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“We will be here for you,” said Han Huimin to his paralyzed ex girlfriend, Wu Yueying. “We will take care of you as long as we are alive.” Han’s wife, Xu Minfang, also standing by Wu’s sick bed, nodded reassuringly at Wu. This is the 34th year since Wu was paralyzed after a traffic accident back in 1974. At that time, Wu was Han’s first girlfriend. Han attended to her since then, and refused to consider another girlfriend. He was determined to take care of Wu all his life, even at the cost of his own marriage. Three years later...

....At any given time, 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners were said to be somewhere in the Chinese penal system. Like most numbers coming out of China, these were crude estimates, further rendered unreliable by the chatter of claim and counterclaim. But one point is beyond dispute: The repression of Falun Gong spun out of control. Arrests, sentencing, and whatever took place in the detention centers, psychiatric institutions, and labor camps were not following any established legal procedure or restraint. As an act of passive resistance, or simply to avoid trouble for their families, many Falun Gong began withholding their names from...

Falun Gong Protests China Policy by: Rachel Paulk, July 24, 2008 Falun Gong practitioners met on Friday, July 18th, near the Washington Monument to protest Communist China’s treatment of the peaceful religious sect. Holding signs with statements such as “If you don’t believe what the Communists say about Tibet, why would you believe what they say about Falun Gong?” and “Support 40 Million People Resigning from Chinese Communist Party,” over two thousand people met to raise awareness of the group’s persecution by the Chinese Communists. Officially outlawed July 20th, 1999, the Falun Gong practitioners have weathered a brutal crackdown in...

Flashpoint for US-China Relations in Flushing Showdown Recent events in Flushing New York, unnoticed by most Americans except for ethnic Chinese, may dramatically alter US-Chinese relations. For three years the Falun Gong, a religious group banned and persecuted by the Chinese government, has met outside the Flushing public library to encourage Chinese Communist Party members to turn in their Party membership. The activity attracted little attention until the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province and staggering loss of life put a spotlight on the Chinese government’s response. Since then, Falun Gong’s ‘Epoch Times’ newspaper and its website have relentlessly attacked the...

Where Is the Dignity of the United States? Events in Flushing show Uncle Sam in a compromising position By Stephen Gregory Epoch Times Staff Jun 03, 2008 For over two weeks now, organized mobs have harassed Falun Gong practitioners in Flushing, New York. For over one week, we have known that those mobs have been incited by the Chinese Consul General for New York, Mr. Peng Keyu, yet Peng has not been expelled. The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) released a tape on May 23 of Peng talking with one of its investigators. In...

In early 2006, The Epoch Times first exposed the Chinese Communist Party's crime of harvesting organs from live Falun Gong practitioners. Since then new evidence continues to surface. Recently a witness from Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province has come forward and revealed what he discovered during his detention in Wuxi City No.2 Detention Center. According to the witness, many cases of organ harvesting occurred during 2002. He was detained from 2005 to 2007 because he made opposing comments about China's unlawful control of personal speech and media. During his imprisonment he learned that not only death row prisoners were killed for...

An article published in the April 4th edition of Qi Lu Evening , a newspaper in Shandong Province in eastern China, has attracted people's attention and recently circulated throughout the Internet. It reported that a young man temporarily working in Jinan City decided to donate his corneas after a kidney failure diagnosis. However, several major hospitals throughout the area explained that they were "not qualified" to accept the donation. An official in the Ophthalmology Department of the Jinan Central Hospital even mentioned that none of the corneas used by his department came from donations. This report revisits the concern over...

For many of us, the memory of the student-led, pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protest of 1989 is still very fresh and vivid. It served as an indication that, no matter how tightly China tries to restrict the flow of information and ideas from outside their influence, they can’t control everything (keep in mind – 1989 happened before the internet revolution). It also served as a reminder that the Chinese communist regime was still as lethal and cold as ever. They are still the people who supported and fought with the Korean and Vietnamese communists against American forces.....

"Bodies...the Exhibition" has drawn thousands to the Cincinnati Museum Center, but now the company behind it is part of an investigation. The New York Attorney General's Office tells Local 12, its looking into possible misrepresentations concerning how some of those human bodies were obtained in China. Museum center officials say they're approaching 40,000 tickets sold in just 15 days. Now, the company profiting from the bodies is now under investigation. The New York State Attorney General's Office has issued subpoenas for organizers at Premier Exhibitions Incorporated. That's the same company the museum center is using to put bodies on display...

(NEW YORK) — The doctor behind the "Body Worlds" exhibits that show cadavers in different poses says he has stopped using bodies from China for fear that some of them may be executed prisoners, ABC News reported on Friday. Dr. Gunther von Hagens told ABC's "20/20" that he had to destroy some bodies he had received from China because they had injuries that made him suspect they were execution victims. The doctor invented a liquid plastic process that preserves bodies. He has put many of them on display in museum exhibits that show them in poses like playing poker or...

(SACRAMENTO) -- Cars packed the parking lot of a shuttered CompUSA store one recent weekday afternoon as schoolchildren, health professionals and the just plain curious paid $24 apiece to stare at a score of plasticized, dissected human cadavers and roomfuls of preserved body parts. The cadavers are displayed dramatically, with layers of skin and muscle peeled back to reveal internal organs, bones, blood vessels and nerves. The exhibition, with bodies posed as if playing a violin, swinging a golf club or performing other tasks, provoked plenty of hushed comments.   "Where do they come from?" a young woman asked a...

There could be some discord during the Tournament of Roses Parade as demonstrators promise to raise issues during the holiday spectacle that has been going on for more than a century. Human rights advocates plan to protest a float honoring the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and anti-war activists, including "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan, intend to rally for peace. The theme of this year's New Year's Day parade is "Passport to the World's Celebrations." It will feature 46 floats, 21 marching bands and 18 equestrian units. Volunteers have busy in Pasadena and nearby areas this past week decorating the floats with...

Mart Laar, two-time Prime Minister of Estonia, has been credited with lifting the small Baltic nation out of economic and social collapse under communism to becoming a prosperous, free society. Currently a member of the Estonian Parliament, Laar first became Prime Minister of Estonia at age 32. During his tenure from 1992-1994, he initiated sweeping economic reforms that included unilateral free trade, privatization, and the introduction of the world's first flat tax. Laar was re-elected in 1999 and served until 2002. Known as the Baltic Tiger, in the past two decades Estonia has experienced unprecedented economic growth and has dramatically...

When Malaka, an Indian tsunami refugee, agreed to sell her kidney, the organ broker told her she would receive $3,500. But after the operation, he gave her only $700 - for an organ that a wealthy foreigner likely paid $40,000. "She got what she deserved," the broker told the National Geographic Channel in an "Explorer" episode, "Inside the Body Trade," that airs tonight. Later, when Malaka's son's kidneys were failing, the doctor told her, "You gave away your kidney. Now your child needs a kidney. Who will give it to him?" While free-market types have talked up Transplant Tourism as...

Could local Falun Gong allegations of organ harvesting become a thorn in Beijing's Olympic crown? When Jeff Kline's mother was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in 2003, doctors told her there was nothing they could do. There wasn't time for conventional treatments, and her age and type of cancer made her ineligible for a transplant. At 59, with no hope of getting a new liver, she was given less than two months to live. But in the course of his work developing Web sites for nonprofits in Philadelphia, Kline came across a human-rights organization that described allegations of organ harvesting...

Controversy has followed an exhibit of preserved, plasticized human bodies around the world. Now, a group of Ohio State University students and faculty members is raising questions about "Bodies … The Exhibition" during its six-month stay in Columbus. Like others, the OSU group is challenging whether the bodies are those of people who died of natural causes, as the exhibit's owners insist, or whether they are those of political prisoners who died in Chinese prisons. Premier Exhibitions, the Atlanta company that brought an exhibit of Titanic artifacts to COSI Columbus in 2005, says it's under suspicion because the bodies came...

(SHANGHAI) - More than 10,000 people received liver transplants in China between March 2005 and May 2007. Most of the patients' information is registered with the China Liver Transplant Registration (CLTR) system. Several of Shanghai's more reputable hospitals, including Renji Hospital, Zhongshan Hospital and Ruijin Hospital, are participating in the system. The CLTR statistics showed that the one-year survival rate for people who have undergone a liver transplant has doubled in recent years. From 2003 to 2006, 84 percent of such patients survived for more than a year. And the three-year survival rate increased to about 75 percent in 2006...

Mainland China's well known media Southern Weekly , published a front page article titled "China Puts A Stop on 'Organ Transplant Tourism'" on July 19, 2007. The article reported on the recent restrictions imposed on organ transplants performed on foreigners by Chinese hospitals, and exposed the inside story behind these organ transplants in Mainland China, which are performed under the rule of the Communist Party. A Very Profitable Business Organ transplants skyrocketed after 1999 and hospitals reaped huge profits. The Southern Weekly mentioned that "liver transplants increased at a shocking rate: in 1999 only 24 liver transplants were performed; in...

(HONG KONG)--Paul Lee got his liver from an executed Chinese prisoner; Karam in Egypt bought a kidney for his sister for $5,300; in Istanbul Hakan is holding out for $30,700 for one of his kidneys. They are not so unusual: a dire shortage of donated organs in rich countries is sending foreigners with end-stage illnesses to poorer places like China, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines to buy a new lease of life. Lee, a 53-year-old chief subway technician in Hong Kong, was diagnosed with liver cancer in January 2005 but doctors denied him a transplant because they feared...

The bodies are coming, and with them some questions that will not go away.    "Bodies ... The Exhibition,' featuring 15 full-body human corpses from China that have been preserved by a process called "plastination," is scheduled to open at The Carnegie Science Center in October for a seven-month run. The cadavers are peeled of their skin and arranged in poses -- kicking a soccer ball, setting up a tennis serve -- alongside 200 other body parts and specimens, including embryos and fetuses from 9 to 32 weeks gestation, all plasticized. It is one of three major traveling exhibits that...