US transport chief eyes reduction of flights in and out of major airport beset by equipment outages

HONG KONG: Hong Kong police announced bounties Friday for information leading to the arrest of 19 overseas activists, accusing them of national security crimes.

Political dissent in Hong Kong has been quashed since Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020 after huge, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests the year before.

Many opposition figures have fled abroad, while others have been arrested and sentenced to years in jail.

Police said the 19 activists were involved in what they called a “subversive organization,” Hong Kong Parliament — a pro-democracy NGO established in Canada.

On July 1, Hong Kong Parliament said on social media that it was holding an unofficial poll online to form a “legislature,” aimed at “opposing one-party dictatorship and tyranny and pursuing Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong.”

In a statement on Friday, police accused the group of seeking to “unlawfully overthrow and undermine the fundamental system” of the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities.

The investigation into the organization is ongoing, the police said, warning that they “will offer bounties to hunt down more suspects in the case if necessary.”

They also called on the accused to “return to Hong Kong and turn themselves in, rather than make further mistakes.”

A reward of HK$200,000 ($25,500) each was offered for 15 of the activists, while the four others were already wanted for HK$1 million, the statement said.

The bounties are seen as largely symbolic given that they affect people living abroad in nations unlikely to extradite political activists to Hong Kong or China.

Friday’s announcement is the fourth time the financial hub’s authorities have offered rewards for help capturing those alleged to have violated the city’s national security laws.

“The Hong Kong government is deepening repression in Hong Kong, extending its long arm abroad and seeking to silence the diasporas,” Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang said in a statement to AFP.

According to the Hong Kong police’s website, as of Friday there are now 34 people wanted for national security offenses, including secession, subversion, or foreign collusion.

Previous rounds of bounties were met with intense criticism from Western countries, with Hong Kong and China in turn railing against foreign “interference.”

Hong Kong has also previously canceled the passports of other pro-democracy activists on its wanted list, under its second homegrown national security law enacted in 2024.

As of July 1, authorities had arrested 333 people for alleged national security crimes, with 165 convicted in Hong Kong.

Earlier this month, Hong Kong police arrested four people, including a 15-year-old, who were allegedly part of a group in Taiwan that called for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party.

This week police said they had arrested an 18-year-old for writing “seditious words” on a toilet wall in a commercial building.

KYIV: Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight, a senior commander said, part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite Internet provider.

Ukraine’s forces are heavily reliant on thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and some drone operations, as they have proved resistant to espionage and signal jamming throughout the three and a half years of fighting Russia’s invasion.

Starlink experienced one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline.

“Starlink is down across the entire front,” Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, wrote on Telegram at 10:41 p.m. (1941 GMT) on Thursday.

Starlink, which has more than 6 million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the global outage on its X account and said “we are actively implementing a solution.”

Brovdi updated his post later to say that by about 1:05 a.m. on Friday the issue had been resolved. He said the incident had highlighted the risk of reliance on the systems, and called for communication and connectivity methods to be diversified.

“Combat missions were performed without a (video) feed, battlefield reconnaissance was done with strike (drones),” Brovdi wrote.

A Ukrainian drone commander, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive matters, told Reuters his unit had to postpone several combat operations as a result of the outage.

Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian system that centralizes feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage showed that relying on cloud services to command units and relay battlefield drone reconnaissance was a “huge risk.”

“If connection to the Internet is lost ... the ability to conduct combat operations is practically gone,” he said, calling for a move toward local communication systems that are not reliant on the Internet.

Reuters reported on Friday that Starlink owner Elon Musk issued an order in 2022 to cut Starlink coverage in certain areas of Ukraine as Ukrainian forces were waging a counter-offensive to take back occupied land from Russia.

As of April 2025, according to Ukrainian government social media posts, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals.

Although Starlink does not operate in Russia, Ukrainian officials have said that Moscow’s troops are also widely using the systems on the frontlines in Ukraine.

“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Starlink vice president Michael Nicolls wrote on X, apologizing for the disruption and vowing to find its root cause.