Protesters took to the streets across Australia to rally against the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whom they describe as “war criminal supporting one of the most heinous genocides”. Clashes broke out in Sydney as police used pepper spray and arrested demonstrators.
Lando Norris’ confidence is “even higher” for the 2026 Formula 1 season after he won his first drivers’ title last year, McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown says.
As McLaren launched their car for the new season, two days before the start of the second pre-season test in Bahrain, Brown said Norris wanted to become a multiple title winner.
He predicted the British driver’s team-mate Oscar Piastri would again pose a strong challenge, having led the championship for much of last season only to fade in the final part of the year.
He said: “There are some drivers that say, ‘I’ve done it, now I’m done.’
“And then you have drivers like Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen and Michael Schumacher who go, I’ve done it once, now I want to do it twice and three and four times.
“Lando’s confidence is very high. He’s highly motivated. It’s our job to give he and Oscar equipment again to be able to let him fight it out for the championship. But if we can do that, I would think Oscar and Lando will both be in with a shout.”
Brown said that, as last year, the team would allow their drivers to race each other for the title.
“They continue to be free to race. Again, we will be strategic and intelligent when situations arise. There won’t be much change because they were free to race last year,” he said.
Brown is optimistic McLaren, who also won their second consecutive constructors’ title last year, will be “strong” when the new season starts with the Australian Grand Prix from 6-8 March.
Brown said the evidence of the first ‘shakedown’ test in Spain last month was that they, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull “all seemed competitive”.
Brown said: “Very risky to judge. Spain, what I would say is we feel like we’ll be competitive.
McLarenBrown was dismissive of the row that is taking place in F1 ahead of the season regarding the engine rules.
Mercedes’ rivals have complained to governing body the FIA that the former champions have found a way to circumvent the rules regarding compression ratio.
This is set at a maximum of 16:1 and the rules say it is measured at ambient temperature.
Audi, Honda and Ferrari fear Mercedes have found a way to exploit the way materials expand with heat to have the engines running to a higher compression ratio when the car is on track.
This, some say, could give a power advantage worth about 0.3 seconds a lap. Talks are ongoing on the issue.
McLaren use Mercedes customer engines and Brown said: “It’s typical politics of Formula 1. The engine has been designed and totally compliant within the rules. That’s what the sport is about. I don’t believe there’s a significant advantage.
“They’ll make some story out of it, but reality is the engine is completely compliant past all its tests.”
Asked if he was concerned that the row could lead to a situation where Mercedes were forced to modify their engine, which would be problematic in the timescale before the first race of the season next month, Brown said: “I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t have Mercedes teams on the grid in Australia.”
Brown said it was “too early to tell” whether the complexity of the energy management required under the new regulations introduced this year would make it harder for teams using customer engine supplies to compete with manufacturer teams.
Brown said: “We know we get the same stuff. We’ve proven the last couple of years that a customer team is not at a disadvantage of a works team, so I don’t see any reason why that won’t continue.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s coalition won 352 of the 465 seats in the lower house of Parliament, its best result ever at the polls. Experts say the decisive victory will pave the way for a defence expansion that China has condemned as a return to militarism.
Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s prominent pro-democracy prisoner and media mogul, was sentenced to 20 years in prison under Beijing’s sweeping national security law on Monday in a high-profile case that has dragged on for five years.
Lai, the founder of the now-shuttered Apple Daily newspaper, was first arrested in August 2020 and found guilty late last year on two counts of foreign collusion and one count of seditious publication.
Now age 78, he faces a prison term that is effectively a life sentence, rights groups say – a “profoundly unjust” verdict they call emblematic of China’s crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.
More than six years have passed since millions of Hong Kongers – led by students and young activists – first took to the streets to protest against Beijing’s expanding powers in the territory in 2019.
After a months-long standoff with protesters occupying roads ended with thousands of arrests, China imposed its sweeping national security law in Hong Kong in 2020, effectively quelling the most significant challenge to the Communist Party’s authority in decades.
Called the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the legislation practically criminalised protest, or any act of subversion, in Hong Kong. Since its introduction, it has seen a near-100 percent conviction rate.
So, what happened to the pro-democracy activists in these years, and where are they now?
Lai’s case has drawn the attention of world leaders and global rights groups.
Before he was arrested in 2020 and held in solitary confinement in Hong Kong’s high-security Stanley Prison, Lai was one of Hong Kong’s most famous rags-to-riches stories.
After fleeing China for then-British Hong Kong as a child in the 1950s, he built up a business empire in the city, including the tabloid Apple Daily, over several decades.
He was among the few Beijing critics among Hong Kong elites, and has openly supported the city’s democracy movement, including during the 2019 protests.
Last year, Lai was found guilty of two counts of foreign collusion and one count of seditious publication.
The Hong Kong court noted that Lai’s sentence was particularly punitive because he had been the “mastermind” and driving force behind foreign collusion conspiracies.
Lai’s family, lawyer, supporters, and former colleagues have warned that he could die in prison, as he suffers from health conditions, including heart palpitations and high blood pressure.
His co-defendants in the case – six editors and journalists from Apple Daily – also received jail terms ranging from six years and three months to 10 years. They are publisher Cheung Kim-hung, associate publisher Chan Pui-man, editor-in-chief Ryan Law, executive editor-in-chief Lam Man-chung, executive editor-in-chief responsible for English news Fung Wai-kong, and editorial writer Yeung Ching-kee.
Yes. One month after Lai was convicted, three more pro-democracy figures who organised an annual memorial in Hong Kong to mark the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 were charged under the new national security law.
Their trial commenced last month.
Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho have been charged with inciting subversion, with a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment if convicted.
The activists are former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. The alliance was founded in May 1989 to support protesters holding democracy and anticorruption rallies in Beijing.
The following month, China’s government sent in soldiers to crush the movement around Tiananmen Square.
Every year since then, Hong Kong has hosted yearly candlelight vigils to mark Beijing’s deadly crackdown. These were banned by the government in 2020, but some activists continued to attempt to hold them.
“This case is not about national security – it is about rewriting history and punishing those who refuse to forget the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown,” said Sarah Brooks, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for Asia, when the trial commenced last month.
The trial of the HK47, or Hong Kong 47 – a protest group of politicians, activists, campaigners, and community members during the 2019 demonstrations – became the largest national security case in the territory, with 47 prominent pro-democracy activists and politicians facing charges.
Many of them were arrested in early 2021 under the new national security law for organising an unofficial primary election in 2020 to choose pro-democracy candidates for legislative elections.
Prosecutors accused the defendants of plotting to “overthrow” the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, whose executive is appointed by Beijing, to force the city’s leader to resign. In November last year, a Hong Kong Court sentenced 45 of them to jail terms of up to 10 years in a mass sentencing under the controversial law. Thirty-one of them had pleaded guilty in the landmark case.
In the verdict, judges noted that if the defendants had succeeded in their plot, it would have created “a constitutional crisis for Hong Kong”.
Two individuals – barrister Lawrence Lau and social worker Lee Yue-shun – were acquitted during the lengthy trial.
Among the defendants were activists Joshua Wong, Benny Tai, Owen Chow and Gwyneth Ho, alongside veteran democratic lawmakers such as Leung Kwok-hung, Lam Cheuk-ting and Helena Wong.
Here is the latest we know about Hong Kong’s prominent pro-democracy activists:
Benny Tai, a former University of Hong Kong professor, is serving a 10-year sentence in Hong Kong, the heaviest punishment issued during the trial.
Handing down the sentence to Tai, judges, who were hand-picked by the Hong Kong government, described him as the “mastermind” behind the “conspiracy”, in their judgement.
Tai, now 61, could have been sentenced to 15 years in prison, but the judges said that the sentence was lower because he entered a guilty plea.
Wong was one of the most internationally recognised faces of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and emerged during the protests of the Umbrella Movement in 2014, when activists demanded electoral reforms in Hong Kong. The protests failed to trigger electoral reforms, but became the catalyst for several years of escalating resistance that culminated in the 2019 protests and Beijing’s eventual imposition of the national security law.
Wong co-founded Demosisto, a pro-democracy political party launched in 2016 from the student-led movements of the 2010s. The party was disbanded on June 30, 2020, the same day the national security law was enacted.
Wong has been arrested and jailed multiple times over the years for protest-related offences, including unlawful assembly and once for participating in a Tiananmen vigil after the 2020 ban. Last year, Wong was convicted in the HK47 trial, and was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison.
However, in June last year, he was again charged with conspiring to collude with foreign forces – also under the national security law.
He has been accused of conspiring to ask foreign countries, institutions, organisations or individuals outside China to impose sanctions or blockades. He awaits trial for this charge.
Nathan Law, who co-founded Demosisto with Wong, fled Hong Kong in 2020 after China imposed the sweeping security law.
In 2021, Law, who also previously served as a local legislator in Hong Kong, was granted asylum in the United Kingdom. Hong Kong authorities have offered rewards of one million Hong Kong dollars ($128,000) for information on him.
Law was alleged to be a co-conspirator with Wong in the latest charge of “foreign collusion” brought against them last year. He remains wanted by Hong Kong authorities, with arrest warrants issued under the security law.
Chow, the third co-founder of Demosisto alongside Wong and Law, is living in exile in Canada.
Now 29, she was arrested in 2020 and received a 10-month jail sentence for participating in an unauthorised assembly during the 2019 demonstrations. She was released on bail in 2021, after spending more than six months in jail, on the condition that she check in with the police regularly.
She went to Toronto to pursue a master’s degree after securing permission from authorities – and then jumped bail in 2023, announcing in a social media post that she did not intend to return to Hong Kong.
Owen Chow is a pro-democracy activist who was jailed for involvement in the 2019-2020 anti-Beijing protests.
He was arrested at age 23 in January 2021 and tried and sentenced to seven years and nine months’ imprisonment. He is currently serving jail time in Hong Kong.
Chow was also a candidate in the District Council elections in 2019 and ran in the pro-democracy primaries in 2020. When arrested, he had nearly finished earning a degree in nursing.
A founding member of the League of Social Democrats in 2006, Leung formerly served as a member of the Legislative Council from 2004 to 2016.
He was disqualified from his Legislative Council position in 2016 after he held a yellow umbrella, exclaiming that the “Umbrella Movement would never end”, in reference to the protests of 2014.
He has had multiple stints in jail, and was convicted in the HK47 case, receiving a prison sentence of six years and nine months.
Leung was known for sporting long hair and his political theatrics. He is now 69.
He married his longtime partner, Vanessa Chan, also a prominent activist, after China imposed the national security law, noting that marriage would give them greater legal rights, such as prison visitations.
Ng, a Hong Kong-Australian citizen, was jailed for seven years and three months as part of the mass sentencing in the HK-47 case.
Ng went to Sydney’s Waverley College to study mathematics and commerce. He has been in jail since his arrest in February 2021.
Gwyneth Ho, who worked at Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) and various media outlets, including Stand News and BBC, as a journalist, is also serving a prison sentence in Hong Kong.
Ho reported from the front lines of the protests and later ran in the unofficial democratic primary elections that led to her arrest in January 2021.
She was convicted of conspiracy to commit subversion under the national security law and handed a seven-year sentence. She was also sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for participating in a Tiananmen Square vigil in June 2020.
Sham, a prominent pro-democracy and LGBTQ+ activist, was released from prison in May last year, after being imprisoned for over four years in the HK47 case.
While imprisoned, Sham fought for recognition of his same-sex marriage at the city’s top court, which later in September 2023 led to a ruling that the government should provide a framework for recognising same-sex partnerships.
Sham was freed with three others, Kinda Li Ka-tat, Roy Tam Hoi-pong, and Henry Wong Pak-yu, who are all former district councillors. They live in Hong Kong now.
They were the second batch of prisoners to have completed their sentences through pre-trial imprisonment by the time the HK47 trial concluded.
Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych wore a helmet with images of people killed in the war in his home country during a Winter Olympics training session in Cortina.
Heraskevych had promised before the Games to use the event as a platform to keep attention on the conflict.
“Some of them were my friends,” said Heraskevych, who was Ukraine’s flagbearer in the opening ceremony.
He told Reuters that many of those pictured on his helmet were athletes including teenage weightlifter Alina Peregudova, boxer Pavlo Ishchenko and ice hockey player Oleksiy Loginov.
The 26-year-old said the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had contacted Ukraine’s Olympic Committee over the helmet.
“It’s still being processed,” said Heraskevych – Ukraine’s first skeleton athlete.
He held up a ‘No War in Ukraine’ sign at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, days before Russia’s 2022 invasion of the country.
Rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter states: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”
Heraskevych had said he intended to respect Olympic rules which prohibit political demonstrations at venues while still raising awareness about the war in Ukraine at the Games.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 athletes from Russia and Belarus were largely banned from international sport, but there has since been a gradual return to competition.
The IOC cleared 13 athletes from Russia to compete as Individual Neutral Athletes (AINs) in Milan-Cortina.
Winter Olympics 2026
6-22 February
The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi says ‘the changing goal posts’ of Iran-US talks leave little room for success.
If the Trump administration adopts Israel’s “red lines” in the negotiations with Iran, the talks are doomed, argues Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Parsi tells host Steve Clemons that Iran is willing to reach a deal on its nuclear programme, as it did in 2015 with then-President Barack Obama. But a lot depends on “whether the US is willing to push back against Israel or not”.
