Under cover of darkness, a blind Chinese lawyer and dissident is believed to have escaped house arrest Friday and begun a journey that ended in Beijing, where he is thought to be in hiding at the U.S. Embassy. In 2005, Chen Guangcheng took up a campaign against officials who forced couples into having late-term abortions and sterilizations. Since then, the Chinese government has confined Chen to his home in a secluded village. Chen was convicted of criminal charges in 2006 in a trial that Chinese legal experts widely felt made a sham of the Communist country's judicial system.
Read it at The New York Times
