Media tycoon Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years in Hong Kong
Jimmy Lai, Apple Daily founder, arrives at the Court of Final Appeal ahead a bail hearing on February 9, 2021 in Hong Kong, China. (Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)
(HONG KONG) — China critic and media mogul Jimmy Lai has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in Hong Kong for national security offences, a penalty his son Sebastien called “heartbreaking.”
Lai was found guilty on charges of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign forces. He had pleaded not guilty.
It is the harshest sentence delivered to anyone under the sweeping national security law since Beijing introduced it as part of crackdowns in 2020. Lai’s family has been worried their 78-year-old dad would die in prison, and given his age and this 20-year-penalty, there is now a real chance that will happen.
It was a tense morning at the court in Hong Kong. Where there would once be huge lively crowds gathering in support of Hong Kong’s democracy figures, the mood was subdued and yet at the same time on edge. There was a heavy police presence outside the court, where officers were tightly controlling the media and the supporters who were queueing up outside of the court.
Lai’s wife, Teresa, walked out of the court holding back tears behind her large black glasses after seeing her husband in the dock, expressionless as he received his sentence.
Jimmy Lai is a U.K. citizen, and his son Sebastien said he is hoping, now that the case has worked its way through the Hong Kong judicial system, that China may release his father as a way to appease the U.K. and the U.S., especially ahead of President Donald Trump’s scheduled visit to China in April.
“Even though it was expected, it’s still quite a hard reality to have to deal with,” Sebastien Lai said. “There’s no upside in what China is doing to dad and there are very real consequences if he dies in there. That April visit is key.”
“I’m sure many Americans would want to have done what my father did in standing for freedom and defending his people. And for that heroism he is being tortured and sentenced to life in prison,” he added.
When ABC News interviewed Lai at his home while he was on bail in September 2020, Lai explained why he was willing to risk it all. He said he escaped from China at the age of 12 with just a dollar, “This place gave me everything. My reward is to pay back. It’s my redemption.”
U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Hong Kong should free Lai “on humanitarian grounds” and the UK government has also pledged to “rapidly engage further” with Beijing. Trump said back in December that he asked President Xi Jinping to consider Lai’s release, and the U.S. ambassador to China David Perdue has said Lai’s case is part of “ongoing discussions” with the Chinese side.
The sentence has been widely condemned by human rights groups, with Human Rights Watch calling the length of the sentence “effectively a death sentence.”
Amnesty International said it was “another grim milestone in Hong Kong’s transformation from a city governed by the rule of law to one ruled by fear.”
Meanwhile, Beijing and Hong Kong officials welcomed the penalty, with Hong Kong’s leader John Lee saying Lai deserved the 20-year prison sentence for his “evil deeds.”
China’s foreign ministry on Monday called the punishment “legitimate and reasonable.”
Greenland residents and political leaders have publicly rejected suggestions by U.S. President Donald Trump that the Arctic island could become part of the United States. Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, has emphasized that its future will be decided by its own people, with officials stating that the island is not for sale and does not wish to become American. (Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were expected to meet Wednesday at the White House with top diplomats from the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenland, its semiautonomous territory, U.S. officials said, as tensions escalate amid President Donald Trump’s threats to “acquire” the island — possibly even by military force.
When asked about his strong personal interest in the world’s largest island, Trump repeatedly cites its rare earth minerals and other natural resources he says are critical to U.S. national security.
“One way or the other, we are going to have Greenland,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He told the New York Times last week that his desire to take over the territory is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”
At the same time, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen argues Trump using the U.S. military to seize Greenland would mark “the end of NATO” because Denmark, a NATO ally, like the U.S., is obligated to come to the island’s defense, as are other European NATO allies.
The European Union’s defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, echoed her grave hypothetical scenario, contending Europe would be forced to confront the U.S. if Greenland’s NATO allies had to protect it from an American takeover attempt.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has downplayed the diplomatic alarms, saying the alliance is “not at all” in crisis and offered assurances it was focused on securing the Arctic from inroads by China and Russia, something Trump has said Greenland, and Denmark, have failed to do.
Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said Wednesday’s meeting was aimed at understanding the U.S. position after weeks of heated rhetoric from Trump and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who has said the U.S. has a “right” to Greenland and has notably declined to rule out military force to secure it.
“Our reason for seeking the meeting we have now been given,” Rasmussen said, “was to move this whole discussion, which has not become less tense since we last met, into a meeting room where we can look each other in the eye and talk about these things.”
But Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, was more direct ahead of the Washington meeting.
“We are now facing a geopolitical crisis,” he said. “If we have to choose between the U.S. and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark, NATO, and the EU.”
On Tuesday, when was asked about the prime minister’s comments, Trump told reporters, “That’s their problem. I disagree with them. I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him, but that’s going to be a big problem for him.”
Danes shocked by US rhetoric toward Greenland Danish and Greenlandic officials have said consistently that Greenland is not for sale, even as Rubio appeared to try to temper Trump’s strong rhetoric — and defuse congressional opposition to using force — by floating the idea of the U.S. buying the island, saying Trump has talked about doing so since his first term.
A source familiar with the emerging rift said the policy pronouncement came as a shock, and that the U.S. goal to buy the island was never communicated to Copenhagen — which the source said had never received an offer of any kind.
State Department officials under Rubio had never driven a Greenland policy aimed at acquiring it, the source said, and Copenhagen had been satisfied with bilateral relations through most of 2025.
That changed in December, when Trump appointed Louisiana GOP Gov. Jeff Landry to be his special envoy to Greenland, a move designed to steer policy from the White House instead of through the State Department, the source said.
Vance, who traveled to Greenland last March, said last Thursday, “I guess my advice to European leaders and anybody else would be to take the president of the United States seriously.”
Following some of Trump’s comments that he wanted Greenland to be part of the U.S., which came days after he ordered the American military to attack Venezuela, Danish and Greenlandic officials in Washington went to Capitol Hill to voice concerns to lawmakers.
A source familiar with those meetings said there was a tone shift among Republicans, who said they took the president’s threats seriously – not as a laughing matter.
The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee emerged from his meeting with the Danish envoys foreclosing any suggestion the future of Greenland was in dispute.
“I think it has been made clear from our Danish friends and our friends in Greenland that that future does not include a negotiation,” Sen. Roger Wicker said.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of American lawmakers was crossing the Atlantic for meetings in Copenhagen at the end of this week.
Arctic security as a central argument Trump has said the U.S. would demand sovereignty over the island for its own national security purposes, suggesting China and Russia could pose a threat to America by taking the island themselves.
“Basically, their defense is two dog sleds,” Trump said of Greenland, where the U.S. has a military base and 150 troops stationed. “In the meantime, you have Russian destroyers and submarines and China destroyers and submarines all over the place.”
Danish officials have pointed to new investments there and a willingness to work with NATO and the U.S. on protecting the island. The kingdom announced a $6.5 billion Arctic defense package last year.
Denmark’s top lawmaker overseeing defense said the threat to the island did not come from the east, but instead from the U.S., its NATO ally across the Atlantic.
“It is my job to be on top of security in Greenland and I get all relevant information about it,” Rasmus Jarlov wrote in a post on X. “I can assure you that your fantasies about a big threat from China and Russia against Greenland are delusional. You are the threat,” he wrote of the U.S. “Not them.”
Provocations from China and Russia have been more concentrated near Alaska than Greenland, said Connor McPartland, who noted China has minimal commercial interests on the island and there’s been no uptick in Russian or Chinese naval activity near the island.
McPartland, who was the deputy director of the Pentagon’s Office for Arctic and Global Security until September, said Trump’s attention to Arctic security comes as a needed focus on an overlooked region.
“Caring about the Arctic is not just caring about the Arctic,” he said. “It has ramifications for our global security, not just in this one little sliver of at the top of the world.”
“In my office, we’d like to say that the Arctic is the front door to the homeland, because most of the really existential threats to the United States that we think about [like a] nuclear missile … are going to fly over the pole to get to the continental United States,” said McPartland, who is now an an assistant director with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative.
“It’s the fastest way to get to the United States, from Russia, from North Korea, from Iran, from China.”
A 1951 treaty between the U.S. and Greenland allows the American military, which has downsized its presence to only one base in Greenland, to upscale its footprint as it wants. During the Cold War, the U.S. had 17 military installations there.
“There aren’t really problems to be solved by the United States controlling Greenland,” said McPartland. “We can build infrastructure, we can station troops, we can operate from Greenland almost at will, as long as we recognize the sovereignty of Denmark and Greenland.”
People gather during protest on January 8, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. Demonstrations have been ongoing since December, triggered by soaring inflation and the collapse of the rial, and have expanded into broader demands for political change. (Anonymous/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization confirmed on Thursday morning that flights were back in operation over the country, according to a statement carried by Iranian state-aligned media.
Iran issued a notice, known as a NOTAM, on Wednesday closing its airspace to all flights except international civil arrivals and departures with prior permission from Iran’s aviation authorities. The NOTAM was initially extended through 10:30 p.m. ET but then expired.
The NOTAM was issued after U.S. President Donald Trump hinted at possible action against Iran and in support of anti-government protests which have roiled the country in recent weeks.
As of Wednesday, 18 days of protests and a resulting crackdown by security forces had seen 2,615 deaths and 18,470 people arrested, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). Among the dead were 13 children and 14 non-protesting civilians, HRANA said.
On the government side, HRANA said it had confirmed the deaths of 153 members of the security forces.
Another 882 additional deaths remain under investigation, HRANA said.
The HRANA data relies on the work of activists inside and outside the country. ABC News cannot independently verify its numbers.
Protests have been spreading across the country since late December. The first marches took place in downtown Tehran, with participants demonstrating against rising inflation and the falling value of the national currency, the rial. As the protests spread, they took on a more explicitly anti-government tone.
The subsequent security crackdown has included a sustained national internet blackout, which — according to online monitoring group NetBlocks — had been in place for 156 hours as of Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, Cloudflare’s threat-intelligence unit said in a statement that it had “observed Iranian authorities targeting Instagram accounts with tools that perform bulk extraction of follower lists and account activity.”
Estimates of the death toll from the protests have varied, with the internet and communications blackout making it difficult to establish clear figures.
Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday, “We’ve seen numbers vary from 2,000 to 12,000. All of those numbers are horrendous, but I don’t have a number to share with you.”
Trump has repeatedly threatened military action against the government in Tehran — which is headed by its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — in response to violence against protesters.
Trump said Wednesday that he had been informed that the “killing” in Iran had stopped and that anticipated executions of arrested protesters would not take place.
The information was coming from “very important sources on the other side,” Trump said during an event in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “We’ve been told on good authority, and I hope it’s true. Who knows, right?” he added.
Asked by a reporter if this means that military action was now off the table, Trump responded, “We’re going to watch and see what the process is. But we were given a very good statement by people that are aware of what’s going on.”
On Tuesday, Trump had addressed protesters on social media, urging “Iranian Patriots” to “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” He added, “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
Khamenei and top Iranian officials have said they are willing to engage with the economic grievances of protesters, though have framed the unrest as driven by “rioters” and “terrorists” sponsored by foreign nations — prime among them the U.S. and Israel — and supported by foreign infiltrators.
Iranian officials have also threatened retaliatory strikes against U.S. and Israeli targets in the event of any outside intervention.
On Wednesday, a U.S. official confirmed to ABC News that some personnel had been advised to leave al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar due to increased tensions in the region.
Meanwhile, Tehran has signaled an intent to proceed with expedited trials and executions for those arrested during the protests.
The head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, said Wednesday, “If we want to do a job, we should do it now. If we want to do something, we have to do it quickly,” in a video shared online by Iranian state television, according to The Associated Press
“If it becomes late, two months, three months later, it doesn’t have the same effect,” Mohseni-Ejei said.
Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi acknowledged that “hundreds” of people had been killed and again characterized the protests as an “Israeli plot” and a “terrorist operation.”
Araghchi said that the protests had died down and that the government is “in full control.”
Fireworks light up the sky over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House during New Year’s Eve celebrations on January 01, 2026 in Sydney, Australia. (Izhar Khan/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Countries across the globe are beginning to usher in 2026.
The Pacific island nation of Kiribati was the first to ring in the new year, while Alaska and Hawaii will be among the last places to say goodbye to 2025.
New Zealand
At 6 a.m. ET, New Zealand was one of the first countries to reach 2026, ringing in the new year with a fireworks display.
Australia
In Australia, fireworks over the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge went along as planned, but law enforcement presence was ramped up in Sydney in the wake of this month’s mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach.
