As politicians in Beijing gathered for the annual meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the skies outside darkened, providing grim foreshadowing of events that could alter the fate of Hong Kong forever. Hours later, international news outlets were announcing “the end of Hong Kong.”
Drew Pavlou, an undergraduate at the University of Queensland (UQ), and an outspoken anti-CCP political activist, has been threatened with expulsion.
In the United Kingdom, teenage climate activists have gone on hunger strikes in order to prevent the construction of the Woodhouse Colliery coal mine in West Cumbria, which would be the United Kingdom’s first deep coal mine in three decades.
Shiori Ito won rape lawsuit damages in what may be indicative of the tide turning against Japan’s poor record on gender equality; but for now, Japan’s performance in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020, released last week, speaks of a grim reality.
StandwithHK, a Hong Kong solidarity organization, drove a digivan broadcasting live protest footage from Hong Kong through Central London
Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam formally withdrew the controversial extradition bill last Wednesday, explaining in a five-minute television address that it was done “in order to fully allay public concerns.”
Twelve weeks into pro-democracy demonstrations, Hong Kong is on the verge of a tipping point, and protesters are becoming increasingly desperate in the face of inaction by their government.
Since Shinzo Abe stormed back into power in December 2012, he and his Liberal Democratic Party have been able to count upon Japanese millennials as a steady and reliable support base. But the Liberal Democratic Party espouses stances on a variety of issues which run directly counter to millennials’ interests, hopes and beliefs.
The Indonesian coal mining conglomerate Adaro Energy, which is allied with the Japanese companies J-Power, Itochu, as well as a number of public and private Japanese banks, has been avoiding local taxes for more than a decade, depriving the Indonesian government of about US$125 million in income from 2009 to 2017, and has even been accused of provoking human rights abuses in the country.
After almost three-quarters of a century it appears unlikely that Japan will ever receive an apology from the United States for its horrific atomic bombings.
