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HONG KONG ACTIVIST Joshua Wong has been sentenced to three months in prison for breaching court bans on disclosing personal information about a police officer during 2019 anti-government protests.
Wong rose to prominence in 2014 pro-democracy protests in the Chinese territory and is in prison after being convicted of multiple charges during authorities’ crackdown on the city’s pro-democracy movement.
He intends to plead guilty in the city’s biggest national security case, in which he faces a potential penalty of up to life in prison.
The former student leader of the 2014 protests was not a leader of the 2019 protests but his continued activism and high profile made him a target of the authorities.
The jailing and silencing of activists like Wong have damaged faith in the future of Hong Kong, with many young professionals responding to the shrinking freedoms and autonomy by moving abroad.
During the protests, violent clashes between police and protesters occurred and some protesters expressed their opposition to officers’ questionable tactics through doxxing — the practice of maliciously leaking others’ personal information.
In today’s case, Wong had been convicted of contempt of court after flouting a ban on publishing officers’ details. The prosecution also alleged he breached another order that prohibited people from publishing any matters that might lead to the public identifying the police officer who shot a protester with his revolver in November 2019.
Wong was accused of reposting on Facebook a thread from an online forum that disclosed the details of the officer who fired three live rounds in the residential area of Sai Wan Ho on Hong Kong Island. One of the shots injured a protester and sparked a public outcry at the height of the protests.
Judge Russell Coleman, who handed down the sentence, said he would offer the full reasoning in the next few days.
Hong Kong returned to China’s rule in 1997 under the promise that the former British colony could retain its own political, social, and financial institutions for 50 years.
Critics say the promise is becoming increasingly threadbare in recent years after the enactment of the security law in 2020.
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It would be nice to surprise us with something outside Dublin .
@Donal Carey: Well it is the science gallery in TCD which happens to be in Dublin.
I would like to submit an image and a quote to the ‘Fake’ exhibition.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0112/JuSa2000_tezel.gif
That is time lapse of the faster Earth overtaking the slower moving outer planets Jupiter and Saturn causing them to temporarily fall behind in view. It is the main point of Copernicus in demonstrating that the Earth moves and the Sun is the centre of the solar system based on direct/retrograde motions.
Here is the fake perspective that destroyed the reasoning of Copernicus in the matter of direct/retrogrades -
“For to the earth planetary motions appear sometimes direct, sometimes
stationary, nay, and sometimes retrograde. But from the sun they are
always seen direct,…” Newton
Anyone good enough to spot what is really wrong with that statement from Newton as opposed what the images show ?.
@Gerald Kelleher: never stationary?
@Doz: No but I see what you mean. The old geocentric astronomers thought the planets moved in loops around a stationary Earth as the planets appeared to move in one direction against the background stars, then stop and go backwards (retrograde) before resuming a forward motion (direct). It looked like this in modern imaging -
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100613.html
Copernicus came along and explained that these periodic changes in direction were really the Earth moving and overtaking the slower moving outer planets so we see the motions of the planets directly from a moving Earth and therefore infer the Sun is stationary and central to all planets. It only really makes sense in terms of time lapse -
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html
It gets interesting after this if it is not already interesting.
Imagine Nigel Farage running amok in astronomy and that gives readers some idea what happened when Newton deconstructed astronomical insights and rebuilt him to suit himself. The thing is that extracting the falsehoods from the work of Copernicus or Kepler is not at all difficult and is enjoyable with familiarity
The original Sun-centred astronomers gauged the motion of the planets against the background stars and saw they moved in direct/retrograde motion and what they seen as loops. Once Copernicus explained that it was due to the Earth’s orbital motion they could gauge variations such as variable orbital speeds. Modern imaging allows observers to appreciate the loops -
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160915.html
In the 16th century they created graphics instead of the same thing and most notable Kepler -
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Kepler_Mars_retrograde.jpg
“Copernicus, by attributing a single annual motion to the earth,
entirely rids the planets of these extremely intricate coils leading
the individual planets into their respective orbits ,quite bare and
very nearly circular. In the period of time shown in the diagram, Mars
traverses one and the same orbit as many times as the ‘garlands’ you
see looped towards the center,with one extra, making nine times, while
at the same time the Earth repeats its circle sixteen times ” Kepler
Newton thinks if you plonk the Sun in the centre of the diagram that the looping motions disappear and that is why he conjured up a true/ apparent motion based on a stupid notion of direct/retrogrades.
Again, it is not that difficult for reasonable people even when they are so hard to find.
have your say