Sometime before the end of the year, China Communist party will hold its 18th Congress, when the old batch of leaders will step aside for a new crop. Rumours are flying about what will happen then, from the almost certainty that Xi Jinping will become China’s next president to suggestions that the Politburo Standing Committee will be cut from nine members to seven, demoting the power of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee.
The arrest of an anti-corruption cartoonist in India on sedition charges has sparked outrage. Marta Cooper reports (more…)
Stanislav Samutsevich, 73, is the father of the imprisoned Pussy Riot member, Ekaterina Samutsevich. She, together with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, was sentenced to two years in the women’s prison colony on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after performing an anti-Putin protest songin Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral.
Barack Obama’s administration cast free speech aside in its pursuit of file sharers and whistleblowers, says Mark Rumold