Archive for ‘charge’

10/05/2020

Elderly Chinese woman rescued three days after being ‘buried alive by son’

  • Police in Shaanxi province dug up 79-year-old from grave in woods after suspect’s wife tipped them off
  • Woman is now in a stable condition in hospital while her son is facing an attempted murder charge
The woman was rescued from the grave in Shaanxi province after three days. Photo: Handout
The woman was rescued from the grave in Shaanxi province after three days. Photo: Handout

A man in northwest China has been detained after his 79-year-old mother was buried alive.

The woman, who was partially paralysed, was rescued after three days and is in a stable condition in a hospital in Shaanxi province, police said.

Prosecutors in Jingbian county said the woman’s son, a 58-year-old identified only by his surname Ma, had been charged with attempted murder.

On Tuesday his wife told local police that Ma had taken the bedridden woman named Wang away on a cart and she had not returned home.

Police said the man had confessed to burying her in the woods and she was rescued later that day.
The elderly woman is now recovering in hospital. Photo: Handout
The elderly woman is now recovering in hospital. Photo: Handout
“Ma was there when police were digging up the two metre deep grave. He didn’t say anything or respond when he saw his mother was still alive,” an unidentified Jingbian police official told news portal Thepaper.cn.

The website reported that Ma had been sent to live with his uncle after his father died, while his mother remarried and moved to Gansu province with her younger son when Ma was 12 years old.

The mother returned to Jingbian a few years ago to live with the younger son after her second husband died and only moved in to Ma’s house last year when her health started to deteriorate.

Breakthrough in 28-year-old Chinese murder case as DNA test leads police to suspect

25 Feb 2020

Police said Ma began to resent her presence after she became bedridden after a fall last November and he complained that her incontinence was making the house smell bad.

A statement from the national health commission and national office of elderly care called for severe punishment for the man and said he had “crossed the bottom line in law, morality and human relations”.

The two organisations have sent staff to Jingbian county to help with the woman’s medical treatment and rehabilitation, and to arrange her future care.

Source: SCMP

09/04/2020

WHO rejects ‘China-centric’ charge after Trump criticism

GENEVA (Reuters) – World Health Organization officials on Wednesday denied that the body was “China-centric” and said that the acute phase of a pandemic was not the time to cut funding, after U.S. President Donald Trump said he may put contributions on hold.

The United States is the top donor to the Geneva-based body which Trump said had issued bad advice during the new coronavirus outbreak.

U.S. contributions to WHO in 2019 exceeded $400 million, almost double the 2nd largest country donor, according to figures from the U.S. State Department. China contributed $44 million, it said.

“We are still in the acute phase of a pandemic so now is not the time to cut back on funding,” Dr Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, told a virtual briefing when asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump told a news conference on Tuesday that the United States was “going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO,” however, he appeared to backtrack later when in response to questions he said: “We’re going to look at it.”

It was not immediately clear how Trump could “block” funding for the organization. Under U.S. law, Congress, not the president, decides how federal funds are spent.

Dr Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the WHO Director-General, also defended the U.N. agency’s relationship with China, saying its work with Beijing authorities was important to understand the outbreak which began in Wuhan in December.

“It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this,” he told reporters.

“This is what we did with every other hard-hit country like Spain and had nothing to do with China specifically.”

Aylward, who led a WHO expert mission to China in February, defended WHO recommendations to keep borders open, saying that China had worked “very hard” to identify and detect early cases and their contacts and ensure they did not travel.

“China worked very, hard very early on, once it understood what it was dealing with, to try and identify and detect all potential cases to make sure that they got tested to trace all the close contacts and make sure they were quarantined so they actually knew where the virus was, where the risk was,” he said.

“Then they made it very clear that these people would not and could not travel within the country, let alone internationally,” he added.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been lavish in his praise of China from early in the outbreak, praising President Xi Jinping’s “rare leadership”.

David Heymann, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who led WHO’s response to the 2003 SARS outbreak, said that any U.S. funding cut would be a huge blow.

“If the WHO loses its funding it cannot continue to do its work. It works on a shoe-string budget already,” Heymann said in London. “Of course it would be disastrous for the WHO to lose funding.”

Source: Reuters

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