‘Grandma Wong’ held for protest over Tiananmen
HONG KONG: Hong Kong police have arrested an elderly democracy activist as she made a solo demonstration over China’s deadly Tiananmen crackdown in a vivid illustration of the zero protest tolerance now wielded by authorities in the financial hub.
Alexandra Wong, 65, was detained on Sunday on suspicion of taking part in an unlawful assembly as she walked towards Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong.
Wong - known locally as “Grandma Wong” - was a regular fixture of the huge democracy protests that swept Hong Kong in 2019.
She could often be seen waving a Union Jack flag, a symbol of her dissatisfaction with Beijing’s
rule since the city was handed to China by former colonial power Britain in 1997.
Protest is now all but outlawed in Hong Kong.
Authorities have used both the threat of the coronavirus and security concerns to ban demonstrations.
A vigil planned for this Friday - the 32nd anniversary of Beijing’s 1989 crackdown on democracy protests in Tiananmen Square - has been denied permission for the second year in a row.
HK prosecutors: Activists may be jailed for life
Dozens of leading Hong Kong democracy activists could face up to life in prison for organising an unofficial primary election, prosecutors confirmed on Monday, in the most sweeping use yet of Beijing’s strict new security law. Police charged the 47 activists with “subversion” after they organised a non-binding vote last year to choose candidates for an ultimately postponed local election.
The defendants say they were simply taking part in opposition politics. But authorities accused them of a “vicious plot” to subvert the government by seeking a majority in the city’s partiallyelected legislature.
On Monday the defendants appeared en masse for the first time in nearly three months at a hearing in which a judge granted a request by prosecutors to have the case upgraded to the city’s high court.
Offences heard in that court start at seven years imprisonment for those who are convicted. The maximum penalty under the new security law is life in prison.
WASHINGTON: All seven passengers aboard a plane, including Tarzan actor Joe Lara and his diet guru wife, died after it crashed in a lake near the US city of Nashville, authorities said.
The small business jet crashed at around 11am local time on Saturday, shortly after taking off from the Smyrna, Tennessee airport for Palm Beach, Florida, Rutherford County Fire & Rescue (RCFR) said on Facebook.
The plane went down into Percy Priest Lake, about 19 kilometres south of Nashville.
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed seven people had been aboard the plane, the CNN reported.
By Saturday night, operations had switched from search and rescue to recovery efforts, RCFR incident commander Joshua Sanders told a press conference.
“We are no longer in an attempt to (look) for live victims at this point so we’re now recovering as much as we can from the crash site,” he said.
On Sunday afternoon, RCFR said on Facebook that recovery operations had found “several components of the aircraft as well as human remains” in a debris field about half a mile wide.
Operations would continue until dark and resume on Monday morning, RCFR wrote on Facebook.
Lara played Tarzan in the 1989 television movie Tarzan in Manhattan.
He later starred in the television series Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, which ran from 1996-97.
His wife Gwen Shamblin Lara, whom he married in 2018, was the leader of a Christian weight loss group called Weigh Down Ministries.
She founded the group in 1986, and then in 1999 founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood, Tennessee.
She is survived by two children from a previous marriage, according to a statement posted on the church’s website.