The police said they expected the death toll of 128 to rise as the authorities began combing through the charred apartment towers.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4108317

The Hong Kong independence activist Tony Chung says he has been granted asylum in the UK, two years after fleeing the Chinese region.

Chung, 24, revealed the news on his Instagram page on Sunday, the day after the former Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui said he had been granted asylum in Australia. Both Chung and Hui are among dozens of pro-democracy activists targeted with arrest warrants and 1m Hong Kong dollar bounties by authorities.

Chung was one of the youngest people to be sentenced to jail under Hong Kong’s draconian national security law, which was imposed by China in 2020 and essentially criminalised dissent in the former British colony.

He posted a photo of a letter from the UK Home Office saying he had been granted refugee status and five years of residency in the UK. “This means that we accept you have a well-founded fear of persecution and therefore cannot return to your country,” the letter said.

...

舊年整咗首歌《獅子山下》，係自己寫嘅粵語歌，主題比較唔 mainstream，講啲壓抑之下應該還需要心存希望嘅感覺，有啲抗爭象徵喺入面，但其實都係反映現實，尤其啱啱過咗紀念日，我唸起其中一句歌詞“那晚再看到有燭光乍現，照遍了和平的公園”。曲尾故意加入“榮歸”melody大家可以留意，呢首唔係一般 K 歌，但如果你會鍾意 Beyond 嗰種有骨嘅歌，應該都聽得入耳。

我知呢度好多巴打都鐘意講真話、聽有血有肉嘅歌，所以想放上嚟畀大家聽下，有咩意見都歡迎話我知，幫我改進都得 🙏

MV YouTube link 🎥：[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoI0zqbMZcU

I miss the old HK. Shout-out to everyone that managed to move out.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16412062

A high-profile British judge who resigned from Hong Kong’s highest court last week has warned the city is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state” and judges are being compromised by an “impossible political environment created by China”.

Lord Sumption’s comments on Monday came as a third senior foreign judge in the past week resigned from the Court of Final Appeal.

"The problem in Hong Kong has been building up over the last four years and I think all the judges on the court feel concerned about this," Lord Sumption told the BBC's Today programme.

"I have reached the point eventually where I don’t think that my continuing presence on the court is serving any useful purpose."

On Monday he wrote in a newspaper op-ed that the city's rule of law has been "profoundly compromised".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16128611

The verdict wasn’t surprising but outside room no 2 of the West Kowloon courthouse, people still wept. The panel of Hong Kong national security judges had set down two days for the hearing but dispensed with the core business in about 15 minutes. In the city’s largest ever national security trial – involving the prosecution of pro-democracy campaigners and activists from a group known as the “Hong Kong 47” – almost all the defendants were found guilty of conspiracy to commit subversion.

Their crime was trying to win an election, holding unofficial primaries in 2020 attended by an estimated 600,000 residents.

The plan was devised by organiser and academic Benny Tai, who had previously been jailed over his involvement in the 2014 “umbrella movement”, and whom Beijing has labelled a “vicious traitor”. Tai’s plan began with primaries to select the best candidates to win a legislative majority. They would then block government budgets to potentially force a dissolution and the resignation of the chief executive, Carrie Lam, in an effort to have the government answer the movement’s demands.

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/3804162

Retro Hong Kong Tram 50s-80s style