades of trying in one form or another.

I am almost as excited and happy that I can again post to these pages. It's been six weeks or so since "New" Blogger glitches bit us in the ass the moment Blogger arbitrarily switched us to the "improved" format, and kept us the hell off the Internet. While that was undoubtedly a boon to my many detractors, it just about drove me off a cliff, for two primary reasons: I could not post the dramatic, day-by-day events and lunacies that culminated in Hong Kong last Wednesday night (May 23*) as "Beijing Foreign Studies University" was finally pronounced by CUHK Professor Jason Gleckman at the zenith of an achingly slow ascending order of "winners" from 4th runner-up to...to...to...us!


And, surely as importantly, I could not post new pictures of Baby Joseph A. Bosco, my first grandchild. Now that I suddenly can again, I will post much more--photos and article links--on both joys very soon. I now have to rush off to rehearsals for "The Crucible."

Liang Xingyi, (Emilia) chose the order of our appearance over the three days of final performances--she picked a winner.

Cui Xinyu (Othello) delivering the opening remarks for the BFSU troupe at the feast which began the festivities.

Li Jing (Desdemona) and her "Othello" on opening day getting camera-ready for whatever was to come their way.

The finale group picture of all winners (there were no losers, regardless of prizes declared).


Loading us up with awards (Li Jing was at Immigration Bureau; red tape follows us everywhere).

"I need a Scotch," I said; and it was soon forthcoming, in abundance.
Opening day in the theatre lobby with impressive competitors from Chinese universities hallowed and normal: Fudan University, Qujing Normal University, Yunnan, and BFSU.
Fudan University accepting 3rd Runner-up Award; if we had not won, I believe their performance of "Macbeth" should have won First Prize.
Fudan and BFSU troupes together at awards dinner.