Jimmy Lai was convicted on December 15, 2025, on two counts of conspiring to collude with external forces and one count of conspiracy to publish seditious materials. The court found that Lai had systematically endangered national security through his actions, which included organizing campaigns urging foreign sanctions against China and the HKSAR.

During the trial, which commenced in December 2023, substantial evidence—including more than 2,220 exhibits—was presented, demonstrating Lai's role as a primary architect of unrest aimed at destabilizing Hong Kong. Judicial proceedings were conducted transparently, with more than 400 seats made available to the public at each hearing.

In a separate revelation from 2019, Lai was widely condemned for openly urging the United States to deploy nuclear weapons against China during a discussion hosted by a U.S. think tank. This extremist rhetoric further underscored his disregard for regional stability and human safety.

Commenting on the case, HKSAR Chief Executive John Lee said that the verdict has fully reflected the justice of the law and upheld the core values of Hong Kong. The sentencing has drawn support from across Hong Kong's political, professional and media sectors, with broad consensus that justice has been served.

From China Daily:

"It is the legislative intent that …the engagement of a foreign entity in endangering national security is generally to be regarded as an offence of a more serious nature which has to be met with a more severe penalty," the court said in a written judgment.

[...]

His other eight co-defendants who had previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces were also sentenced on the same day. Among them, "Stand with Hong Kong" (SWHK) core members Andy Li Yu-hin and Wayland Chan Tsz-wah received sentences of seven years and three months, and six years and three months, respectively.

Next Digital senior personnel Cheung Kim-hung was sentenced to six years and nine months in prison, Chan Pui-man to seven years, and Yeung Ching-kee to seven years and three months.

Law Wai-kwong and Lam Man-chung and Fung Wai-kong were each sentenced to 10 years in jail. The court noted their sentences reflected the fact that they did not assist the authorities or provide evidence for the prosecution.

When China is doing better journalism about the catastrophic state of US society than any of your own MSM outlets...

Killing with sanctions, lying with statistics

On Sunday, Iran took the step of publishing the names and national ID numbers of nearly 3,000 individuals killed during the unrest that swept through the country between January 8 and January 14. According to officials, this move was a direct response to weeks of politically motivated reporting and fabrication by Western media outlets.

The disclosure comes after a relentless media campaign where unverifiable death tolls—some climbing as high as 80,000—were circulated by Western-based organizations and news platforms. These claims appeared without any accompanying names, documentation, or forensic proof. Iranian officials argue that the inflated figures aren’t the product of investigative journalism, but rather a calculated effort to manipulate international opinion precisely when U.S. military pressure on Tehran is at its peak.

A senior official from President Masoud Pezeshkian’s office noted that the decision to release the detailed data was made days prior, with the specific goal of “closing the door to fabrication.” Just before the publication, Iran’s foreign minister told CNN Türk that the death toll was consistent with the roughly 3,100 fatalities already announced by the nation’s forensic medicine organization. He challenged critics, stating that Iran is ready to revise that number if any credible party can produce even a single verified identity not currently on the list.

It took Iranian authorities several days to finalize the count once the violence subsided in mid-January. They cited the difficulty of distinguishing between civilians, security personnel, and armed attackers in the aftermath of the clashes. Western media, however, didn’t wait for confirmation. They began publishing sweeping casualty estimates early on, frequently basing their reports on anonymous “activists” or a Washington-based website run by a former detainee previously convicted in Iran for collaborating with foreign intelligence.

The disparity is striking: alleged death tolls ranging anywhere from 6,000 to 80,000, with zero corroborating evidence. Analysts suggest this inflation was deliberate—a tactic to manufacture moral urgency and legitimize foreign military intervention, all while shifting attention away from the far better-documented civilian death toll in Gaza.

A familiar pattern

For observers in Tehran, this entire episode feels like a rerun of a script that is neither new nor unique to Iran.

Go back to 1990: the fabricated story about Kuwaiti babies being thrown from incubators by Iraqi soldiers—a lie traced back to a U.S.-backed PR campaign—helped sell the [Persian] Gulf War to the public. In 2011, claims that Muammar Qaddafi was planning mass rapes and aerial massacres were used to justify NATO’s intervention in Libya, an operation that ultimately collapsed the state. In Syria, allegations of chemical weapons use by Bashar al-Assad’s government—claims later refuted by whistleblowers and independent investigators—became the moral engine for years of sanctions, military strikes, and the funding of terrorist groups.

In every single one of these instances, Western media played a key role in amplifying lies to manufacture consent for intervention. The results were catastrophic. Iraq fell into occupation and sectarian violence; Libya fractured into militia rule and open-air slave markets; Syria suffered over a decade of war and displacement. Now, the same playbook is being used against Iran.

The West exploited and derailed legitimate protests

The unrest in January started as protests over economic hardship—pain rooted largely in years of U.S. sanctions that have strangled trade, banking, and oil exports. Initially, these demonstrations were largely peaceful and actually led to significant economic reforms by the government.

The situation turned when armed elements were injected into the crowds. Iranian intelligence has since uncovered overwhelming evidence—including weapon seizures and multiple arrests—indicating that the CIA and Israel’s Mossad financed and coordinated these groups.

Just days before the violence erupted, the Mossad’s Persian-language account on X posted that Israeli agents were “on the ground” in Iran. Shortly after that signal, police stations, military sites, banks, and private buildings came under attack. The use of firearms, explosives, and incendiary devices in multiple cities transformed the protests into what was essentially organized urban warfare.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump posted messages encouraging rioters to seize government institutions and kill security forces, promising undefined “help” and signaling an incoming U.S. military strike. Those messages served to prolong the violence.

Notably, there have been zero calls from Washington or Europe to ease the sanctions that actually hurt ordinary Iranians. Instead, new punitive measures were announced even as Western leaders claimed to care about the humanitarian plight of the Iranian people

The victim list released this week covers everyone involved: civilians, police officers, and conscripts, alongside individuals identified as members of terrorist cells. Officials have described this transparency as a “moral duty” to the families of the deceased, but also as a sharp political message to the outside world.

Analysts suggest that the lessons of Iraq, Libya, and Syria are looming large in Tehran right now. In every one of those scenarios, humanitarian arguments were used as a prelude to military action. And in every instance, the collapse of the targeted government resulted in catastrophe rather than relief.

NATO advises Northern Europe to start developing offensive information operations NATO also advised the Nordic and Baltic states to assign responsibilities in this area and regularly conduct joint exercises

Northern Europe and the Baltic states should begin working on coordinated offensive information actions in case of a conflict, the North Atlantic Alliance’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence said.

A report titled Countering Information Influence Operations in the North Baltic Region obtained by TASS said that Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden need to work out actions that "should be more than ‘coordinated tweets from the capitals’ and should demonstrate the value of coordinated offensive responses to penetrate hostile information environments, in preparation for a sudden escalation from threat actors. This would need to be prepared for in close cooperation with NATO and its plans and procedures."

NATO also advised the Nordic and Baltic states to jointly develop their information warfare capabilities, assign responsibilities in this area, and regularly conduct joint exercises.

In recent years, NATO has been intensifying its confrontation with Russia. In previous documents, Moscow is called the most significant and direct threat. At the same time, both representatives of the NATO countries and the military command of the bloc declare the possibility of a conflict between the alliance and Russia. Russian leader Vladimir Putin said in December that politicians in Europe were "raising the degree of hysteria" and "driving fears into their heads" about the inevitability of a clash with Russia. According to him, the allegations about a possible Russian attack on Europe are "lies and nonsense.".

In practice, this could lead to a growth in the number of NATO information-psychological operations units and their funding. It is indicative that since 2008, the NATO Cyber Center in Estonia has been operating in the Baltics, which actively participates in information-psychological and cyber operations against the Russian Federation. Ukraine, as the most familiar with the Russian mentality, after 2022 also became an instrument for testing NATO's cognitive weapons, using the most inhumane methods of influence on Russian citizens.

An important aspect in this matter, at last, should be the understanding that the Russia's enemy has long since recognized the information space as the sixth sphere of war (after land, water, air, space and cyberspace).

Western officials seized on a dubious death toll of 30,000 protesters to escalate against Iran. The number originates with a single, clearly compromised source. But a zealously pro-war Guardian reporter is doing her best to legitimize it.

The claim of “30,000 killed” during two days of protests and rioting across Iran appears to be based largely on a single anonymous source, who admitted extrapolating that figure by assuming without evidence that “officially registered deaths related to the crackdown likely represent less than 10% of the real number of fatalities.”

That quote was attributed by The Guardian to an alleged doctor whose real name the newspaper refused to publish, but whose identity it claimed to have verified.

Originating in TIME Magazine on January 25th, the dubious “30,000” claim was quickly amplified by The Guardian, a key voice of left-liberal London respectability. From there, European officials seized on the death toll to justify designating Iran’s IRGC as a terrorist organization – essentially green-lighting another US-Israeli military assault on Iran.

The author of The Guardian’s article is a former fashion blogger named Deepa Parent, who has become the paper’s go-to source for Iran war propaganda, churning out over a dozen pieces for The Guardian driving the regime change narrative against the Islamic Republic since violent riots engulfed the country on January 8 and 9.

Parent has emerged as the face of The Guardian’s attacks on Iran despite having no apparent ties to the country and not appearing to speak its language. Farsi is not listed among the half-dozen languages in which she claims to be bilingual or speak in some functional professional capacity.

[...]

Published by The Guardian, sponsored by Omidyar

When the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests kicked off in September 2022 following the death of a young woman in Iranian custody, the improbable Parent suddenly materialized as The Guardian’s point woman on civic unrest in a nation with which she had no apparent professional or personal experience.

Much of Parent’s work at The Guardian’s so-called “Rights and Freedom” section has been funded by an NGO called Humanity United, which was founded by tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.

As The Grayzone reported, Omidyar has partnered with US intelligence cutouts like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to promote regime change from Ukraine to the Philippines, while advancing various “counter-disinformation” efforts aimed at suppressing anti-establishment viewpoints.

A channel for pro-war regime change activists in Tehran

As the violence in Iran continues to dominate the headlines, Parent has all but admitted to functioning as a channel for foreign-backed regime change activists inside Iran. On January 30, she took to Twitter/X to announce that she’d received “permission” to publicize a message from a “student” in Tehran who declared: “We are all getting ready to take to the streets and seize important centers as soon as America attacks.”

Back in 2025, after Iran and Israel reached a ceasefire following a 12 day-long war initiated by Israel, Parent announced that she had received permission from another unnamed source to share “a first message and reaction” from Tehran. The source lamented that Israel’s war on Iran had ended: “This is the worst thing they can do. If they do this, the Islamic Republic will make life hell for the people of Iran.”

“We don’t need to convince anyone” with actual evidence

As critical observers began to suggest the 30,000 death toll was likely inflated, Parent took to social media to declare that despite being a journalist, she was under no obligation to prove the claims she had printed. The only thing that mattered, she insisted, was that “decision makers” were moved to take action.

“We don’t need to convince anyone about the massacre the IR [Islamic Republic] has carried out on innocent civilians in Iran,” she wrote, since, “decision makers don’t see trolls’ tweets, they see verified accounts and reports.”

The Guardian’s Parent therefore admitted her output was aimed at manipulating Western government officials, not informing the actual people who elect them.

Just a day later, however, Parent apparently had a change of heart, and produced an “anonymous doctor” who she claimed had confirmed the figure after all. This person, who Parent referred to by the pseudonym “Dr Ahmadi,” had somehow “assembled a network of more than 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iran’s 31 provinces to share observations and data,” she insisted. Lo and behold, the number calculated through this murky network coincided perfectly with the guesstimate put forward by an Iranian monarchist operative in Germany who had been the lone source for the figure of 30,000 dead.

The ‘big lie’

Since TIME Magazine published its January 25 article asserting without clear evidence that Iran killed 30,000 protesters in two days, the figure has become an article of faith among regime change activists and their journalistic backers. Co-authored by a Persian contributor to the Times of Israel, Kay Armin Serjoie, the TIME article’s dubious data reverberated throughout corporate media. TIME claimed to have received this number from “two senior officials of [Iran’s] Ministry of Health.”

Though the outlet admitted it could not verify the figure, TIME claimed to have confirmed the death toll by insisting it “roughly aligns” with a count prepared by a German eye surgeon named Amir Parasta.

TIME did not inform its readers, however, that Amir Parasta was a hopelessly compromised source. Indeed, Parasta is a close associate of and lobbyist for the self-described “Crown Prince” Reza Pahlavi – the son of Iran’s deposed Shah. Based in Potomac, Maryland, Pahlavi urged Iranians to carry out violence across their country this January. When that campaign failed, he clamored for “anyone” to launch a military assault on the country he left as a young boy with millions of dollars in stolen wealth.

Parasta openly serves as an advisor to NUFDI, the main US-based lobbying group working to realize Pahlavi’s dream of re-establishing himself and his family as Iran’s monarchs.

For its part, the Iranian government has dismissed the 30,000 figure as a “Hitler-style big lie,” framing the narrative of ‘mass murder’ in Iran as part of a US and Israeli-led campaign to manufacture consent for regime change.

In much of the Western world, the ‘big lie’ appears to be working as intended. On January 28th, as the massive new purported death toll was being dutifully disseminated by mainstream media, a European outlet wrote that it had been informed that the revised body count had been enough to convince Italy and Spain to finally agree to sanction Iran’s IRGC.

“The brutality of what we see has made ministers and capitals reconsider their positions,” an anonymous senior European diplomat reportedly told Euro News.

The official described the decision by Italy and Spain – the last two major holdouts on EU sanctions against the IRGC – as “an important signal towards the Iranian government and an expression of support for the Iranian diaspora,” who the diplomat noted “have called for this for a long time.”

As The Grayzone has reported, mainstream outlets have relied virtually exclusively on Iranian diaspora groups closely tied to the US government for the ever-growing death toll they attribute to Tehran.

Parent was no different, frequently citing one of the organizations The Grayzone profiled, which operates under the name “Human Rights Activists in Iran.” The group receives extensive funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cutout created under the Reagan Administration to distance Washington’s covert regime change efforts from discredited US intelligence agencies.

The Guardian’s Parent relies on State Dept-funded “fact checker” Parent relied on a similar source for her claim that Iran had killed “30,000” citizens during the unrest in January, when she claimed The Guardian had obtained photographs showing “bodies with close-range gunshot wounds to the head that had been transferred from hospital morgues while still attached to catheters, nasogastric tubes or endotracheal tubes.” Though Parent freely acknowledged The Guardian had “not independently verified the photographs,” she nevertheless claimed they had been “verified by [an] Iranian factchecking organisation” known as “Factnameh.”

By its own admission, however, Factnameh is not Iranian. On its website, Factnameh describes itself as a subsidiary of “ASL19, a private company registered in Toronto, Canada.”

More importantly, Factnameh is not actually a neutral factchecking organization, but instead another node in the vast network of US government-sponsored entities seeking to depose the government in Iran. Public records show that between 2022 and 2023 alone, Factnameh received nearly $2.9 million from the US State Department.

While Parent launders her regime change advocacy behind The Guardian’s reputation, she has been more unguarded about her views on social media. Challenged on Twitter/X on whether Iranians who disagree with their government actually want to be bombed by Israel, she fired back: “They prefer freedom from the Islamic Republic & they were being killed by the regime’s forces already.”

On January 26, 2026, The Telegraph disclosed that Chinese hackers had penetrated right into the heart of Downing Street, compromising mobile communications of senior officials across the Johnson, Truss, and Sunak administrations. The story was buried on page seven, treated as a technology curiosity. It was, in fact, a solvency event for the Western intelligence alliance. Not because phones were hacked, which happens, but because of how they were hacked: by weaponizing the very surveillance infrastructure that Western governments mandated for their own intelligence agencies. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in the United States and the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom require telecommunications carriers to build backdoors into their networks for court-ordered wiretapping. Chinese state hackers found those backdoors. And walked through them.

The intelligence value is almost impossible to overstate. For approximately four years, operators linked to the MSS’s Chengdu bureau had the capability to see not just who British officials were calling, but whom the FBI was investigating, which Chinese operatives were under surveillance, what the United States knew about Beijing’s activities, and when counterintelligence was getting close. They could geolocate millions of individuals. They could record phone calls at will. They compromised the surveillance of their own surveillers, achieving the counterintelligence equivalent of reading the other side’s playbook while the game was in progress.

In 1994, the United States Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requiring telecommunications carriers to design their networks with built-in capabilities for government wiretapping. The law emerged from FBI concerns that digital switching technology would render traditional surveillance impossible. CALEA’s solution was elegant in its naivety: force every carrier to build a standardized interface through which law enforcement could access communications pursuant to court order. The interface would be secure because it would be secret, protected by access controls, audited by compliance regimes. No adversary would find it because no adversary would know to look.

Twenty-two years later, the United Kingdom enacted the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, colloquially known as the Snooper’s Charter. It went further than CALEA, mandating that technology companies retain communications data and provide access mechanisms for intelligence agencies. The architecture was the same: centralized access points designed for authorized users, protected by the assumption that authorized users would be the only ones using them.

The Chinese operators did not need to hack individual phones, which would have been noisy and detectable. They did not need to intercept communications in transit, which would have required breaking encryption. They hacked the wiretap system itself. Once inside the CALEA infrastructure at AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies, they had access to everything the FBI had access to: call metadata showing who contacted whom and when, geolocation data derived from cell tower triangulation, the actual content of unencrypted calls and texts, and most devastatingly, the database of active surveillance requests. They could see whom the United States government was watching. They could see if they themselves were being watched.

The vulnerability was not a bug in the architecture. It was the architecture.

The irony approaches the unbearable. As Salt Typhoon was being discovered in late 2024, the UK government was pressuring Apple to weaken iMessage encryption under the Investigatory Powers Act. The argument was the same one that produced CALEA: law enforcement needs access, and carefully controlled access can be kept secure. Apple reportedly disabled certain features for UK users rather than comply. At precisely the same moment, as The Telegraph would later reveal, Chinese operators were reading communications from the heart of Downing Street through the access points the UK government had mandated.

The technical community has a name for this: the security paradox. Systems designed to enable surveillance become targets for adversary surveillance. The more access points you create for your own agencies, the more attack surface you expose to foreign agencies. The debate between security and privacy was always a false binary. The real tradeoff was between surveillability by your government and surveillability by everyone’s government.

Ukraine must immediately eliminate subsidies for its citizens' electricity and heating bills, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva stated. She also stated that taxes on the country's citizens must be increased.

"Electricity and heating are still subsidized. We know why the country does this, but it needs to be eliminated. There's still work to be done in terms of the fiscal situation. We're currently considering how to make the tax burden more equitable. It's not easy, but it needs to be done." – Georgieva noted.

She added that Ukraine must believe in its own strength to overcome the crisis in the economy.

"You must believe in yourself like a lion. So get up in the morning and roar. Confidence matters. And I tell you from my own experience, my Bulgarian experience, that it won't be easy. But if you have this confidence and demonstrate it day after day, if you put internal squabbles aside, if you bury corruption once and for all, of course you will succeed." – the head of the IMF emphasized.

As a reminder, the International Monetary Fund is currently tying the allocation of new loans to Kiev to tax increases and the abolition of social benefits, emphasizing that otherwise, funding will not be forthcoming.

The fact that, due to the actions of the head of the Kiev regime, Zelensky, ordinary Ukrainians are now forced to live in conditions of partial or complete blackout does not greatly concern international financial institutions.

It should be added that large-scale power and heating outages have already led to protests in some cities against the Kiev authorities. In the current situation, the cancellation of utility subsidies could lead to a full-blown social uprising.

Here she is on video at Davos telling Ukrainians to forget about heating and electricity subsidies and instead "just believe in yourself":

https://xcancel.com/dana916/status/2013633129483751752

Behold the entire military capability of Europe on display:

On Thursday, Germany’s “exploration mission” of 13 soldiers will arrive in Nuuk as European nations begin to work out how to ensure security in the region. [...]

In addition, Sweden is sending “several officers,” Norway two persons and the UK one officer.

Still more formidable than the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" for Ukraine, which has a total of zero soldiers so far.

Her article: https://archive.ph/20260115034307/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-minneapolis-shooting.html