Hong Kong unionists have pleaded not guilty to publishing “seditious” material as a five-day trial began over illustrated children’s books.
The case revolves around a series of books published by the now-defunct General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists that featured cartoon sheep and wolves, which prosecutors said were analogies for Hong Kong residents and Chinese that were intended to “incite hatred” toward the latter.
On the first day of the trial on Tuesday, prosecutor Laura Ng (伍淑娟) said the books characterized the two groups as hostile toward each other.
“Hong Kong residents are vulnerable minorities, Chinese rulers are cold-blooded, totalitarian and brutal, and mainland Chinese are thugs,” Ng said.
Ng said the defendants openly admitted to having based the books on the political turmoil and street protests that began in 2019 over a contentious extradition bill.
One of the books, titled The 12 Warriors of Sheep Village (羊村十二勇士), was linked by the prosecutor to the capture of 12 Hong Kong fugitives by Chinese authorities in 2020.
She said that one of the books called for Hong Kong residents to take up arms and use violence against authorities, while another called for foreign interference in the territory’s judicial process.
A third book was said to have blamed Chinese for the COVID-19 pandemic, portraying them as “selfish, uncivilized and unhygienic,” which could incite separatist feelings among Hong Kong residents, Ng said.
The unionists were arrested by national security police in July last year and have been in custody since, with bail applications denied.
The defendants, two men and three women in their 20s, were executive committee members of the union. They face the charge of “conspiracy to print, publish, distribute, display and/or reproduce seditious publications” under the colonial-era crimes ordinance, with a maximum penalty of two years in jail.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS