Hong Kong locks down Tiananmen vigil park amid tight security, arrests organizer

By Clare Jim and Scott Murdoch

HONG KONG (Reuters) -Police blocked off a Hong Kong park to prevent people gathering to commemorate the anniversary of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on Friday and arrested the planned vigil’s organizer.

The ban on the vigil came amid growing concern in the pro-democracy movement and internationally about the suppression of the semi-autonomous city’s traditional freedoms, notably a national security law imposed by Beijing last year.

The annual June 4 vigil is usually held in the former British colony’s Victoria Park, with people gathering to light candles for the pro-democracy demonstrators killed by Chinese troops in Beijing 32 years ago.

This year, with thousands of police deployed across the city, some marked the anniversary in churches or at home amid fears of being arrested.

In the working class district of Mong Kok, minor scuffles broke out and police arrested one person. As night fell, police cleared people from around Victoria Park as they walked with their phone lights on.

“Being able to have a memory is a basic human right. Taking that away is beyond anyone’s authority,” District Councilor Derek Chu told Reuters. “We need to remember those people who have been sacrificed for democracy in the past.”

Early on Friday, police arrested Chow Hang Tung, vice-chairwoman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, for promoting an unauthorized assembly.

“She only wanted to go to Victoria Park, light a candle and commemorate,” Chiu Yan Loy, executive member of the Alliance, told Reuters.

He said believed her arrest was meant to strike fear into those planning to attend.

Chow told Reuters earlier this week that June 4 was a test for Hong Kong “of whether we can defend our bottom line of morality”.

The Alliance’s chairman, Lee Cheuk-yan, is in jail over an illegal assembly.

Authorities warned of more arrests and said that anyone who took part in an unauthorized assembly could face up to five years in jail.

Police cordoned off most of the downtown park, including football pitches and basketball courts. They also conducted stop-and-search checks across the city, with officers posted at three cross-harbour tunnels.

The heightened vigilance from authorities was a marked departure from Hong Kong’s freedoms of speech and assembly, bringing the global financial hub closer in line with mainland China’s strict controls on society, activists say.

Police did not say whether commemorating Tiananmen would breach the new national security law.

“From the bottom of my heart, I must say I believe Hong Kong is still a very safe and free city,” senior superintendent Liauw Ka-kei told reporters, saying police had no option but to enforce the law.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has only said that citizens must respect the law, as well as the Communist Party, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary. June 4 commemorations are banned in mainland China.

China has never provided a full account of the 1989 violence in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The death toll given by officials days later was about 300, most of them soldiers, but rights groups and witnesses say thousands of people may have perished.

CANDLES AT CHURCHES

At the United States consulate and European Union office in Hong Kong, candles flickered at windows throughout the buildings. Seven churches that arranged to hold memorial masses were full, according to their Facebook pages, with some of the congregation holding white flowers and lighting candles.

One church on Hong Kong island quickly reached its 30% capacity set by coronavirus restrictions and opened up its courtyard to accommodate more people.

Jailed activist Jimmy Sham said via his Facebook page he planned to “light a cigarette at 8pm”.

“We do not see the hope of democracy and freedom in a leader, a group, or a ceremony. Every one of us is the hope of democracy and freedom,” he said.

Last year, thousands in Hong Kong defied the ban on marking the Tiananmen anniversary.

Prominent democracy activist Joshua Wong received a 10-month prison sentence last month for participating in the 2020 vigil, while three others got four-to six-month sentences. Twenty more are due in court on June 11 on similar charges.

(Additional reporting by Jessie Pang, James Pomfret, Pak Yiu and Scott Murdoch and Hong Kong newsroom; Writing by Marius Zaharia and Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Robert Birsel, Mark Heinrich and Angus MacSwan)

“Lock down,” says Italy adviser, as deaths head for wartime levels

By Reuters Staff

ROME (Reuters) – An adviser to Italy’s health ministry has called for coronavirus restrictions to be drastically tightened to avoid a “national tragedy” after the national statistics bureau ISTAT said deaths this year would be the highest since World War Two.

“We are in a war situation, people don’t realize it but the last time we had this many deaths, bombs were dropping on our cities during the war,” public health professor Walter Ricciardi told the television channel la7 on Tuesday evening.

Ricciardi, the adviser to Health Minister Roberto Speranza, said the government, which is considering tightening restrictions over the Christmas and New Year holidays, should lock down the main cities completely.

In an interview with Wednesday’s daily La Stampa, he said Rome had been “constantly late” in responding to the second, autumn wave of the virus.

Italy reported 846 COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday, taking the official total to 65,857, the fifth highest in the world.

As in many other countries, that total is widely considered to be an underestimate because many people who died of COVID-19 during the first wave were never tested for the virus.

ISTAT head Gian Carlo Blangiardo said on Tuesday that the overall number of deaths in Italy this year would exceed 700,000, against 647,000 in 2019.

“The last time something like this happened was in 1944 when we were at the height of the Second World War,” he told RAI state television.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Tuesday urged Italians to avoid “irresponsible” gatherings over the holidays and said the government might make some “small adjustments” to its current restrictions.

But Ricciardi told La Stampa this was not enough:

“The Netherlands has locked down with half our deaths, Germany has locked down with a third of them – I don’t understand this hesitation. If we don’t take adequate measures, we are heading for a national tragedy.”

Two police officers among four fatally shot in Canada: authorities

Emergency vehicles are seen at the Brookside Drive area in Fredericton, Canada August 10, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media. Kev Bourque/via REUTERS

By Anna Mehler Paperny

FREDERICTON, New Brunswick (Reuters) – Four people, including two police officers, were killed in a shooting in eastern Canada on Friday in the latest eruption of gun violence across the country that has led to calls for weapons bans in cities.

Police said a suspect was taken into custody just three weeks after a gunman walked down a busy Toronto street, killing two people and wounding 13 others before taking his own life.

Police in Fredericton, a city of about 56,000 that is the capital of the province of New Brunswick, said two of the dead were police officers but gave few details about the circumstances of the shooting and did not release names. They said the suspect was being treated for serious injuries.

Local media images showed emergency vehicles converging on a tree-lined residential street. Nearby facilities were closed and authorities imposed a lockdown for residents before issuing an all-clear message.

“It was scary,” said Marlene Weaver, who was in bed on Friday morning when she heard shots ring out in her neighborhood. “It takes you back to the shooting in Moncton.”

Three RCMP officers were killed and two more were wounded in 2014 in Moncton, New Brunswick, about 195 km (121 miles) from Fredericton, in one of the worst incidents of its kind in Canada.

Gun laws in Canada are stricter than in the United States but a proliferation of weapons has led to an increase in gun-related crimes in recent years.

Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were assisting Fredericton authorities in the investigation.

New Brunswick had only three homicide shootings in 2016, according to Statistics Canada.

“Awful news coming out of Fredericton,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter. “My heart goes out to everyone affected by this morning’s shooting. We’re following the situation closely.”

Jeff Magnussen, general manager of a golf course near the site of the shooting, said by phone he heard multiple gunshots before 8 a.m. local time.

“You hear a lot about gun violence in the United States,” he said, “but this morning when I heard those noises, what’s starting to sink in is that those noises were people losing their lives. To have it happen so close to us is shocking. Now we’re becoming the story that nobody wants to hear.”

In the wake of the Toronto bloodshed, the city council voted overwhelmingly to urge the federal government to ban the sale of handguns in the city. Gun laws are under federal jurisdiction.

“Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?” Toronto Mayor John Tory said. Canada’s largest city has had 241 shooting incidents this year, resulting in 30 deaths, a 30 percent increase in fatalities.

On Thursday, Ontario pledged more money for police and to keep suspects behind bars while they await trial on gun crimes charges, as the Canadian province grapples with rising shootings involving domestically obtained weapons.

(Additional reporting by Danya Hajjaji and Allison Martell in Toronto and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Secrecy, delays surrounded North Korea leader’s slow train to China

FILE PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves from a train, as he paid an unofficial visit to China, in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang March 28, 2018. KCNA/via Reuters/File Photo

By Brenda Goh and Sue-Lin Wong

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) – For a regime obsessed with secrecy, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s decision to travel to Beijing on a distinctive green armored train was an all-but-dead giveaway that he was making his first journey abroad since assuming power in 2011.

The historic visit sent officials scrambling to obscure the identity of the 21-car train and its occupants as it meandered across roughly 1,100 km (680 miles) of track through northeast China, causing rare delays along the way and triggering a growing frenzy of speculation as it neared the Chinese capital.

The train arrived at Beijing Station on Monday afternoon and left the following afternoon, with the identity of its occupants only announced on Wednesday morning – after it had crossed back into North Korea at the city of Sinuiju.

Clues that something unusual was afoot emerged in the border city of Dandong, just across the Yalu River from North Korea and linked to the isolated country by the Sino-Korea Friendship Bridge. That bridge bears a single rail track which, it turned out, carried Kim’s train into China late on Sunday.

The Daily NK, a Seoul-based website staffed by North Korean defectors, reported that boards supported by scaffolding had been set up on the platform at Dandong’s train station, blocking what is ordinarily an open view, before two trains passed through the station between 10:20 and 10:40 p.m. on Sunday night.

Yao Jun, who sells car parts in Dandong, said the station was locked down again on Tuesday night, an unusual occurrence. Kim returned to North Korea in the early hours of Wednesday.

“Now we know for next time – if the train station is in lockdown then that means Kim Jong Un has come to China,” Yao told Reuters.

At least one Dandong hotel was told by Chinese authorities not to book rooms facing the bridge, while tours from China into the North were canceled on Sunday, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. A local resident said that a wedding party along the river on Sunday had been told not to set off firecrackers.

By Monday morning sighting rumors and pictures were making the rounds on Chinese social media, before being blocked or deleted by censors, while railway bureaus began warning travelers to expect delays or cancellations on Monday and Tuesday.

The disruptions were noteworthy in a country with a vast rail network that prides itself on its efficiency, with 98.8 percent of trains departing on time in 2016 and 95.4 percent arriving on schedule, and prompted complaints online.

Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University who researches the country’s railway system, said Kim’s train traveled on the regular track network, rather than on the tracks used by the country’s high-speed trains.

“Passenger and freight traffic would have been affected,” he said.

A person answering the official phone line at Dandong station on Thursday stressed that everything had been “normal” this week, and asked, “who told you the station was closed?”

An official in the international cooperation department of the China Railway Corporation declined immediate comment on Kim’s visit.

MANCHURIA AND THE GREAT WALL

China has not disclosed the route taken by Kim in the train – green with a yellow stripe resembling one used by his late father, Kim Jong Il, on his last visit to China in 2011.

Based on photos from the elder Kim’s visit, the only visible difference between the two trains was a license plate. The younger Kim’s license plate showed DF0002; the plate on the train used by his father displayed DF0001.

North Korean state media showed Kim and his entourage, including his wife Ri Sol Ju, seated on stuffed pink sofas inside the train carriage with Song Tao, the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s international affairs department, during their inbound stop in Dandong.

There are at least two likely rail routes between Dandong and Beijing, and an ordinary service takes at least 14 hours, according to Chinese railway timetables. The route is also covered by China’s high-speed trains, which travel on separate tracks, in just over six hours.

But social media posts made by local railway bureaus and ordinary users on social media suggest a surge in delays around the route from Dandong that heads north to Shenyang, in the region previously known as Manchuria. The route then snakes west along the Hebei province coast towards Beijing.

On Monday morning, Weibo users at rail stations in Tangshan and Tianjin began complaining of unexpected cancellations to regular services bound for Beijing, which they said were made without explanation.

In a Weibo post published at 5:14 p.m. on Monday and since deleted, the Beijing Railway Bureau told travelers waiting at stations in Beijing, Tianjin and Shijiazhuang to expect delays of up to two hours for trains from Shenyang and Qinhuangdao.

On Tuesday evening, a Twitter user with the handle “2018you333” posted a grainy video of a train with a single horizontal stripe hurtling across an empty car underpass, which the user said was taken at the Shanhai Pass area, 300 km east of Beijing and a major pass in the Great Wall of China.

“Let’s guess where this distinguished guest is coming from!”, the post said.

Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the video.

(Additional reporting by Michael Martina, Philip Wen and the Shanghai and Beijing newsrooms; Editing by Tony Munroe and Alex Richardson)