Society

Three people were sentenced to death for murder and other crimes committed in and after the July 5 riot in Urumqi, capital of west China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on Friday.
The defendants were Heyrinisa Sawut, Ruzikhari Niyaz and Li Longfei.
Another one was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Intermediate People's Court of Urumqi, while three others were given jail terms.
The trials were heard in open sessions with presence of relatives of the defendants and the victims.
On Thursday five people were sentenced to death by the court, two others were sentenced to life imprisonment while another six were given jail terms.

Susan Osman, 51, a former British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News Channel presenter, announced that she would host a program in China after being consistently overlooked for jobs at the BBC.

She will host a prime-time breakfast show on China Radio International and is moving to Beijing.

Osman has worked in broadcasting for 28 years, presenting bulletins on BBC World and reporting for ITN News. She had worked in BBC One for 14 years, according to the Times. The freelance presenter had auditioned for a series of BBC jobs and been told she was "marvelous". But she was consistently overlooked without explanation.

Her name was Dandan.
A wife and mother in her 50s, she looked no different to any Beijing woman you see each day.
We met in the summer at a television studio. As I walked in she had a flask of tea in one hand, a good book in the other and a great smile on her face.
We were both there to be interviewed because apart from being a wife and mother, Dandan was a former drug user and living with HIV.
Over the next hour, she shared her story of how she was infected. But it was the stigma and discrimination she struggled through each day that reminds us that AIDS is not just a battle of public health, but a fight for social justice.

I came down from my apartment building last Thursday planning only to walk my dog, and five minutes later found myself scuffling with a squat country thug.

There was an eviction going on in the ruins of the old compound next door, and the daughter of one of the families involved was trying to film it, only to find herself being assaulted by a couple of hired goons.

I was raised to believe that a man doesn't raise his hand to a woman, and that you don't walk away from people in trouble, so when I saw them grabbing her I put myself in between, ending up in a scuffling and snarling contest with the two.

They backed down, but what made me truly angry, at first, was the 20 or so people who were standing around gawping and hadn't lifted a finger to help the woman.

It's a complaint I've heard voiced by many Chinese that bystanders just aren't willing to get involved, even in cases of obvious criminality.