Lee Cheuk-yan’s mitigation before sentencing for ‘incitement’ and other charges relating to last year’s Tiananmen vigil…
Your Honour, the people of Hong Kong who took part needed no person or organisation to incite them. If there was a provocateur, it is the regime that fired at its own people.
What sentence will he get? It says here…
A couple who chained their friend’s baby daughter like a dog and beat her with a rattan stick until it broke before her death have both been sentenced to five years and four months in jail.
…while Ma Chun-man got five years and nine months for shouting slogans.
The ICAC will deploy 800 staff (it even has that many?) in polling stations to ‘observe voting and ballot counting procedures’ and deploy others to ‘monitor social media for election-related activity’.
The Hong Kong Cyclothon – an event we had previously never heard of – will ban the slogan ‘Hong Kong add oil’ with police assistance in order to prevent the People’s Republic of China from collapsing.
The government that maintains that evil foreign forces induced two million Hongkongers to protest in 2019 is mulling ways to curb ‘fake news’.
Chinese state media issues a screenshot of an email supposedly from tennis star Peng Shuai assuring the Women’s Tennis Association that she has not been disappeared after accusing former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of pressuring her into sex. Oddly, no-one is convinced, with the WTA being especially skeptical. An analyst notes that…
This creepy tweet by CGTN is a good example of the fusion of incompetence and authoritarian hubris in China’s official messaging.
…messages like these are meant as a demonstration of power: “We are telling you that she is fine, and who are you to say otherwise?” It’s not meant to convince people but to intimidate and demonstrate the power of the state.
Except that the ‘power’ being demonstrated is really no more than obnoxiousness and thuggery, encouraging more calls to boycott the Winter Olympics. Expect Beijing to make Peng read a statement on video while strapped to a chair in a dungeon – or a classy good-taste variant of that tactic – before long.
The BBC on how China has painted itself (and of course dragged Hong Kong with it) into a corner with its zero-Covid strategy.
Sub-head from the SCMP:
Journalists, academics say time would be better served boosting critical thinking among the public, funding delivery of fact-checking services
Get real journalists and academics. Critical thinking ability in the population is NOT what SWMO and her ratpack (nor BJ) want – they know they wouldn’t last 5 minutes. Hence the educational syllabus “improvements”.
If Hong Kong were still under the thumb of the hated racist colonial oppressors, would it be following the insane “Zero Covid” strategy?
I think we should be told.
Love the ICAC’s ironic sense of timing, swooping in to save the LegCo elections from unfair practices an entire year after they were obviously, publicly, systemically rigged in favour of the ever-unpopular CCP-chosen candidates.
Talk about bolting the stable door a year after the horse was found shot dead in the woods.
Mind you, some might see it as presenting the populace with the opportunity to have a meaningful voice at the polling station after all: just imagine if the millions of freshly disenfranchised voters turned up to report the election as being corrupt to the ICAC observers and then left without voting. You might very well think that would be an embarrassing own-goal for the government, I couldn’t possibly comment.
What’s Gui Minhai up to these days speaking of detainees and forced confessions?
Do any of you fossils remember the Great Maria Cake Coupon Disaster of 1985?
I thought that Maria had long since gone to her heavenly reward but no. A brand new Maria Cake shop is opening on the corner of Percival and Lockhart Road, including not-so-brand-new 60s logo. How Maria can afford that rent while selling cream puffs and sponge cake confections, I don’t know. But if you want a taste of yesterday, you know where to go.
Re Joe Blow – if I remember correctly, Maria worked her way through the debts and started off afresh, already some years ago
@Joe Blow: Since China is going the way of old school 1950s and 60s commieism under Shit Jumping, isn’t it so appropriate that venerated old brands get pulled out of the dustbin for re-animation in a Chinaproud Hong Kong?
Joe – get out more. There has been a Maria Cake shop in the public housing estate near where I live for about 15 years. My wife is a fan of the butter cookies.
So would the Cyclothon authorities object to the sound mechanical advice, ‘Hong Kong cyclists, add oil’? I think someone needs to share this love with his fellow pedallers.