The owner of Hong Kong anti-communist news-paper Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai, is facing a minimum of a decade in prison after being charged on December 11 with violating the city’s new, and illegal, law against “national security” trespasses.
Prosecutors charged Lai, 73, under the law’s “foreign intervention” provision for allegedly having conversations with foreigners about the steep decline of respect for human rights in Hong Kong in the past year.
The “national security” law mandates no less than ten years in prison for those convicted of four times of national security crimes: foreign interference, “secession,” “terrorism,” and “subversion of state power.” The law was implemented through Beijing’s National People’s Assembly, which violates Hong Kong’s longstanding policy of “One Country, Two Systems.” Under the policy, Hong Kong cannot exercise sovereignty and the Chinese Communist Party cannot impose its laws on the city. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, a Beijing loyalist, has nonetheless ordered Hong Kong police to enforce the illegal legislation.
Apple Daily has developed a reputation for being one of Hong Kong’s most vocal publications criticizing the current government’s friendliness towards Beijing. The newspaper regularly covers Hong Kong police’s use of violence against peaceful dissidents and Lai himself became a regular during the anti-communist protests that erupted in the city in 2019.

Church leaders have thanked Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan for ordering an investigation into forced conversions of females from religious minorities.
“The PM has ordered an investigation on a case-by-case basis of incidents of forced con-versions of minor girls belonging to minority communities, particularly Christian and Hindu, to find reasons for this issue. Law and rights are equal for all. Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and daughters of minorities are our daughters as well,” said Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, the PM’s special representative on religious harmony.
“Forced marriages, forced conversion of religion and abdu-ction of underage girls of other religions in the name of marriages will not be tolerated. The human rights ministry, in consultation with other stakeholders, is working out a mechanism to eliminate the fear of forced marriage among non-Muslims.”
Ashrafi was speaking at a joint press conference on November 30 with Catholic and Protestant bishops on Nov. 30 at St Peter’s School of Lahore.
Church of Pakistan Bishop Azad Marshall, president of the National Council of Church-es, welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision.
“We urge Islamic scholars and government officials to sit with us and develop a mechanism for judging instances of religious conversion of children. Many cases go unreported due to societal pressure and fear of reprisal from the accused” he said.

A female professor at Loyola College (Autonomous) is listed in the world’s top 2 percent scien-tists. J. Judith Vijaya of the De-partment of Chemistry has been named in the world’s top scientist, in the field of “materials.”
The analysis was conducted by a team of scientists from Stanford University, USA, led by John P. A Ioannidis and published in PLOS Biology on October 2, Jesuit Father A Thomas, principal said in a statement.
The management of Loyola congratulates Vijaya for placing Loyola College on the global map of scientific research and bringing laurels to the institute, he added.
“Our youngest cousin Vijaya who is a professor at Loyola Chennai is listed in the world’s top 2% scientists. Proud of this brilliant sister of ours,” said Sister Cicily, a Handmaid of Mary nun, who is working in Odisha. Vijaya has been teaching at Loyola College since 2001.
Jesuit-run Loyola College was established in 1925. It offers several undergraduate and graduate degrees in Commerce, Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences and liberal arts.
She did her undergraduate course in Chemistry at Stella Maris College, University of Madras, Masters in Chemistry and Ph.D. at Loyola College.

China criticized Pope Francis on November 24 over a passage in his new book in which he mentions suffering by China’s Uighur Muslim minority group.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Francis’ remarks had “no factual basis at all.”
“People of all ethnic groups enjoy the full rights of survival, development, and freedom of religious belief,” Zhao said at a daily briefing.
Zhao made no mention of the camps in which more than 1 million Uighurs and members of other Chinese Muslim minority groups have been held. The U.S. and other governments, along with human rights groups, say the prison-like facilities are intended to divide Muslims from their religious and cultural heritage, forcing them to declare loyalty to China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping.
China, which initially denied the existence of the facilities, now says they are centers intended to provide job training and prevent terrorism and religious extremism on a voluntary basis.
In his new book Let Us Dream, due Dec. 1, Francis listed the “poor Uighurs” among examples of groups persecuted for their faith.
Francis wrote about the need to see the world from the peripheries and the margins of society, “to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude.”
In such places of suffering, “I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi — what ISIS did to them was truly cruel — or Christians in Egypt and Pakistan killed by bombs that went off while they prayed in church,” Francis wrote.

“A hidden Church,” “not noisy;” as small as “a Fiat 500,” but alive, which envisions its apostolate above all through schools and help for migrants. This is the image of the Church of Brunei, depicted by the new cardinal- designate Cornelius Sim speaking with AsiaNews via Zoom. Despite being among the smallest churches in Southeast Asia – indeed, perhaps precisely for this reason – Pope Francis wanted to reserve a Cardinal’s hat for Archbishop Sim during the next consistory on 28 November. Unfortunately, the new cardinal will not be able to be present at the ceremony in Rome, due to the Covid-19 lockdown.
“We are a minority Church and this makes us prudent. Not so much because we are discriminated against… Like in any family gathering, small children should be quiet to let the elders talk. So we are quiet. And we, being small, accept our role: if the dishes have to be washed, we do it; if the floor has to be swept, we do it; we do what is required of us.
As a Church we have three small parishes and a mission station. We also have some schools, linked to the parish. Most of our social apostolate takes place through the school, which was opened in the 1930s. School is where our presence started. And where the Church has been established. The Church was actually present here in the first half of the 1800s, thanks to a PIME father [Fr Antonio Riva, in the Barambang mission; Fr Ignazio Borgazzi in Labuan – ed] but after three or four years, those priests were called to Hong Kong and their attempt did not bear much fruit, until 1920, when the Mill Hill missionaries arrived from Sabah (in present-day Malaysia.) The missionaries started a small school. My grandfather was one of the first to be baptized and he was one of the first Catholics in the nation.
And so the Church has always been involved in school, in education, which is not a partisan education, but an open one: 70 percent and more of the students are non-Catholics. There are Muslims, Buddhists, people of different faiths, or people without any faith. Our schools are renowned for the quality of the education they offer. Our teachers are academically bright and prepared. The teachers are local, but also international: they come from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, …
We are the smallest Church in ASEAN. Perhaps only Laos has a very small Church like ours.
We have about 16 thousand faithful. There were more, but due to the economic crisis, many people left the country. On Sundays, 3-4 thousand people arrive at every mass.”
–AsiaNews

The U.S. will be working against the use of technology to suppress religious minorities, the religious freedom ambassador announced.
“The United States announced that we will pursue the topic of misuse of technology to oppress religious minorities,” said Sam Brownback, Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Free-dom, on a Nov. 17 press call about the 2020 Ministerial to Advance Freedom of Religion or Belief.
Brownback cited China’s abuses against Ughurs; it has created a “virtual police state” to track the movements of the population and to engage in predictive policing.
“We’re seeing this graphically done in Xinjiang, where high-tech observation systems using artificial intelligence and facial recognition are oppressing a dominantly Muslim majority from practicing its faith, this along with being locked up in detention facilities – over a million Muslim Uyghurs locked up in detention facilities,” Brownback said.
Poland hosted the third annual ministerial, held virtually on Nov. 16-17 due to the pandemic. The meeting featured leaders from more than 50 countries and international organizations. –CNA

A U.K. based charity has called on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to grant asylum to a 14-year-old Christian girl who was abducted at gunpoint during the Covid-19 lockdown and forcibly married and converted to Islam by a Muslim married man.
The Catholic charity Aid to Church in Need, which supports persecuted Christians around the world, is urging concerned Chri-stians to add their names to an online petition that will be sent to the Prime Minister on behalf of Catholic teenager Maira Shahbaz in Pakistan, who was abducted in April.
In August, Maira fled the home of her alleged husband, Mohamad Nakash, weeks after the Lahore High Court ordered her to return to her abductor and ruled that she was legally married to the Muslim man.
“Regardless of what the court eventually decides, Maira’s life will forever be in danger,” the charity said. “There is the threat of honour killing. Extremists in Pakistan consider her an apostate and will kill her at the first chance. Her lawyer said men have been looking for her, knocking on doors and asking for her whereabouts.”
–MATTERS INDIA

Lebanon’s “living together,” the historic vocation perceived and conferred by Pope John Paul II to Lebanon, and proposed by him – for our greatest honour and confusion – as “model for East and West,” is once again in the spotlight because of what is happening in a world where multi-religious societies are constantly growing, not without frictions, wars and sometimes horrible massacres.
In his homily on Sunday 15 November, in which he accused those who are delaying  the formation of a government by Saad Hariri of trying to “overthrow of the State of Greater Lebanon” established by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the head of the Maronite Church, Patriarch Bechara al-Rahi, sought to comfort the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh that Azerbaijan has just militarily conquered, by offering them as model Lebanon’s “living together,” encouraging them not to flee their homes and their shrines, but to agree to coexist in good harmony with the Muslims of Azerbaijan, in a multicultural and multi-religious state in which the believers of the two great Muslim and Christian religions stand together in an atmosphere of mutual acceptance. –AsiaNews