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Last Thursday, the Apple Daily, the 26-year-old Hong Kong newspaper published its last edition, as well as stopped updating its website, citing “employee safety and staffing issues” for the shutdown.
The newspaper had become known for its pro-democracy stance and had expressed unbridled criticism of the Beijing regime until authorities began a crackdown on dissent, which became untenable.
“Crackdown” is a word that comes up frequently in any story of how Beijing is dealing with Hong Kong, now that the former British colony is under full control of the Communist Party of China (CCP).
As in our 2 March 2021 article, “HONG KONG CRACKDOWN,” in which we noted that Trends Journal publisher Gerald Celente has, on many occasions, appeared in Hong Kong media and has long predicted Beijing would rule Hong Kong with an iron fist.
The paper’s majority owner, Jimmy Lai, is in jail, and last week journalists’ computers were seized, the company’s assets were frozen, and two of its executives were charged with violation of a national security law that Beijing imposed last year for the purpose of quashing dissent.
And yesterday, an Apple senior journalist was arrested by Hong Kong police on a suspected national security offence as he was trying to catch a flight out of Hong Kong.
Not a Peep from the Presstitutes
In the meantime, last Wednesday the United States government seized some 33 Iranian news websites including Press TV, a popular English-speaking site. Under the Emergency Economic Powers Act, declaring this a national emergency and an “extraordinary threat” to the “national security … of the United States,” not only did the U.S. government lock them down in American, they blocked them worldwide.
TREND FORECAST: From big tech to the central governments…the repression of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought have become the new way of the world. Indeed, for decades we have forecast this trend, and as economies decline, social tensions increase, and wars – civil, regional and global – escalate, these freedoms will continue to erode.