At the NetEase forum, a shocking photo was uploaded.  A topless teenage boy was hung up in the air and being whipped.  There were welts over this body.  The poster claimed that this photo was sent to him by whoever kidnapped his son.  His son's life is in imminent danger.  The father went to the police and told them that the kidnappers demanded 30,000 RMB.  The police refused to accept the case because the amount has to be 50,000 RMB or more.  The helpless father therefore went onto the Internet for help.

The reporter contacted the police.  They rejected the claims made in the post.  They said that this was just another con game.  If there was a kidnap, they would never turn the case down.

The poster is named Guo Yaogan.  He is from Macheng, Hubei  province and he has worked in the Huadu district, Guangzhou city for more than a decade.  He told the reporter that his son is named Guo Zhuwe, 17-years-old.  On October 25, his son was tricked by friends to go to Qinhuangdao city, Hebei province.

On November 4, Guo Yaogan received a telephone call from an unidentified middle-aged man.  The man threatened him to hand over 30,000 RMB in return for his son's life.  The man said that he will cut off a finger for every day's delay.  He also received a SMS: "Not a cent less than 30,000 RMB.  If the money is sent to my card in two days, I will guarantee that not a hair will be missing on your son's head.  He will be released as soon as the money arrives."

On the same day, Guo Yaogan called the Qinhuangdao police from Huacheng.  He was referred to the Haigang district public security bureau.  He said that the police said, "This is a big place, and it is late.  Where are we going to find a person for you?"  When he called again, the other party hung up the telephone immediately.

On November 5, Guo Yaogan went personally to Qinhuangdao to file a case.  He went directly to the security division, where he was told to see the Crime Squad.  Over there, he was told, "Forget it.  The case is too minor.  It is just 30,000 RMB.  We can set up a case unless there is 50,000 RMB involved."

Guo then asked his uncle to file a report with the Macheng police, who made this suggestion: Go to the Petition Office of the Qinhuangdao public security bureau.  The Petition Office proposed: If 30,000 RMB was not enough to set up a case, you go to the Haigang district and said that the random was 300,000 RMB -- they will set up a case for you immediately.

Guo followed the instructions, but the Haigang district police wanted him to provide a voice recording in addition to the SMS.  Guo Yaogan complained: "Where was I going to get a fake recording?"

Failing to get police attention, Guo Yaogan followed the number of the threatening call to a small grocery store.  The owner told Guo that there were many outsides in the direct sales industry, but he could not provide more useful information.  Guo went to more than a dozen direct-sales locations but was unsuccessful.

On November 13, Guo returned to Guangzhou without being able to locate his son.  On November 16, his eldest son received a color photo on his mobile phone.  This was the photo that got posted on the Internet.  The kidnapper called him repeatedly to ask for the ransom payment.  He heard the screams of his son being beaten.  He was allowed to speak to his son.  When his son tried to use local dialect, the kidnappers forced him to use putonghua.  His son managed to communicate that he was held in a house somewhere in a rural village.  He was being beaten every day.  There are more than 30 others being held hostage.

Guo Yaogan followed the police advice not to pay directly.  He insisted on a simultaneous exchange.  The kidnappers refused.  They have been stuck since.

The reporter called the Xigang city police station.  The policeman on duty knew what the issue was as soon as the word "kidnap" was brought up.  "He told you that it was a kidnapping?  Did he tell you what his son was up to?  Would we as a public security organ fail to act in a serious kidnapping case?  What is the point of a public security organ if we can't even accept a case?  As soon as I got the information, I knew that this was a direct sales trick.  Lots of people are involved in direct sales.  But all we do is to give them some education.  If they refuse to listen, I can't do everything to them.  I don't know if we tried to look for this specific person, because I was not on duty that day."

Is this a ruse by direct sales people to trick him?  Guo Yaogan rejected this possibility.  Apart from calling home, Guo Zhuwu has not called anyone else.  Guo Yaogan is extremely worried about the safety of his son, but he could not get police help.  That was why he got on the Internet to plead for help: "I hope that the netizens of Qinhuangdao can search for my son.  I also hope that the relevant authorities will pay attention to help me get my son back."

The UK-bound plane made an emergency diversion to Shannon Airport, in Ireland, last January after the Air Canada flight officer began a ‘rambling and disjointed’ conversation, said an official report.

Another attendant suffered wrist injuries as the crew forcibly removed the co-pilot from the cockpit controls and restrained him in a seat in the cabin.

Mid-air drama: The air hostess helped out after the plane's captain asked if anyone could fly

The captain of the Boeing 767 from Toronto to Heathrow asked staff to seek out any trained pilots onboard.

One of the female cabin crew came forward saying she had a commercial pilot’s licence and was asked to take over in the co-pilot’s seat.

The captain praised the attendant to investigators for helping him safely land the plane at Shannon, where the ill flight officer was removed and admitted to the acute psychiatric unit of Ennis Regional Hospital for 11 days.

He was later flown home to Canada by an air ambulance for further care, according to the investigation.

The official report into the incident by the Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit (AAIU) did not explicitly refer to the co-pilot’s medical condition.

But it recorded the views of two doctors onboard that he was in a ‘confused and disorientated state’.

The captain also reported that his colleague became uncharacteristically ‘belligerent and unco-operative’ and was ‘effectively incapacitated’.

One passenger at the time reported seeing the distraught co-pilot yelling for God as he was being restrained.

The AAIU praised the actions of both the captain and crew in diverting to the nearest airport and removing the co-pilot from the controls.

‘For his own well-being and the safety of the aircraft, the most appropriate course of action was to stand him down from duty and seek medical attention which was available on board,’ said the report.

‘The commander (captain) realising he was faced with a difficult and serious situation used tact and understanding and kept control of the situation at all times.

‘The situation was dealt with in a professional manner... As such, the commander and flight attendants should be commended for their professionalism in the handling of this event.’

Beijing's XiHere in cheng court ordered developers to level the home of Ni Yulan and told the family to vacate the premises by the end of last week, husband Dong Jiqin told AFP, adding he had refused to leave.

"They stuck the demolition notice on our front door," Dong said.

"Nobody came to talk with us, there were no negotiations for compensation, no public hearings."

For over a decade, Ni, 47, has been a prominent rights activist and lawyer fighting against government-backed land grabs in central Beijing, one of the city's most sensitive social issues.

As all land belongs to the state in China, local officials enjoy immense powers to determine land-use rights, and critics say residents and farmers are often forcefully evicted in shady deals between the government and developers.

Ni was jailed for a year in 2002 for damaging public property after being arrested at a rally aimed at stopping the demolition of another courtyard home in Beijing.

Dong and rights activists said she was beaten in the 2002 arrest and has since had to walk with a cane due to injuries sustained then.

Dong and Ni's courtyard home, in an historic part of central Beijing, then also became a target for developers and she was arrested in late April as she tried to stop it from being knocked down.

Ni was charged with "obstructing official business", and she has been in custody ever since although she has not appeared in court.

An August 4 trial was postponed at the last minute as prosecutors said they needed more time to gather evidence, according to Dong.

Her lawyer, Hu Xiao, said he was pushing for the court proceedings to begin quickly.

"I saw her last month, she is physically weak and her jailing has put a lot of stress on her," Hu told AFP.

"She is a handicapped person, so we have asked the court to begin her trial as soon as possible out of respect for her health."

Mikhail Beketov, the editor of a newspaper in the Moscow suburb of Khimki, was found unconscious and covered in blood near his home on Nov. 13. He had multiple fractures.

Doctors have amputated one of his legs and have had to delay another operation at Moscow's main emergency hospital, the Sklifosovsky Institute, because his condition is so serious.

"Mikhail is floating between life and death," Lyudmila Fedotova, a friend of Beketov's, told Reuters by telephone.

"He remains in a coma. The doctors say he is the most seriously ill patient in the intensive care unit of the Sklifosovsky Institute."

"This is what happens when you oppose certain people," Fedotova said. "If they finish me off then you can write a story about that too. I am no longer scared."

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said that threatening calls had been made to the hospital where Beketov was treated. The Sklifosovsky Institute declined to comment.

"Beketov has lost a leg and is still in a coma, but that is not all -- threatening calls were also made to the hospital where he was taken," Reporters Without Borders said.

"Violence against journalists continues to be very much in the news in Russia... This cycle of violence must stop."

Reporters in Russia risk beatings and even death if they delve into the murky world where Russian politics and business overlap. Attackers are rarely convicted and journalists say they regularly receive threats.

Beketov, owner and editor of the paper Khimskaya Pravda, was known for his opposition to plans by local officials to fell a forest to make way for a major road. He also wrote about corruption.

Those behind the killings of Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov -- the highest-profile reporters murdered during the eight-year rule of former President Vladimir Putin -- have still not been brought to justice.

Politkovskaya was shot dead on Oct. 7, 2006 outside her flat in Moscow. The judge in the trial of three people accused of involvement in her killing opened the hearings to the public on Monday. Klebnikov was shot near his office on July 9, 2004.

A prominent reporter in Russia's Ingushetia region, Magomed Yevloyev, was shot dead in police custody in September. Investigators said a police officer had accidentally fired his gun at Yevloyev's head.

"It is impossible not to get angry when you think about these murders that too often remain unpunished," said Reporters Without Borders.

Two Chinamen have been caught using high end spying technology to help Chinese candidates cheat UK immigration "Life in The United Kingdom" tests.

Steven Lee and Rong Yang have been jailed for eight months after having been found guilty of operating a scam which could have allowed dozens of other fellow Chinese citizens to pass the Knowledge of life test, which is essential for anyone who wish to become a British citizen.

Officers discovered laptops, radio transmitters and radio transmitters that were first though to have been used for cash machine scams but which the two crooks said were being used by them to watch Chinese television (in their BMW car).

The pair transmitted the answers to their "clients", who each had to pay £1000, via an in-ear speaker and supervising the operation by using a button-hole camera.

Even candidates who did not know how to write or speak English could pass the exam provided they knew how a multiple choice question test works.

Practitioners of Falun Gong were forbidden to communicate openly. Yet as the guards motioned for them to begin walking, Wang felt the group fall into step like a gentle migrating herd. He looked down at the red earth, streaked with straw and human waste, to the barren mountains on the horizon. Whatever lay ahead, Wang knew they were not afraid.

After 20 minutes, he saw a large gleaming structure in the distance--maybe it was a hospital, Wang thought. The summer of 2001 had been brutal in South China. After he'd worked for months in the burning sun, Wang's shaved head had become deeply infected. Perhaps it was getting a little better. Or perhaps he had just become used to it; lately he only noticed the warm, rancid stench of his rotting scalp when he woke up.

Wang broke the silence, asking one of the police guards if that was the camp hospital ahead. The guard responded evenly: "You know, we care so much about you. So we are taking you to get a physical. Look how well the party treats you. Normally, this kind of thing never happens in a labor camp."

Inside the facility, the practitioners lined up and, one by one, had a large blood sample drawn. Then a urine sample, electrocardiogram, abdominal X-ray, and eye exam. When Wang pointed to his head, the doctor mumbled something about it being normal and motioned for the next patient. Walking back to camp, the prisoners felt relieved, even a tad cocky, about the whole thing. In spite of all the torture they had endured and the brutal conditions, even the government would be forced to see that practitioners of Falun Gong were healthy.

They never did learn the results of any of those medical tests, Wang says, a little smile suddenly breaking through. He can't help it. He survived.

I spoke with Wang in 2007, just one out of over 100 interviews for a book on the clash between Falun Gong and the Chinese state. Wang's story is not new. Two prominent Canadian human rights attorneys, David Kilgour and David Matas, outlined his case and many others in their "Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China," published and posted on the web in 2006.

By interviewing Wang, I was tipping my hat to the extensive research already done by others. I was not expecting to see Wang's pattern repeated as my interviews progressed, nor did I expect to find that organ harvesting had spread beyond Falun Gong. I was wrong.

Falun Gong became wildly popular in China during the late 1990s. For various reasons--perhaps because the membership of this movement was larger than that of the Chinese Communist party (and intersected with it), or because the legacy of Tiananmen was unresolved, or because 70 million people suddenly seemed to be looking for a way into heaven (other than money)--the party decided to eliminate it. In 1998, the party quietly canceled the business licenses of people who practiced Falun Gong. In 1999 came mass arrests, seizure of assets, and torture. Then, starting in 2000, as the movement responded by becoming more openly activist, demonstrating at Tiananmen and hijacking television signals on the mainland, the death toll started to climb, reaching approximately 3,000 confirmed deaths by torture, execution, and neglect by 2005.

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 the police, identifying themselves simply as "practitioner" or "Dafa disciple." When asked for their home province, they would say "the universe." For these, the nameless ones, whose families had no way of tracing them or agitating on their behalf, there may be no records at all.

In early 2006, the first charges of large-scale harvesting--surgical removal of organs while the prisoners were still alive, though of course the procedure killed them--of Falun Gong emerged from Northeast China. The charges set off a quiet storm in the human rights community. Yet the charge was not far-fetched.

Harry Wu, a Chinese dissident who established the Laogai Foundation, had already produced reams of evidence that the state, after executing criminals formally sentenced to death, was selling their kidneys, livers, corneas, and other body parts to Chinese and foreigners, anyone who could pay the price. The practice started in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s, with the use of anti-tissue- rejection drugs pioneered by China, the business had progressed. Mobile organ-harvesting vans run by the armed services were routinely parked just outside the killing grounds to ensure that the military hospitals got first pick. This wasn't top secret. I spoke with a former Chinese police officer, a simple man from the countryside, who said that, as a favor to a condemned man's friend, he had popped open the back of such a van and unzipped the body bag. The corpse's chest had been picked clean.

Taiwanese doctors who arranged for patients to receive transplants on the mainland claim that there was no oversight of the system, no central Chinese database of organs and medical histories of donors, no red tape to diminish medical profits. So the real question was, at $62,000 for a fresh kidney, why would Chinese hospitals waste any body they could get their hands on?

Yet what initially drew most fire from skeptics was the claim that organs were being harvested from people before they died. For all the Falun Gong theatrics, this claim was not so outlandish either. Any medical expert knows that a recipient is far less likely to reject a live organ; and any transplant dealer will confirm that buyers will pay more for one. Until recently, high volume Chinese transplant centers openly advertised the use of live donors on their websites.

It helps that brain death is not legally recognized in China; only when the heart stops beating is the patient actually considered dead. That means doctors can shoot a prisoner in the head, as it were, surgically, then remove the organs before the heart stops beating. Or they can administer anesthesia, remove the organs, and when the operation is nearing completion introduce a heart- stopping drug--the latest method. Either way, the prisoner has been executed, and harvesting is just fun along the way. In fact, according to doctors I have spoken to recently, all well versed in current mainland practices, live-organ harvesting of death-row prisoners in the course of execution is routine.

The real problem was that the charges came from Falun Gong--always the unplanned child of the dissident community. Unlike the Tiananmen student leaders and other Chinese prisoners of conscience who had settled into Western exile, Falun Gong marched to a distinctly Chinese drum. With its roots in a spiritual tradition from the Chinese heartland, Falun Gong would never have built a version of the Statue of Liberty and paraded it around for CNN. Indeed, to Western observers, Falun Gong public relations carried some of the uncouthness of Communist party culture: a perception that practitioners tended to exaggerate, to create torture tableaux straight out of a Cultural Revolution opera, to spout slogans rather than facts.

For various reasons, some valid, some shameful, the credibility of persecuted refugees has often been doubted in the West. In 1939, a British Foreign Office official, politely speaking for the majority, described the Jews as not, perhaps, entirely reliable witnesses. During the Great Leap Forward, emaciated refugees from the mainland poured into Hong Kong, yammering about deserted villages and cannibalism. Sober Western journalists ignored these accounts as subjective and biased.

The yammering of a spiritual revivalist apparently counts for even less than the testimony of a peasant or a Jew. Thus, when Falun Gong unveiled a doctor's wife who claimed that her husband, a surgeon, had removed thousands of corneas from practitioners in a Northeastern Chinese hospital named Sujiatun, the charge met with guarded skepticism from the dissident community and almost complete silence from the Western press (with the exception of this magazine and National Review).

As Falun Gong committees kicked into full investigative mode, the Canadian lawyers Kilgour and Matas compiled the accumulating evidence in their report. It included transcripts of recorded phone calls in which Chinese doctors confirmed that their organ donors were young, healthy, and practiced Falun Gong; written testimony from the mainland of practitioners' experiences in detention; an explosion in organ transplant activity coinciding with a rise in the Falun Gong incarceration rate, with international customers waiting as little as a week for a tissue match (in most countries, patients waited over a year). Finally, Kilgour and Matas compared the execution rate in China (essentially constant, according to Amnesty International) and the number of transplants. It left a discrepancy of 41,500 unexplained cases over a five-year span.

This report has never been refuted point by point, yet the vast majority of human rights activists have kept their distance. Since Falun Gong's claims were suspect, their allies' assertions were suspect. Transplant doctors who claimed to have Falun Gong organ donors in the basement? They were just saying what potential organ recipients wanted to hear. Written testimony from practitioners? They'd been prepped by activists. The rise in organ transplant activity? Maybe just better reporting. The discrepancy between executions and transplants? As a respected human rights scholar asked me, why did Kilgour and Matas use Amnesty International's estimate of the number of executions in China to suggest the execution rate had stayed constant for 10 years? Even Amnesty acknowledges their numbers might represent a gross understatement. There might be no discrepancy at all.

Finally, why had no real witness, a doctor or nurse who had actually operated on Falun Gong practitioners, come forward? Without such proof (although such an individual's credibility can always be savaged, even with supporting documents), human rights advocates argued there was no reason to take the story seriously. There certainly were not sufficient grounds for President Bush to mention organ harvesting in his human rights speech on the eve of the Beijing Olympics.

The critics had hinted at legitimate points of discussion. But so had the Chinese government: Fresh off the confession in 2005 that organs were being harvested from ordinary death-row prisoners, and after issuing their predictable denials of harvesting organs from Falun Gong, Beijing suddenly passed a law in July 2006 forbidding the sale of organs without the consent of the donor.

Three things happened. The organ supply tightened. Prices doubled. And transplants continued. So unless there has been a dramatic cultural shift since 2004, when a Chinese report found that only 1.5 percent of transplanted kidneys were donated by relatives, the organs being sold must still come from somewhere. Let's assume it's prisoners--that's what Taiwanese doctors think--and theorize that the new law was a signal: Get your consent forms and stop harvesting from Falun Gong. For now.

And the critics had one thing exactly right: Precision is an illusion. No taped conversation with a mainland doctor is unimpeachable. All witnesses from China have mixed motives, always. And, again, no numbers from China, even the one in the last paragraph, can be considered definitive.

Indeed, the entire investigation must be understood to be still at an early, even primitive, stage. We do not really know the scale of what is happening yet. Think of 1820, when a handful of doctors, scientists, and amateur fossil hunters were trying to make sense of scattered suggestive evidence and a disjointed pile of bones. Twenty-two years would pass before an English paleontologist so much as coined the term "dinosaur"--"terrible lizard"--and the modern study of these extinct creatures got seriously under way. Those of us researching the harvesting of organs from involuntary donors in China are like the early dinosaur hunters. We don't work in close consultation with each other. We are still waiting for even one doctor who has harvested organs from living prisoners of conscience to emerge from the mainland. Until that happens, it is true, we don't even have dinosaur bones. But we do have tracks. Here are some that I've found.

Qu Yangyao, an articulate Chinese professional, holds three master's degrees. She is also the earliest refugee to describe an "organs only" medical examination. Qu escaped to Sydney last year. While a prisoner in China in June 2000, she refused to "transform"--to sign a statement rejecting Falun Gong--and was eventually transferred to a labor camp. Qu's health was fairly good, though she had lost some weight from hunger strikes. Given Qu's status and education, there were reasons to keep her healthy. The Chinese police wanted to avoid deaths in custody--less paperwork, fewer questions. At least, so Qu assumed.

Qu was 35 years old when the police escorted her and two other practitioners into a hospital. Qu distinctly remembers the drawing of a large volume of blood, then a chest X-ray, and probing. "I wasn't sure what it was about. They just touch you in different places . . . abdomen, liver." She doesn't remember giving a urine sample at that time, but the doctor did shine a light in her eyes, examining her corneas.

Did the doctor then ask her to trace the movement of his light with her eyes, or check her peripheral vision? No. He just checked her corneas, skipping any test involving brain function. And that was it: no hammer on the knee, no feeling for lymph nodes, no examination of ears or mouth or genitals--the doctor checked her retail organs and nothing else.

I may have felt a silent chill run up my spine at points in our interview, but Qu, like many educated subjects, seemed initially unaware of the potential implications of what she was telling me. Many prisoners preserve a kind of "it can't happen here" sensibility. "I'm too important to be wiped out" is the survivor's mantra. In the majority of the interviews presented here, my subjects, though aware of the organ harvesting issue, had no clear idea of my line of questioning or the "right" answers.

Falun Gong practitioners are forbidden to lie. That doesn't mean they never do. In the course of my interviews I've heard a few distortions. Not because people have been "prepped," but because they've suffered trauma. Deliberate distortions, though, are exceedingly rare. The best way to guard against false testimony is to rely on extended sit-down interviews.

In all, I interviewed 15 Falun Gong refugees from labor camps or extended detention who had experienced something inexplicable in a medical setting. My research assistant, Leeshai Lemish, interviewed Dai Ying in Norway, bringing our total to 16. If that number seems low, consider the difficulty of survival and escape. Even so, just over half of the subjects can be ruled out as serious candidates for organ harvesting: too old, too physically damaged from hard labor, or too emaciated from hunger strikes. Some were simply too shaky in their recall of specific procedures to be much help to us. Some were the subjects of drug tests. Some received seemingly normal, comprehensive physicals, though even such people sometimes offered valuable clues.

For example, Lin Jie, a woman in her early 60s living in Sydney, reported that in May 2001, while she was incarcerated in the Chongqing Yong Chaun Women's Jail, over 100 Falun Gong women were examined "all over the body, very detailed. And they asked about our medical history." Fine. Yet Lin found herself wondering why "one police per practitioner" escorted the women through the physical, as if they were dangerous criminals. Practitioners of Falun Gong are many things--intense, moralistic, single-minded--but they are strictly nonviolent. Clearly someone in the Chinese security system was nervous.

Or take Jing Tian, a female refugee in her 40s, now in Bangkok. In March 2002, the Shenyang Detention Center gave a comprehensive physical to all the practitioners. Jing watched the procedure carefully and saw nothing unusual. Then, in September, the authorities started expensive blood tests (these would cost about $300 per subject in the West). Jing observed that they were drawing enough blood to fill up eight test tubes per practitioner, enough for advanced diagnostics or tissue matching. Jia Xiarong, a middle-aged female prisoner who came from a family of well-connected officials, told Jing outright: "They are doing this because some aging official needs an organ."

But Jing sensed something else in the air that fall, something more substantial: Prisoners were arriving in the middle of the night and disappearing before dawn. There were transports to "hospital civil defense structures" with names like Sujiatun and Yida, and practitioners with no names, only numbers.

It was not a good time to be an angry young practitioner, according to a refugee in her 30s recently arrived in Hong Kong. She has family in China, so let's call her Jiansheng Chen. Back in 2002, Chen noticed another pattern. When the blood tests started, she said, "before signing a statement [renouncing Falun Gong] the practitioners were all given physicals. After they signed, they wouldn't get a physical again."

Chen was a "nontransformable"--with an edge. Not only did she refuse to renounce Falun Gong, but she shouted down anyone who did. Chen was getting medication three times a day (possibly sedatives), so drug-testing can't be ruled out. Yet as her resistance dragged on, the police said: "If you don't transform, we'll send you away. The path you have chosen is the path of death." For eight days efforts were made to persuade Chen to renounce Falun Gong or gain her submission by torture. Suddenly the guards ordered her to write a suicide note. Chen mocked them: "I'm not dead. So why should I sign a death certificate?"

The director brought in a group of military police doctors wearing white uniforms, male and female. The labor camp police were "very frightened" at this point, according to Chen. They kept repeating: "If you still won't transform, what waits for you is a path to death."

Chen was blindfolded. Then she heard a familiar policewoman's voice asking the doctors to leave for a minute. When they were alone, the policewoman began pleading with her: "Chen, your life is going to be taken away. I'm not kidding you. We've been here together all this time, we've made at least some sort of connection by now. I can't bear to see this--a living person in front of my eyes about to be wiped out."

Chen stayed silent. She didn't trust the policewoman--why should she? In the last eight days, she had been hung from the ceiling. She had been burned with electric batons. She had drunk her own urine. So, the latest nice-nice trick was unconvincing. Then Chen noticed something dripping on her hand--the policewoman's tears. Chen allowed that she would think about transforming. "That's all I need," the policewoman said. After a protracted argument with the doctors, the police left.

Practitioners like to talk about altering the behavior of police and security personnel through the power of their own belief. It's a favorite trope. Just as a prisoner of war is duty bound to attempt escape, a Falun Gong practitioner is required by his moral code to try to save sentient beings. In this spiritual calculus, the policeman who uses torture destroys himself, not the practitioner. If the practitioner can alter the policeman's behavior, by moral example or supernatural means, there's some natural pride, even if the practitioner still gets tortured.

But practitioners vary. Chen did not tell her story with composure. She screamed it out cathartically, in a single note of abrasive, consuming fury. It's also relevant that Chen is not just stubborn, impossible, and a little mad, but young, attractive, and charismatic. She gave her account of the policewoman without braggadocio, only abject, shrieking shame at having finally signed a transformation statement. The policewoman had met a fellow warrior--her tears are plausible.

Dai Ying is a 50-year-old female refugee living in Sweden. As 2003 began, 180 Falun Gong were tested in Sanshui labor camp. The usual our-party-especially-cares-for-you speech was followed by X -rays, the drawing of massive blood samples, cardiograms, urine tests, and then probes: "They had us lie on [our] stomachs and examined our kidneys. They tapped on them and ask[ed] us if that hurt."

And that was it--organs only, hold the corneas--a fact that Dai, almost blind from torture at the time, remembers vividly. Corneas are relatively small-ticket items, worth perhaps $30,000 each. By 2003, Chinese doctors had mastered the liver transplant, worth about $115,000 from a foreign customer.

To meet the demand, a new source of supply was needed. Fang Siyi is a 40-year-old female refugee in Bangkok. Incarcerated from 2002 to 2005, Fang was examined repeatedly and then, in 2003, picked out for special testing in the Jilin detention center in Northeast China.

Fang had never seen the doctors before: "Upon arriving here, they changed into labor camp uniforms. But what struck me is that they seemed to be military doctors." Twelve prisoners had been selected. Fang estimates that eight were Falun Gong. How did she know? "For Falun Gong, they called them, Little Faluns." Who were the other four? "[The staff] would say, Here comes another one of those Eastern Lightning."

Eastern Lightning are Christians--fringy, out-there Chinese Christians to us, incurable, nontransformable deviants to the party. Jing, too, remembers Eastern Lightning being given blood tests in 2002, but Fang remembers the Jilin exam as far more focused: "The additional examinations would just be blood tests, electro-cardiograms, and X-rays, nothing else. It was Falun Gong practitioners and Christians."

Compassion fatigue seeping in? I'll keep this short.

"Masanjia Confidential" has family in China, so prudence dictates mentioning only that she's about 40 and is in Bangkok. Her experience takes us into what I call the "Late Harvest Era" of 2005, when many practitioners seem to have been whisked off to wham-bam organ exams and then promptly disappeared. When I asked her if anyone in Masanjia Labor Camp actually received medical treatment, she responded without missing a beat: "If people came in on a stretcher, they were given cursory treatment. In good health, a comprehensive exam. .  .  . They needed healthy people, young people. If you were an auntie in your 60s or 70s they wouldn't pay attention to you."

Were there military personnel present at the physicals? "They didn't need them. Masanjia is very close to Sujiatun [hospital]--a pretty quick drive. If they needed someone they could just tie them up and send them over. .  .  . Usually they were taken at night."

In 2007, Yu Xinhui, free after five years in Guangdong prison, signed himself, his wife, and their infant son up for a foreign trip with a Chinese tour group. Upon arriving in Bangkok, they fled to the YMCA and applied for U.N. refugee status. Yu is in his 30s, the picture of robust health. While in prison, he was tested repeatedly, finally graduating to an "organs-only" exam under military supervision in 2005.

Yu makes a good show of indulging my questions, but to him it was never a big mystery: "There was common knowledge of organ harvesting in the prison. .  .  . Even before you die, your organs are already reserved." Criminal prisoners would taunt the practitioners: "If you don't do what we say we'll torture you to death and sell your organs." That sounds like a stupid game, but everyone knew there was a real list: Prisoners and practitioners alike would be taken away on an annual schedule. Yu knew which month the buses would arrive and where they would park in the courtyard. He gave me a tour of the exact spot on Google Earth.

When Falun Gong's claims about organ harvesting surfaced in March 2006, Yu still languished in prison, incommunicado. So it's all the more interesting that he vividly remembers a large, panicky deportation of prisoners (perhaps 400 people, including practitioners) in May 2006. "It was terrifying," Yu says. "Even I was terrified." The timing is consistent: With all the bad publicity, mainland doctors were hinting at a close-of-business sale on organs at exactly this time.

By 2007, the consensus was that the Chinese government had shut down Falun Gong harvesting to avoid any embarrassing new disclosures before the Olympics. So my final case must be viewed as borderline, a comprehensive medical exam followed by .  .  . well, judge for yourself.

Liu Guifu is a 48-year-old woman recently arrived in Bangkok. She got a soup-to-nuts physical-- really a series of them--in Beijing Women's Labor Camp in 2007. She was also diagnosed as schizophrenic and possibly given drugs.

But she remembers her exams pretty well. She was given three urine tests in a single month. She was told to drink fluids and refrain from urinating until she got to the hospital. Was this testing for diabetes or drugs? It can't be ruled out. But neither can kidney-function assessment. And three major blood samples were drawn in the same month, at a cost of about $1,000. Was the labor camp concerned about Liu's health? Or the health of a particular organ? Perhaps an organ that was being tissue-matched with a high-ranking cadre or a rich foreign customer?

The critical fact is that Liu was both a member of a nontransformed Falun Gong brigade with a history of being used for organs and was considered mentally ill. She was useless, the closest approximation we have to a nameless practitioner, one of the ones who never gave their names or provinces to the authorities and so lost their meager social protections.

There were certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of practitioners identified by numbers only. I've heard that number two hundred and something was a talented young female artist with nice skin, but I don't really know. None of them made it out of China alive.

None of them likely will. Tibetan sources estimate that 5,000 protesters disappeared in this year's crackdown. Many have been sent to Qinghai, a potential centre of organ harvesting. But that's speculative. Both the Taiwanese doctors who investigate organ harvesting and those who arrange transplants for their Taiwanese patients agree on one point: The closing ceremony of the Olympics made it once again open season for harvesting.

Some in the human rights community will read that last assertion with skepticism. Until there is countervailing evidence, however, I'll bet on bargain-basement prices for organs in China. I confess, I feel a touch of burnout myself at this thought. It's an occupational hazard.

It's why I told that one-night-in-Bangkok joke to get you to read beyond the first paragraph. Yet what's really laughable is the foot-dragging, formalistic, faintly embarrassed response of so many to the murder of prisoners of conscience for the purpose of harvesting their organs. That's an evil crime.

Washington faces its own imperatives: The riptide of Chinese financial power is strong. Those in government do not want to hear about Falun Gong and genocide at a time of financial crisis, with China holding large numbers of U.S. bonds. So the story continues to founder under the lead weight of American political and journalistic apathy. At least the Europeans have given it some air. They can afford to. They aren't the leader of the free world.

It will be argued--quietly, of course--that America has no point of easy leverage, no ability to undo what has been done, no silver bullet that can change the Chinese regime. Perhaps not, but we could ban Americans from getting organ transplants in China. We could boycott Chinese medical conferences. Sever medical ties. Embargo surgical equipment. And refuse to hold any diplomatic summits until the Chinese put in place an explicit, comprehensive database of every organ donor in China.

We may have to live with the Chinese Communist party, for now. For that matter, we can console ourselves that there are no bones, for now. There will be none until the party falls and the Chinese people begin to sift through the graves and ashes.

We are all allowed a touch of compassion fatigue--it's understandable. But make no mistake: There are terrible lizards. And now that the Olympic Games are over, and the cameras have turned away, they roam the earth again.

Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, wishes to thank the Earhart Foundation and the Wallenberg family of Sweden for research support.

Felicitos Gonzalez, 41, of 1 Division St., Apartment R, Stamford, was arrested by Metropolitan Transportation Authority police at his home a block away from the train station Wednesday.

Gonzalez was arraigned on 16 counts of voyeurism at state Superior Court in Stamford Thursday.

Judge Barbara Brazzel-Massaro ruled that Gonzalez, a Mexican native working in the country illegally, will be jailed in lieu of $50,000 bond for the Class D felony.

Gonzalez' defense attorney Howard Ehring said his client had little chance, if any of raising bond.

A court translator reviews information for Felicitos Gonzalez during his arraignment on voyeurism charges Thursday at state Superior Court in Stamford. (Dru Nadler/Staff photo)

Gonzalez' arrest by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority came after a 21-year-old woman used the ladies bathroom near the Dunkin' Donuts on the main floor of the train station late in the evening on Nov. 1, Gonzalez' arrest warrant says.

When the woman picked her book bag up off the floor, she tipped over a red plastic waste basked that contained five or six toilet paper rolls, she told police. As she picked up the rolls to place them back in the basket, one of the rolls felt heavy and started to beep, the warrant states.

"I ripped the toilet paper off of the roll and noticed that a camera phone had been taped to the roll. I turned the camera around and looked at the screen and noticed that it was recording the bathroom stall," she said in her witness statement to the MTA.

The woman then got on the 11:30 p.m. train to Grand Central Station. Along the way she began looking at the recordings on the phone and found a video clip of a male Hispanic man wearing a green shirt as he set the phone into a stationary position and placed toilet rolls around it, the warrant said.

The woman also saw recordings of two other women going to the bathroom before turning off the phone, the warrant said.

Two days later the woman reported the camera to a police officer at a road job and he told her to call MTA police. That same day on Nov. 3 she talked to MTA Detective Sean Connolly about the phone and turned over the phone, which still had toilet paper taped around it, according to the warrant.

The next day a property manager for Fusco Management, which runs the train station, reviewed the video recordings and identified Gonzalez as the Hispanic man pictured on the camera phone.

Gonzalez, has for the past seven months worked for Suburban Contract Cleaning, a subcontractor hired by Fusco to clean and maintain the station.

Gonzalez has been in Connecticut for seven years according to the state bail commissioner and was identified by Sprint/Nextel as the phone's subscriber, the affidavit said. Inside the phone, authorities found three video files each two hours long.

In each of the videos Gonzalez is clearly seen cutting up pieces of toilet paper and taping the paper around the lens of the camera phone. He is then seen sitting down on the toilet seat to check the view on the phone screen, the affidavit said.

In reviewing the video recordings, Connolly saw 16 women enter the stall, pull down their pants and sit on the toilet seat, the affidavit said.

It is not clear when the recordings were made.

MTA Police Sgt. John Rizzitelli said, "We knew almost immediately he was one of the station cleaners... He denied it."

Police on Wednesday also seized a home computer from Gonzalez' bedroom which is being analyzed for further images at the Connecticut State Police Crime Lab in Meriden.

The U.S. Immigration, Customs, & Enforcement Agency was notified about the case, due to Gonzalez' immigration status.

Gonzalez is no longer working at the train station, Jason Fascella, Fusco's property manager at the station said, referring further questions to Fusco's headquarters and the DOT.

In Wenan Street in Nanjing (a former capital city), one can find NOTHING but stores with pirated brand names!

This map shows the most racist parts of America. Only 22% of counties voted more Republican this year than 2004. These are the people that bucked the general trend and actually went the other way, i.e., Democrats and moderates switching to the Republican side. Race is the only reason that makes sense for a Democrat to switch sides this election cycle. Keep this in mind when you plan your next vacation: America’s “racist belt” stretches through the whitest parts of the South and up the Appalachian Mountains.