Politics

The winds of change are blowing across the globe. What triggers such change, and when it will strike, is something that no one can predict.

Last Jan. 18, a courageous young woman in Egypt took a dangerous step. Asmaa Mahfouz was 25 years old, part of the April 6 Youth Movement, with thousands of young people engaging online in debate on the future of their country.

Lunchtime at the HSBC building Central Hong Kong – gone was its strangely grimy sterility once only broken by smoothly ascending escalators that carry what appear to be robotised humans into its underbelly; the grey flagstone base now replete with a growing tent city, tables of foodstuff, sofas, gaudy banners, quietly disposed youngies at laptops or in small bands, talking.

The often violent response to the Occupy Wall Street campaign that is growing in the United States and elsewhere is affecting the freedom to inform. Reporters Without Borders [campaigning for press freedom] condemns the arrests of reporters in recent weeks, especially in New York where the police assume the right to decide who are journalists.

As Occupy London Stock Exchange celebrated a week of protest thousands gathered for a public assembly in the heart of London’s financial centre. The General Secretary of Britain’s largest trade union added his support. A second occupation was born in nearby Finsbury Sq. St Paul’s Cathedral closed its doors claiming health and safety issues and asking the camp to leave.

In 1967, a year before his assessination, Martin Luther King gave a speech called “Beyond Vietnam” in which he proclaimed: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

Anti-corruption ‘soldier’ Mr Tony Kwok, former Operation Head, ICAC Hong Kong, interviewed by Hong Kong resident Dilip K. Pandey, a volunteer with India Against Corruption campaign, looking at: the anti-corruption movement in India and the role of an independent anti-corruption agency like Lokpal. Presented in full owing to its usefulness as a reference.

Hong Kong has its activists who are always in the limelight of the daily news but the Occupy Hong Kong action October 15 was not as graspable as the usual issues that brings the regulars out onto the street. A strong crowd gathered, in Hong Kong Central, of the more committed, regulars but mostly the new and deeply enthusiastic.

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. “the human microphone”), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

Palestinians gathered in Jerusalem on Sunday night to protest the October 9 killing of Egyptian Copts in Cairo. The mass demonstration was followed by Christian and Muslim prayers and speeches denouncing the incidents, in which Egyptian soldiers from the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) clashed with Coptic Christians, resulting in 25 deaths.

This day will be considered in Palestine as the day of the appointment with freedom for hundreds of the Palestinian prisoners, and the day of meeting the loved ones for hundred of families. The largest prisoners swap in history between Hamas and Israel has begun it first step
releasing 477 Palestinian prisoners including 27 women in exchange of
Israeli soldier Gila’ad Shalit