World News by Wild Rose

Giant pandas, open-top bus rides, a Chinese cooking class, traditional opera, a harbour cruise, the Big Buddha, and The Peak are among the highlights of a packed social programme for VIPs attending this week’s meeting of Apec finance ministers in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post has learned. According to official itineraries obtained by the SCMP, about 500 delegates and guests from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum’s 21 member economies have been offered a range of activities...

Is Hong Kong its own country? No, it is a special administrative region of China, with its own laws, currency and 90-day visa-free entry for Americans. The post Is Hong Kong Its Own Country appeared first on The Rio Times.

United States authorities could deport Hong Kong residents granted extended stay under the Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) programme and have not ruled out the option of doing so after a dozen were reportedly detained at local airports. “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is not precluded from placing aliens with such temporary administrative designation into removal proceedings, nor is it currently removing them,” a department spokesman said in a reply to the South China Morning Post...

Two US lawmakers are pushing for a bill that would allow Hongkongers in the country to apply for permanent residency, but authorities and observers have dismissed it as a political move unlikely to succeed. Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, and Representative James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, announced the Hong Konger Promise of Refuge Act, seeking to provide a pathway to green cards and ultimately citizenship for Hong Kong residents in the US currently protected under the...

A Hong Kong court has sentenced a university student to seven years in prison for raping and sexually assaulting five women, with most of the offences taking place during orientation camps. The 31-year-old defendant was sentenced on Friday at the High Court after the jury found him guilty of one count of rape, another of voyeurism and three indecent assault charges. The five convictions concerned offences between January and August 2023. The defendant, identified only by his initial YLH, was a...

The murder trial of Hong Kong socialite Abby Choi Tin-fung has been delayed again while the court addresses legal issues raised by lawyers in the high-profile case. Deputy High Court Judge Brian Keith told the nine-member jury on Friday that the hearing would resume on Monday, once the legal arguments had concluded. Choi’s mother, Cheung Yin-fa, had been expected to face cross-examination by counsel for Choi’s ex-husband, Alex Kwong Kong-chi, on the fifth day of her testimony. He is standing...

Hong Kong national security police have charged a man with publishing seditious material on social media, while court proceedings did not reveal details of his posts. The force’s national security department said on Friday it had charged a 52-year-old man for posting seditious material with the intent to provoke hatred towards the central Chinese authorities, the Hong Kong government and the judiciary. The defendant had attended the first hearing on Wednesday afternoon, according to the force’s...

The United States has downgraded Hong Kong to the lowest tier in its annual human trafficking report, citing shortcomings in prosecutions and victim identification, an assessment the city’s government rejected as “entirely unfounded”. The US State Department’s 2026 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, released on Thursday, moved Hong Kong from the Tier 2 Watch List, where it had been listed for two consecutive years, to Tier 3. That places the city alongside mainland China and Macau among 20...

Hong Kong police have arrested a man for allegedly splashing red paint at the joint office of two lawmakers, accusing them of being unhelpful. A source said on Thursday that police arrested a 66-year-old man over the incident at the shared office of Kowloon East lawmaker Bill Tang Ka-piu and insurance-sector legislator Chan Pui-leung. The force said it received a report at 6.40am from a security guard at Sau Mau Ping Estate that red paint had been splashed at an office in the estate’s Sau Chi...

More than 300 people signed up for Hong Kong’s Election Committee poll as the nomination period opened on Wednesday, vying for seats on the body that chooses the city’s leader. The nomination period for committee subsectors for the November 22 election will run until October 20. The 1,500-member body will select Hong Kong’s next chief executive in March next year. The Registration and Electoral Office received 305 nominations for candidacy on Wednesday. It also received two nominations from...

Hong Kong will strengthen its regulatory regime and impose stiffer penalties to ensure strong deterrence against building violations, the city leader has pledged, following a series of substandard construction scandals including the latest controversy involving a luxury residential development in Stanley. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu vowed to safeguard the high professional standards of the city’s construction industry on Tuesday in the wake of a debacle involving a house at One Stanley,...

The owners of 14 subsidised sale flats have applied for a grace period to comply with Hong Kong’s new regulatory regime for subdivided homes, the housing minister has revealed, raising concerns that public resources were being abused. The cases were disclosed on Monday at a Legislative Council housing panel meeting when lawmaker Mark Chong Ho-fung asked Secretary for Housing Winnie Ho Wing-yin about the use of subsidised sale flats as subdivided units for renting. Chong said flats sold under the...

The mother of slain Hong Kong socialite Abby Choi Tin-fung has accused her former in-laws of living off her family’s wealth without contributing anything to her grandchildren. Cheung Yin-fa testified in the High Court on Monday about the relationship between her daughter, ex-son-in-law Alex Kwong Kong-chi, and his family in the years leading up to the influencer’s slaying in February 2023. Kwong, 31, his father Kwong Kau, 68, and elder brother Anthony Kwong Kong-kit, 35, are standing trial after...

Hong Kong’s media should eliminate falsehoods and expand their global reach, the chief executive has said, urging news workers to serve as “spokespeople” for good stories about mainland China and Hong Kong. Speaking on Tuesday at an event marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, city leader John Lee Ka-chiu outlined his two expectations for the industry. He first directed media workers to safeguard the truth, dispel falsehoods and exalt the good, invoking a...

Hong Kong authorities have launched a one-month consultation to reform the city’s arbitration laws, as part of efforts to enhance its competitiveness as an international dispute resolution hub and advance an objective laid out in its first local five-year plan. The Department of Justice said on Monday that the one-month stakeholder consultation for amendments to the Arbitration Ordinance, which governs the use of the alternative dispute resolution mechanism, would cover four key areas to enhance...

Hong Kong district councillor Peggy Wong Pik-kiu has resigned from office and several other community roles citing health reasons, following mounting controversy over her team’s alleged proxy-vote collection before last year’s fatal Wang Fuk Court inferno. Wong, a directly elected district councillor for the Tai Po South constituency, also stepped down from her duties as a member of the Tai Po South Area Committee and captain of the Tai Po Kwong Fuk and Plover Cove sub-district care teams. The...

Hong Kong’s Labour Department has terminated Kwai Chung-based catering firm Happy Up Corporation’s application to import workers after it failed to meet the required local hiring ratio. The company has also been barred from applying to import workers for a year. A department spokesman said on Tuesday that the administrative sanctions had taken immediate effect under the Enhanced Supplementary Labour Scheme (ESLS) following an application previously submitted by the company. He added that...

Senior police official Kelvin Kong Hok-lai has been named head of the force’s National Security Department, succeeding Andrew Kan Kai-yan, who began pre-retirement leave on Tuesday. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu appointed Kong as deputy police commissioner (national security) under Article 16(2) of the national security law. The appointment took effect immediately after Kong took the oath of office. Lee said Kong, formerly the director of national security, had served with the Hong Kong...

When Tung Chee-hwa died, the obituaries predictably described a Hong Kong shipping mogul who became the city’s first postcolonial chief executive. How his government navigated the Asian financial crisis and severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic and its retreat from Article 23 were highlighted. There was less attention paid to the political hybrid he embodied. Tung sat as vice-chairman of China’s top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,...

Chinese President Xi Jinping and other top leaders sent condolences from Beijing as Hong Kong bade farewell to the city’s first postcolonial leader, Tung Chee-hwa, at a sombre yet poignant state funeral on Sunday. A report by the official Xinhua News Agency praised Tung, who died on September 8 at the age of 89, as “an outstanding contributor to ‘one country two systems’, a renowned patriot, an outstanding social activist and a close friend of” the Communist Party of China. “While Tung was...