The government yesterday warned that Hong Kong’s decision to freeze assets belonging to jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai (黎智英) was a sign to the international community that doing business in the Chinese-controlled territory was becoming increasingly risky.
The assets freeze, announced on Friday, includes all shares in his company, Next Digital — the first time a listed firm has been targeted by Hong Kong’s National Security Law.
Shortly before the announcement, the Taiwanese arm of Lai’s popular Apple Daily newspaper said it would stop publishing its print version, blaming declining advertising revenue and more difficult business conditions in Hong Kong linked to politics.
In a statement, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said that the assets seizure highlighted the threat the new national security legislation posed to Hong Kongers’ property.
“It is equivalent to announcing to the international community that Hong Kong’s business risks are increasing,” the council said.
“We also once again call on relevant parties to stop suppressing Hong Kong democrats, otherwise they will drift away from popular sentiment,” it added.
Hong Kong has been rocked by protests against its Beijing-backed government in the past few years and last year China imposed tough new national security legislation on the territory.
China denies that the legislation is aimed at taking away people’s freedoms, and is needed to return law and order to Hong Kong.
Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison for taking part in unauthorized assemblies during pro-democracy protests in 2019.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching