Society

A former Chinese police chief was sentenced to death on Wednesday, the state-run Xinhua news agency said. The case of the police chief, Wen Qiang, 55, has been the biggest in a series of gang prosecutions in the southwestern city of Chongqing that have exposed links between government officials and police officers who sought to provide cover for the crime syndicates. Prosecutors accused Mr. Wen of taking bribes worth more than $2.4 million from gang members he protected as director of the Chongqing Municipal Judicial Bureau.

I don't think there are any refugees," said Liu Ning of China's Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters at the end of last month, denying media reports of people leaving their villages in areas stricken by extreme drought.

The senior official is obviously uninformed. Five thousand inhabitants of Nanhua country in Yunnan Province had no choice but to leave their homes in mountainous areas and set up camp near streams in a lowland region. In Guangxi, those who can leave do so. Reporters from Hong Kong's South China Morning Post saw villages "abandoned" by the young and middle-aged, leaving children and the elderly behind.

The worst water shortage in more than a century has hit the country's southwest, in Guizhou and Sichuan provinces in addition to Yunnan and Guangxi. Also badly affected has been Chongqing, a city the size of Belgium. In the north Ningxia, Shanxi, Hebei and Gansu are drought-stricken. The flow from the source of the Pearl River, which empties into the South China Sea near Hong Kong and Macau, has been reduced to a trickle from a waterfall. China is, in a word, parched.

Beijing, April 11 (IANS) A Chinese man has been convicted for conducting a slander campaign on the internet, accusing his former girlfriend of being raped, working as a prostitute and spreading AIDS, a report said.

Yang Yongmeng, 32, distributed explicit photos and video footage of his former girlfriend on the Internet, and fabricated a story that she had been raped, worked as a prostitute and was infected with HIV, after she broke up with him, Xinhua reported Saturday.

The campaign resulted in the woman becoming the subject of public vitriol and which ruined her reputation.

Yang was later convicted of aggravated defamation and sentenced at the People’s Court in Rongcheng county in Hebei province March 26, an official was quoted as saying Saturday.

Yang met the woman in March 2008. They soon became lovers and lived together in Beijing, when he shot explicit video clips and photos, police said.

Sunday is a slow night for the Beijing Hooters girls. Jiang Xin -- or Summer, as her name tag reads -- takes the opportunity to teach the new hires one of their dance routines.

With smoky dark eyes and her all-black trainer uniform, 24-year-old Jiang is sexy, smoldering and standoffish until she smiles. This she does when she gently admonishes the girls to loosen up, laugh, and stop tugging at the bottoms of their shorts.

Hooters in Beijing is much like its American counterpart. The waitresses dress in orange track shorts, pantyhose and shrunken white tank tops. When customers come in, they call out in garbled English, "Welcome to Hooters!"

A sign hanging by the bathroom reads: "Caution. Blonds thinking." A glass case displays a Hooters China swimsuit calendar, mugs, T-shirts and a Hooters-branded miniature Temple of Heaven.

On the scale of China's sexual evolution, Hooters lands somewhere between a wink and a smile. Unthinkable two decades ago, the restaurant promotes a playful kind of sexuality different from the country's seedy massage parlors and hostess bars, and yes, it serves the chain's famous wings too.