Hundreds trapped inside Polytechnic as demonstrators try to break campus siege
Hong Kong police have fought running battles with protesters trying to break a security cordon around a university in the city, firing teargas both at activists trying to escape the besieged campus and at crowds trying to reach it from outside.
Police have said the demonstrators inside Polytechnic University had no option but to come out and surrender.
Continue reading...Riot police have swooped on pro-democracy activists trying to flee a university they had set ablaze in one of the most violent confrontations in nearly six months of unrest. Hundreds of demonstrators clashed with officers who had threatened to use deadly force, as tensions flared elsewhere in the region
Continue reading...Hundreds of Hong Kong protesters have been trapped inside the Polytechnic University campus they have been occupying since last week. Despite a pledge from the university president that demonstrators could leave peacefully, those who tried to leave were forced back into the campus by teargas and water cannon
Continue reading...Pro-democracy activists see move as effort by Beijing to intervene in HK’s affairs
On Saturday afternoon, a few dozen Chinese soldiers jogged out of their barracks in triple file line, wearing shorts and matching army green T-shirts. They cheerily joined a group of residents, clearing away road blocks set up by anti-government protesters, using brooms and plastic buckets.
One of the officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), when asked by a local journalist what the group were doing, responded: “We volunteered! Stopping violence and ending chaos is our responsibility.” He shouted: “We are spreading positive energy!”
Continue reading...Police pulled back after attempted dawn raid on Polytechnic University was met with fire
Pro-democracy lawmaker Claudia Mo says medics are among those arrested at Poly U.
Hongkong police #arrest #medics who were on PolyU campus to help
This is surely #against #humanitarian law principles
Front: Doctor, Back: Nurse#HongkongProtests pic.twitter.com/prMD5m2uee
According to Reuters, a senior US official has condemned the “unjustified use of force” in Hong Kong and encouraged China to “protect Hong Kong’s freedom”.
“We condemn the unjustified use of force and urge all sides to refrain from violence and engage in constructive dialogue,” the official said.
Continue reading...Australia can’t go on downplaying the largest economic shift in world history. Read the former PM’s speech in full
Taking some longer view of the strategic scenery, I have come to some key beliefs about the changes that are taking place globally.
The international system is fundamentally anarchic in structure. Two world wars in a century and Vietnam, Iraq, Syria gives the evidence of that. We should not confuse the relative peace of the last 30 years with the anarchy which lies latent.
Continue reading...US president says potential Democratic rival is ‘somewhat better than that’ and urges North Korean leader to agree nuclear deal
Donald Trump has come to the defence of one of his potential rivals for the presidency, telling North Korea its recent description of Joe Biden as a “rabid dog” that should be “beaten to death” was a little unfair.
Trump’s criticism of Pyongyang – albeit via a half-hearted endorsement of Biden’s character – came amid attempts to resurrect stalled nuclear talks, with Trump imploring North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to “get the deal done”, and the US and South Korea agreeing to postpone an annual air force drill the North routinely condemns as a rehearsal for an invasion.
Continue reading...Dan McGarry of the Daily Post told at Brisbane airport the Vanuatu immigration service had barred him from flying back to the island country
The media director of a Vanuatu newspaper whose visa renewal was refused this month has been barred from flying home to Vanuatu from Brisbane with his partner.
Dan McGarry, who has lived in Vanuatu for 16 years, applied to have his work permit renewed earlier this year but it was rejected. McGarry believes his visa was refused due to articles he had published about China’s influence in Vanuatu.
Continue reading...Police deployed water cannon against protesters in Hong Kong on Sunday, in some cases using blue-dyed water laced with pepper spray. Teargas was also fired in an attempt to drive people away from the streets outside Polytechnic University. Protesters who occupied several university campuses last week have largely retreated, but hardliners have fortified themselves inside the campus and are refusing to leave
Continue reading...Although many remain sympathetic to the cause, citizens are becoming increasingly fearful
One crisp and sunny morning last week, the normally busy road outside the main entrance to the University of Hong Kong was eerily quiet. Overlooked by mango trees, the road was empty, save for piles of bricks that protesters had scattered across it overnight as a barricade to paralyse traffic.
As students guarded the entrance against the potential arrival of riot police, a woman shouted “We support you!” across the road. As soon as she had finished, another man shouted: “I don’t! You people are university students, for crying out loud!”
Continue reading...More than 400 pages leaked to New York Times by Chinese political insider document brutal crackdown on Muslim minority
Hundreds of pages of leaked internal government documents reveal how China’s mass detention of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang came from directives by Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to “show absolutely no mercy” in the “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism”.
More than 400 pages of documents obtained by the New York Times show the government was aware its campaign of mass internment would tear families apart and could provoke backlash if it became widely known.
Continue reading...At least six deaths have been linked to the outbreak, in a nation where vaccination rates are alarmingly low
Samoa has closed all schools and cracked down on public gatherings as it enters a state of emergency over the deadly measles outbreak spreading across the Pacific islands.
The island state of just 200,000, halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, announced the state of emergency on Saturday after declaring a measles epidemic late in October, when the first deaths were reported.
Continue reading...Chinese soldiers stationed in Hong Kong came out to clear streets on Saturday, which protesters had strewn with debris to slow down any police advances while they had been on the campus. People's Liberation Army soldiers joined the clean-up outside Hong Kong Baptist University, the site of clashes earlier in the week. They can only be deployed to help with disaster relief or to maintain public order if requested by the local government. The controversial move threatens to escalate already high tensions in the Chinese territory
Continue reading...Controversial move could exacerbate tensions in territory dealing with months of anti-government protests
Chinese troops in Hong Kong have been deployed to help clear roads blockaded by anti-government protesters in a controversial move that could escalate the already high tensions in the Chinese territory.
Dozens of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), dressed in shorts and T-shirts, jogged from their barracks in Kowloon to the Hong Kong Baptist University where protesters had built barricades to stop riot police entering the campus. Joining a group of residents, they moved desks, signposts, and bricks blocking a road.
Continue reading...After six hellish years inside Australia’s offshore detention regime, Boochani reflects on the country that rejected him, his new-found freedom and the friends he left behind
“One day,” Behrouz Boochani said, observing the bleakness of the abandoned Manus detention centre, its dark form illuminated by wood stripped from the buildings being burned for light, “we will meet in some other place, far away from here.”
That was two years ago, in the middle of a warm November night, when Boochani helped smuggle this reporter into the decommissioned Manus Island detention centre where 400 men were holding out against being forcibly removed: rationing their dwindling supply of food and medicine, guarding against the violent police crackdown they knew was coming, repairing the freshwater wells that had been deliberately spoiled by the retreating guards.
Continue reading...Survivors are given a voice at first public hearings of investigation into historical abuse of thousands of children in state and faith-based care
On the morning Annasophia Calman is due to testify in public about a childhood destroyed at the hands of her father and the state, she eats scrambled eggs on toast and paces back and forth in the hallway outside her hotel room.
“My daughter rang up and she goes, ‘Mum, I’m so proud of you. You’re finally going to do it. It’s going to be over for you,’ ” Calman says. “But I knew it wasn’t over until I actually did it.”
Continue reading...University writes to students on exchange in Hong Kong as campuses become focus of battles between police and protesters
The University of Sydney has urged Australian students on exchange in Hong Kong to return home as pro-democracy protests intensify on university campuses, the ABC is reporting.
The university has written to students after Hong Kong University and other institutions suspended classes for the last few weeks of semester.
Continue reading...Study of chicken egg samples reveals presence of dangerous chemical compounds around areas where waste is dumped
Plastic waste exports to south-east Asia have been implicated in extreme levels of toxins entering the human food chain in Indonesia.
A new study that sampled chicken eggs around sites in the country where plastic waste accumulates identified alarming levels of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls long recognised as extremely injurious to human health.
Continue reading...Demonstrators say local elections must continue, amid fears of postponement to avoid losses for pro-China candidates
Protesters in Hong Kong have cleared a highway that they have blocked since Monday as a gesture of goodwill, as political unrest paralysed the city for a fifth day in a row.
At a 3am press conference demonstrators at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, one of the main battlegrounds of the last week, said they would reopen the Tolo highway, a major traffic artery, outside of the school.
Continue reading...How poignant that Behrouz was freed from Australia’s grip and welcomed by Christchurch, a city that knows prejudice only too well
Today our world is a little freer, a little fairer, and a little more hopeful. Today, one less innocent man is incarcerated in Australia’s detention camp on Manus Island, guilty only of seeking refuge from persecution. Behrouz Boochani was no ordinary detainee. The Iranian Kurdish journalist and author became the voice of Manus detainees, and with it the persistent conscience of us all as we learned of the atrocities committed by the Australian government on its remote Pacific island detention camps.
How poignant that he was finally freed to visit Christchurch, a city that knows only too well the violence and suffering borne of prejudice. A city that wrapped its arms so warmly around its refugee community after a terror attack just seven months ago, to heal their wounds and stand for inclusion. Behrouz has said that Christchurch has taught the world about kindness this year. He is also quick to note that the prejudice that leads to violence against refugees is the same that underpins policies allowing cruel treatment of them by governments such as Australia’s. For him, the plight of refugees and displaced persons across the globe right now is connected to the fear-mongering politics of Donald Trump and Scott Morrison.
Continue reading...