A Chinese court sentenced Taiwanese democracy activist Lee Ming-cheh to five years in prison on charges of attempting to "subvert state power." Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council immediately denounced the sentence as "unacceptable" and "politically motivated." Lee was incriminated on the basis of social media content he posted on platforms including WeChat, QQ and Facebook.
For the first time, after six years of war and escalating atrocities, a member of the Syrian regime’s military has been convicted of a war crime—a low-level soldier now in Sweden as a refugee, and tried in that country’s courts. Yet there have been several convictions of Syrian rebel and ISIS fighters in European courts. This gross imbalance in convictions persists despite the fact that Assad has killed far more Syrians than ISIS or any other “terrorist” outfit in the country.
Amnesty International condemned Bahrain's sentencing of human rights defender Nabeel Rajab to two years in prison—for the crime of protesting on his Twitter account the harsh conditions in Bahrain's prisons. Rajab has served time for illegal tweeting before, and still awaits sentencing on other similar charges. Amnesty condemned the conviction as a "flagrant violation of human rights."
Spyware supplied to Mexico officially to track narco-traffickers and terrorists was instead used against human rights investigators looking into the case of 43 "disappeared" college students. Amid the new scandal, the families of the disappeared continue to wait for justice. There has been one arrest in the case, and the remains of only two of the missing students identified.
The Security Service of Ukraine stated that the hackers behind the recent global cyber-attack are the same Kremlin-backed outfit that conducted an attack on Ukraine's power grid in December.
Qatar's diplomatic isolation by the other Gulf states, accused of supporting terrorism in the region, heightens contradictions for the Pentagon's use of the critical al-Udeid Air Base.
Amid jeers and demands for the death penalty from government supporters, a trial opened for over 200 Turkish ex-officials accused in last year's attempted coup.
Turkish authorities purged a further 3,900 people from the civil service and military on suspicion of "terrorism" ties, pursuant to a sweeping new national security law.
Seven army officers have been arrested and charged with war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo following a video-recorded massacre that went viral on social media.
Are the "false flag" theories about the anti-Semitic threats vindicated by the bust of a left-wing ex-journo? No, because exploiting anti-Semitism to score points is still anti-Semitic.
The Uighur people of China's Xinjiang province are coming under unprecedented surveillance and militarization amid official fears of terrorism in the far-western region.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand of its symbolic Doomsday Clock from three minutes to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight.
