Student arrested for spying

    A student in Heilongjiang Province has been arrested for selling “intelligence*” to foreigners for more than US$32,000, State media said on August 6.

    The student, surnamed Chang, is an aerospace* graduate student at Harbin University in the provincial city of Harbin, according to Xinhua.

    Police authorized the arrest of Chang on August 5, who was found to have gathered “intelligence” for foreign personnel more than 50 times over nearly two years. Chang received more than 200,000 yuan (US$32,000) in return.

    Tycoon’s sentence upheld

    A court in Central China’s Hubei Province on August 7 rejected the appeal of a former mining tycoon, Liu Han, who was sentenced to death in May.

    Liu Han, his brother Liu Wei and 34 other defendants* were convicted of organizing, leading or participating in a mafia*-style gang as well as murder in May.

    Both Liu brothers and three other defendants were sentenced to death. Another five were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, four to life imprisonment and 22 to imprisonment of different terms.

    Bus plunges into valley

    Forty-four people died after a bus carrying about 40 tourists plunged into* a valley in Tibet on Saturday after hitting two other vehicles on a highway just outside the regional capital, Lhasa.

    Eleven others were injured and are being treated in Lhasa hospitals. There were 55 people on board three vehicles at the time of the accident.

    Briton, wife jailed

    British corporate investigator Peter Humphrey was sentenced in Shanghai on August 8 to two-and-a-half years in prison and his wife, Yu Yingzeng, to two years.

    The Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court also fined Humphrey 200,000 yuan (US$32,260) and Yu 150,000 yuan for illegally obtaining private information on Chinese citizens after the one-day trial.

    Humphrey had admitted he had been paying contractors for the private information for almost a decade.(SD-Agencies)