Hong Kong puts a bounty on five more pro-democracy activists

Today's news: Indonesia will send 100,000 workers to Japan over five years; Afghan refugees in Pakistan will be allowed to stay in the country another two months; China says it has brokered 'a temporary ceasefire' between Burma's coup junta and ethnic militias; Taiwan presidential candidates divided over submarine development; 800,000 Russians have moved to Crimea since 2014.

HONG KONG

Hong Kong police are offering a 1 million Hong Kong dollar (8,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of five pro-democracy activists living abroad accused of violating the national security law. One of them, Simon Cheng, now living in the United Kingdom, was arrested in mainland China in 2019 and said he had been "chained, blindfolded and hooded" during detention.

INDONESIA – JAPAN

Over the next five years, Indonesia will send another 100,000 workers to Japan to address the local labor shortage. Japan began a program to welcome skilled foreign workers in 2019, but Japan would need 6.7 million foreign workers by 2040 to keep economic growth on track, according to a 2022 report from the Japan International Cooperation Agency .

PAKISTAN – AFGHANISTAN

The Pakistani government has announced that Afghan refugees waiting for documents from a third country will be able to stay in the country for another two months, extending a deadline expected in recent days to February 29, 2024. In October, Islamabad had forced the expulsion of over a million Afghans and according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), more than 450 thousand people have returned, motivated mainly by the fear of being arrested in Pakistan.

MYANMAR – CHINA

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning yesterday declared that Beijing had mediated "a temporary ceasefire" between the Burmese coup junta and the three ethnic militias that launched a coordinated offensive in northern Myanmar at the end of November. China had previously mentioned talks between the warring sides but made no reference to a truce.

TAIWAN

Candidates in Taiwan's presidential election, due next month, are divided over domestic submarine development efforts to counter China's military threat, highlighting deep divisions over defense. The Kuomintang would like to open an investigation into Admiral Huang Shu -kuang, former head of the armed forces who now heads a task force for the production of submarines, a key project of the current president Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party.

RUSSIA

The Ukrainian section of the Helsinki Group for Human Rights has calculated that 800,000 Russians have moved to Crimea since the 2014 annexation, while over 100,000 Ukrainians have abandoned the peninsula, evidence of an ongoing "ethnic substitution" by Russia , which also continues to progressively deport and expel Tatars from Crimea.

MOLDOVA

Another 6 Moldovan Orthodox priests in Chişinău and in a village near the capital switched to the Romanian Church, being suspended a divinis by the metropolitan of all Moldova Vladimir (Kantaryan), deepening the ongoing schism after the Moldovan Synod rejected the request to break away from the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow.

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