Society

An 18-year-old Chinese student, who was kidnapped for four days in Vancouver, has been rescued unharmed and five men have been arrested, authorities said Thursday.

The investigation into the kidnapping is still active, Deputy Chief Doug Lepard said in a news release.

Canadian police notified the Chinese Embassy in Canada of the successful rescue, said Consul General Li Guixi.

The student, from China's northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, was kidnapped from his residence in Vancouver on Feb. 15.

The kidnappers later telephoned the student's family members several times, demanding ransom, said the Canadian police.

"Three of the 10 Chinese sailors onboard were saved but seven are still missing after the ship sank off the waters of Vladivostok," it said in a statement on its website.

The ministry didn't mention the cause of the incident, saying rescue efforts and an investigation into the incident are ongoing.

But the Global Times, a Chinese language newspaper based in Beijing, said yesterday the ship was fired on by the Russian navy before it sank, citing a Russian newspaper.

New Star, the cargo ship, was sequestered at the Russian port of Nakhodka earlier this month for alleged smuggling. It left the port not far from the Sino-Russian border without permission from Russian authorities last Thursday and was chased by a cruiser, the newspaper said.

Later, the warship shot at least 500 rounds onto the ship and forced it to sail back toward the port in force 6 winds.

However, the Chinese ship started to sink on the way. According to the report, in a period of almost 24 hours, Russian navy officers and soldiers onboard the cruiser watched the sinking boat and did not make any response to the cries for help from the crewmen.

In the end, 16 sailors onboard New Star got on two lifeboats. The Russian sailors managed to save one boat carrying eight people, while the other was engulfed in the waves.

Three of the missing sailors are Chinese while the other five came from Indonesia, the report said.

The coastal coordination and assistance center of Vladivostok announced on Sunday that a Russian coast guard cruiser saved eight foreign sailors trapped by bad weather. It did not mention the alleged fire from the Russian navy.

The Russian News Agency reported the incident yesterday and said the coast guard just found an empty boat in a three-day search. It also cited bad weather as the reason behind the accident.

According the International Maritime Organization, the owner of New Star is a shipping company of Zhejiang, while the operator is a company based in Guangzhou.

---

One comment left

"If the vessel is sunk by the US Navy, there will be an outcry from state and public media. Now the vessel is sunk by the Russian Navy, Chinese response is low key. Is Russia being treated as the successor to "Big Brother USSR" in the 1950s?
Or is it because Russia is more ready to fight than the United States when provoked. And China cannot afford to fight Big Brother? "

AIDS was the top killer among infectious diseases in China for the first time last year, with 6,897 people dying in the nine months through September, a state news agency said.

Though the report by the Xinhua News Agency, citing the Ministry of Health, did not explain the jump, a possible factor is the Chinese government's improved reporting of HIV/AIDS statistics in recent years as it slowly acknowledged the presence of the disease.

The number of confirmed HIV infections also nearly doubled to 264,302 from 135,630 in 2005, the Xinhua report said.

Neither World Health Organization nor UNAIDS representatives in Geneva commented on the report.

China long denied that AIDS was a problem, accounting in part for the low number of reported deaths. But leaders have shifted in recent years, confronting the disease more openly and promising anonymous testing, free treatment for the poor and a ban on discrimination against people with the virus.

Nevertheless, many Chinese are still reluctant to be tested. The government and UNAIDS estimate the number of people living with HIV in China is actually about 700,000 — much higher than the confirmed number of infections.

The government estimates that 85,000 of those have AIDS.

AIDS was the third deadliest infectious disease in China in 2005, the health ministry said. It is now the first, followed by tuberculosis, rabies, hepatitis and infant's tetanus — common in rural areas where the stump of a newborn's umbilical cord gets infected — the Xinhua report late Tuesday said.

The government says 34,864 people have died of AIDS since it reported its first death from the disease in 1985.

The HIV virus that causes AIDS gained a foothold in China largely due to unsanitary blood plasma-buying schemes and tainted transfusions in hospitals.

But last year, health authorities said sex had overtaken drug abuse as the main cause of HIV infections.

The government remains sensitive about the disease, regularly cracking down on activists and patients who seek more support and rights.

Quanzhou police unveiled the process of catching construction-site-robbers in the evening of Febraury 16th. One of two robbers was shot, the other was arrested.

"From February 11th to 15th, a series of robbery cause at least one million loss and 37 injuries, one of them wounded seriously. After investigation, they launcned the movement against robbery.

But the process was not smooth, the two robbers fought against police with stick and bricks, even after the warning shot. So in order to protect the security of public, our man fired at them."

---

"Armed resistance to arrest" is a serious term, western people may associate with riffle or machine gun. But in china, common Chinese don't  have right to possess guns, even long knifes. So what can the two robbers do to harm the policemen chasing them with gun? and how can they trapped policemen in danger? and why these policemen just shot them without took stick and bricks into consideration?

If took a serious look at those questions, then did they still insist on shotting?