Falun Gong

Followers of Falun Gong, an exercise and meditation ritual, will discuss and demonstrate the practices of their group at 7 p.m. today in McDaniel Lounge at Western Maryland College. Falun Gong, which started in China in 1992, is practiced by millions in 40 countries, including the United States. An active group meets in Baltimore. The popular practice is under attack by the Chinese government, and practitioners are being persecuted, said Larry Wu, a Western Maryland College associate professor of philosophy and religious studies.

BEIJING - Last May, police detained Li Guangqiang, a Hong Kong businessman, for smuggling thousands of Bibles to a Christian sect in China. Under the nation's anti-cult law, Li, 38, faced charges that human rights activists feared could cost him his life. President Bush asked the State Department last month to investigate Li's case. Last weekend, mentioning concern for Li's health - he has hepatitis B - the Chinese government suddenly set him free. "It was remarkable," said Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor who has worked as a legal adviser to the families of Chinese prisoners.

BEIJING - Six people affiliated with the prestigious Qinghua University have been sentenced to prison for downloading material from the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement from the Internet and passing it along, a human rights group said yesterday. In a decision handed down by the Beijing First Intermediate Court on Dec. 13, the six were given prison sentences of three to 12 years, according to the group, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, which is based in Hong Kong.

The meditation and exercise practice called Falun Gong can lead to arrest and prison in China. But it is said to have quite the opposite result in the United States, where a small but growing number of immigrant parents say it's helping kids stay out of trouble. Concerned about violence, casual sex and drugs in American culture, they see Falun Gong as a way to keep their sons and daughters on the straight and narrow. Children are receiving instruction in small, informal groups at a Howard County park, in a rented Silver Spring elementary school cafeteria and elsewhere.

SHANGHAI, China - At least 10 followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement were reported yesterday to have died at a labor camp in northeast China last month, either in a group suicide or from torture. The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said 10 women killed themselves to protest their treatment at the Wanjia labor camp outside Harbin in Heilongjiang province. But the Falun Gong Web site, based in the United States, was quick to denounce that report, saying that 15 women at the camp had been tortured to death and that the camp had labeled their deaths suicides to cover up its crime.

Philippines officials give in to demand of Muslim extremists MANILA - Muslim rebels in the Philippines who had threatened to execute three U.S. hostages said today that they had postponed their plan because the government was willing to give in to their demand for a Malaysian negotiator. But local officials said gunmen suspected of being members of the same rebel group had taken some 50 children hostage from a town in the southern island of Basilan. The Abu Sayyaf rebels, based in Basilan, had threatened to kill the U.S. hostages at midnight EDT if Sairin Karno, a former Malaysian senator, was not allowed to negotiate with them.

WASHINGTON - Recent reports of the misuse and abuse of psychiatry in China have been chilling, but they serve as a steadying cautionary tale for those of us practicing psychiatry in the West. Chinese psychiatrists have apparently been actively colluding with the Beijing government's efforts to discredit the Falun Gong spiritual movement by forcibly hospitalizing and medicating hundreds of defiant followers. According to a report in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, other political protesters are sent to psychiatric facilities where they undergo electroshock therapy for bogus mental illnesses.

BEIJING - A day after Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged the Chinese government to close its re-education-through-labor camps where people can spend three years without trial, officials here defended the practice as legal, humane and kind of cozy. During a morning news conference, an official with the State Council -- China's Cabinet - painted a warm picture of camp life . "On the issue of re-education through labor, we have a saying: the authorities will treat those people who are receiving re-education in a way like teachers treat students, like doctors treat patients, like parents treat children," said Liu Jing, head of China's Office for Prevention and Handling of Cults.

BEIJING -- Every second or third day, Wang, a 32-year-old Falun Gong practitioner, moves to a new safe house somewhere in this capital of 13 million, trying to stay one step ahead of the police. Since his arrest last fall for unfurling a pro-Falun Gong banner in Tiananmen Square, his life has steadily deteriorated. Last month, just before Chinese New Year, Wang lost his engineering job at a design firm because he wouldn't renounce the group. Local police called daily, insisting that he sign a statement pledging not to practice Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation discipline outlawed by the Chinese government.

BEIJING - The Temple of Earth Park these days is unusually quiet, some of the loudest sounds on a recent morning being the soft scraping of bamboo brooms as the grounds crew sweep the stone walkways of snow. In the past, the park echoed each morning with hypnotic music from boom boxes as hundreds of people practiced qigong, a traditional Chinese form of meditation and exercise. Now, 18 months into a government campaign to destroy the nation's largest qigong group, Falun Gong, few practitioners dare venture here.