NEW YORK TIMES: Bo Xilai, the politician who fell from the heights of China’s elite, took a pugnacious stand on Thursday in the opening session of China’s most closely watched trial in decades, denying that he took millions of dollars in bribes and ridiculing his wife’s testimony against him.
According to lengthy transcripts the court released in an extraordinary show of transparency, Mr. Bo, 64, called his wife’s assertions that she had noticed anonymous deposits in their bank account “laughable.” He accused a businessman who had recorded video testimony against him of having “sold his soul.” And he discounted his earlier confession to taking bribes, saying he had made the statements to Communist Party investigators against his will, out of “opportunism and weakness” and under “mental strain.”
The authorities’ unexpected openness about the trial — by allowing a running court microblog that was followed by millions of Chinese directly or through news reports drawing on the microblog — turned what many had expected to be banal ritual into an unpredictable display of Mr. Bo’s defiance… (more)
