A candidate campaigns outside a shopping mall ahead of the Hong Kong District Council elections on November 23, 2019 in Hong Kong, China.
Chris McGrath | Getty Images News | Getty Images
A record number of Hong Kong people voted on Sunday in district elections viewed as a barometer of support for city leader Carrie Lam, who has been besieged by nearly six months of often violent anti-government protests.
Government data showed 1,524,675 people had cast their vote by 1.30 p.m., with nine hours still left until polling stations closed. That surpassed the 1,467,229 voters in the last district elections four years ago.
Pro-democracy protest groups in Hong Kong are urging people not to disrupt Sunday's local elections in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
They hope the polls will send a message to the government in Beijing after five months of political unrest.
The authorities have threatened to suspend voting if there is serious disruption at polling stations.
More than 400 councillors are due to be elected to Hong Kong's district council.
Pro-democracy campaigners hope they will be able to increase their representation on the council, which traditionally has some influence in choosing the city's chief executive.
Pro-Beijing candidates are urging voters to support them in order to express frustration at the upheaval caused by continuous clashes between protesters and police.
What's happening?
Sunday's district elections will take place with a record 4.1 million people in the city registered to vote.
More than 1,000 candidates are running for 452 district council seats which, for the first time, are being contested. (A further 27 seats are allocated to representatives of rural districts.)
Currently, pro-Beijing parties hold the majority of these seats.
Why are these elections important?
District councils themselves have very little actual power, so usually these elections take place on a very local level.
But this election is different.
Getty
Hong Kong district elections
452seats across 18 districts
1,090 candidates - all seats being contested for the first time
4.13mregistered voters - the highest number ever
117councillors sit on committee that elects chief executive
Source: Hong Kong government
They're the first elections since anti-government protests started in June, so will act as a litmus test, reflecting how much support there is for the current government.
"People in Hong Kong have begun to see this election as an additional way to articulate and express their views on the state of Hong Kong in general and the government of Carrie Lam," Kenneth Chan, associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, told news agency Reuters.
Then there's the issue of Hong Kong's chief executive.
Under Hong Kong's electoral system, 117 of the district councillors will also sit on the committee that votes for the chief executive.
So a pro-democracy district win could translate eventually to a bigger share, and say, in who becomes the city's next leader.
The lawmaker has openly voiced his support for Hong Kong's police force on multiple occasions. He was in July filmed shaking hands with a group of men - suspected of being triad gangsters - who later assaulted pro-democracy protesters.
Jimmy Sham, a political activist who has recently rose to prominence as the leader of the Civil Human Rights Front - a campaign group responsible for organising some of the mass protest marches - is running for the first time.
Mr Sham has also been attacked twice, once apparently with hammers. Photographs showed him lying on the street covered in blood.
Who isn't running is also notable. Pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong was barred from running in the elections, a move he referred to as "political screening".
Ambassador Gordon Sondland often lamented his lack of access to his State Department records, saying the impeachment process was “less than fair” and “challenging” for him, during his public testimony before House committees in charge of the impeachment inquiry.
CNN found that Sondland mentioned the missing records at least 15 times throughout the course of the hearing on Wednesday.
“I have not had access to all of my phone records, State Department e-mails and many, many other State Department documents,” Sondland said in his opening.
Sondland argued that the impeachment process would be “far more transparent” if he had access to his records -- a request he said he has made to the State Department and the White House, both of which have been non-compliant in providing documents related to Ukraine, even when subpoenaed by House committees.
On Oct. 23, Federal Judge Christopher Cooper gave the State Department 30 days to release Ukraine-related documents, following a lawsuit from the watchdog group American Oversight. As of today, the documents have yet to be released.
Sondland told Rep. Jackie Speier that he had been “hampered to provide completely accurate testimony without the benefit of those documents,” when she asked about how the missing records affected his testimony.
When minority counsel Steve Castor derided Sondland’s lack of recollection of specific events, the ambassador said the records would help jog his memory of countless calls and meetings he has had with several government officials and foreign leaders.
Among those conversations Sondland couldn’t recall, he said, were calls with President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, energy Secretary Rick Perry, and former US special envoy Kurt Volker, among others.
A Washington Post journalist who was held captive and psychologically tortured by the Iranian government for 544 days was awarded $180 million Friday evening in his family’s lawsuit against the Middle Eastern country.
Reporter Jason Rezaian was arrested at gunpoint in Iran along with his wife in 2014 on dubious espionage charges. He was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Iran and was living there with his family at the time.
“Iran seized Jason, threatened to kill Jason, and did so with the goal of compelling the United States to free Iranian prisoners as a condition of Jason’s release,” U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington, D.C., said in his ruling.
Journalist Jason Rezaian participates in a panel discussion on media freedom at United Nations headquarters, Sept. 25, 2019. (Associated Press)
“Holding a man hostage and torturing him to gain leverage in negotiations with the United States is outrageous, deserving of punishment and surely in need of deterrence,” Leon added.
Rezaian was held at Tehran’s Evin prison and convicted by the Revolutionary Guard in a closed court on the unexplained spy charges.
Earlier this year, Rezaian told The Guardian that "for the first six or seven months, [the threat of execution] was pretty regular.”
"It was the constant anxiety of: 'Are they going to kill me, are they going to keep me forever or am I going to be released tomorrow?' You don't know what to believe. That's the method. That's the torture,” he said.
Iran has not responded to Rezaian’s lawsuit and it’s unclear how the money would be paid – if at all. It could come from the United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund.
This year the Trump administration designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, named as a defendant in Rezaian’s case, as a terrorist organization.
Rezaian has not commented on the ruling.
The Washington Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, said in a statement on the ruling, “We’ve seen our role as helping the Rezaians through their recovery. Our satisfaction comes from seeing them enjoy their freedom and a peaceful life.”
