BEIJING – A Chinese court has sentenced a French national and his Chinese accomplice to death on drugs manufacturing and trafficking charges, French consular officials and state media said Monday.
Chan Thao Phoumy, who was born in Laos but now has French citizenship, was handed the death penalty on Saturday by a court in the southern city of Guangzhou, officials at the French consulate in the city told AFP.
The Frenchman had been sentenced to life in prison in 2007 in connection with a crystal meth ring operating in Guangdong province, on the border with Hong Kong, and the central province of Henan, the China Daily reported.
But he faced a new trial after "additional crimes were uncovered" while he was in prison, resulting in the death penalty, the official newspaper said, without specifying the new crimes.
His Chinese accomplice, Xie Weiming, was also sentenced to death, the report said. Two others were given death sentences with a two-year reprieve, which are often commuted to life sentences in China.
Drugs laws are extremely strict in China, and those convicted of smuggling, selling, transporting or producing more than 50 grams of heroin or methamphetamine face the death penalty, according to state media.
Several foreigners have been executed in China in recent months on drugs charges, sparking concern and protests from their home countries.
In December, China executed Briton Akmal Shaikh, a 53-year-old father of three convicted of drug smuggling. Supporters said he was mentally ill and London repeatedly urged Beijing to grant clemency.
Four Japanese drug smugglers were executed in northeastern China in April.
A court in southern China sentenced a South African woman to death for drugs offences in April, Xinhua said . http://www.ekantipur.com/2010/08/09/world/frenchman-to-be-executed-in-china-on-drugs-charge/320117/

3 Tiny, toxic mushrooms kill hundreds in China
BEIJING- Every summer during the height of the rainy season, villagers of all ages in a corner of southwestern China would suddenly die of cardiac arrest.
No one knew what caused Yunnan Sudden Death Syndrome, blamed for an estimated 400 deaths in the past three decades.
Now, after a five-year investigation, an elite investigative unit from China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention believes it has pinpointed the cause: an innocuous-looking small mushroom known as Little White.
The search for the culprit began in 2005 and took investigators to remote villages spread over the rural highlands of Yunnan province, said Robert Fontaine, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There was "this very obvious clustering of deaths in villages in very short periods of time in the summer," said Fontaine, who helped in the investigation. "It appears that there was something a little different going on."
Local health officials had noted the deaths for years. In 2004, they appealed to Beijing for assistance. The government gave the task to the China Field Epidemiology Training Program, a unit of medical investigators at China’s CDC assigned some of the country’s toughest health mysteries.
The medical teams encountered obstacles. Many villagers didn’t speak standard Chinese, instead communicating in their own dialect. Villages were scattered in often remote areas. Rapid burials made it difficult to conduct autopsies. Torrential rain and mudslides hampered travel.
But that first year, investigators were able to narrow down the list of possibilities: most victims had drunk surface water, they had emotional stress and they ate mushrooms.
The investigators zeroed in on mushrooms, because the deaths were closely aligned with the harvesting season. More than 90 percent of the deaths occurred in July or August. By the end of 2005, investigators began issuing warnings to some villages to avoid eating unfamiliar mushrooms.
That was a difficult order to follow. Yunnan province is legendary for its wide variety of wild mushrooms, many of which are exported at high prices. Entire families go out to hunt for them during the summer months.
By 2008, investigators had discovered a relatively unknown mushroom in a number of homes where people had died. The mushroom is not usually sold in the markets, because it’s too small.
A public information campaign to warn against eating the mushrooms has dramatically reduced the number of deaths. Only a handful have been reported in the last couple of years, and none so far this year.
However, the mystery has not yet been definitively solved.
Testing found the mushroom contained some toxins, though not enough to be deadly. Chinese scientists need to isolate the toxin and test whether it triggers cardiac arrests. www.ekantipur.com/2010/07/13/world/tiny-toxic-mushrooms-kill-hundreds-in-china/318405/