Hong Kong is facing its worst crisis since its return to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong Liaison Office Director Zhang Xiaoming (張曉明) said yesterday.
“Hong Kong’s crisis ... has continued for 60 days, and is getting worse and worse,” Zhang said during a meeting in Shenzhen, China.
“Violent activities are intensifying and the impact on society is spreading wider. It can be said that Hong Kong is now facing the most severe situation since its handover,” he added.
Photo: AFP
Zhang yesterday held a forum to discuss the political crisis, which included Hong Kong delegates to the Chinese National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. No opposition democratic figures or protest representatives were invited.
Speaking after the meeting, several attendees said that Zhang cited speeches by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) in 1984 and 1987 in which he said if “turmoil” occurs in Hong Kong, “the central government must intervene.”
However, no specific mention was made of deploying the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which has a garrison in Hong Kong, to quell the unrest, with Zhang cited as saying that Beijing remained confident in the Hong Kong government and local police.
Former Hong Kong secretary for justice Elsie Leung (粱愛詩) said she felt that even if the PLA were deployed it would not conflict with “one country, two systems.”
“’One country, two systems’ would continue,” she said.
In China’s sharpest rebuke yet of the protesters, the government on Tuesday warned them not to “play with fire” and called on Hong Kongers to protect their homeland.
The Global Times showed a video on Twitter of thousands of police officers taking part in an anti-riot training drill in Shenzhen.
Several thousand Hong Kong lawyers dressed in black marched in silence yesterday to call on the government to safeguard the independence of the territory’s Department of Justice.
The territory’s lawyers fear the department’s prosecutions of arrested protesters are taking on an increasingly political slant with more than 500 arrests, many charged with rioting, an offense that carries a 10-year jail term.
One lawyer who declined to be named said that she was marching “to make sure the government knows that within the legal sector, we will not allow judicial independence to be compromised by politics or pressure from the Chinese government.”
“All we want is justice and all we want is consistency,” said prominent lawyer Kevin Yam (任建峰), who also protested. “We don’t want to see thugs get away while the best of our youth get prosecuted. We uphold the rule of law and we ask for justice.”
Police late on Tuesday fired tear gas in Sham Shui Po, as protesters gathered outside a police station to demand the release of Keith Fong (方仲賢), a student union leader from Baptist University, who they say was unlawfully arrested by several plainclothes police for buying laser pointers on the grounds that he possessed offensive weapons.
Protesters have sometimes aimed lasers, which are widely available in shops, at police during clashes.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS