A Hong Kong court sentenced a US lawyer to prison for a scuffle with a plainclothes police officer at the height of democracy protests in 2019.
Samuel Bickett, 37, was given a term of four months and two weeks yesterday on one charge of assaulting a police officer. The former Asia-Pacific compliance director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch was found guilty last month and denied bail.
Hong Kong Magistrate Arthur Lam described Bickett’s crime as a “serious threat to public order,” saying that the policeman sustained multiple injuries.
Lam said that two weeks were added to the sentence because the assault occurred in a crowded area and Bickett’s actions might have incited others to violence.
A survey of members by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong in May found that more than 40 percent of respondents said that they might leave the territory, with Singapore among the most popular alternatives.
Lawmakers in the US expressed concern to US President Joe Biden last week over what they called China’s “ceaseless assault” on democracy in Hong Kong.
They asked Biden in a letter what his administration was “doing to coordinate with allies and partners to ensure that the private sector” knows about the risk to US citizens in Hong Kong posed by the National Security Law.
Bickett, who said the officer was attacking people with a baton in a subway station, wrote in a statement before his conviction that the verdict was “entirely unsupportable by both the law and the evidence in this case.”
The South China Morning Post quoted prosecutors as saying that Bickett tried to take a baton from Hong Kong Police Force Senior Constable Yu Shu-sang, punched him and knelt on him.
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
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