▶️ Chinese President Xi Jinping meets Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and other Hong Kong officials in Macau, Thursday, December 19.
👉 Meanwhile, Hong Kong police on Thursday said they had frozen HK$70 million ($10 million) from a major fund for donations to help pro-democracy protesters, and arrested its four members for money laundering.
Police said their investigation focused on Spark Alliance, a non-profit online platform formed in 2016 that collects donations to provide support to political critics of the city's pro-Beijing authorities.
It is one of two crowd-sourced funding platforms that have collected millions of dollars to provide legal and other help for people arrested in the pro-democracy protests that have upended the city since early June.
But police said some of the donations were allegedly used by the fund owners for other investment
Semi-autonomous Hong Kong has been battered by increasingly violent demonstrations in the starkest challenge the city has presented to Beijing since its 1997 handover from Britain.
Millions have hit the streets in protests fueled by years of growing fears that authoritarian China is stamping out Hong Kong's liberties.
Police have arrested more than 6,000 people and charged around 1,000 of them, filling the city's courts with cases that are likely to last for years.
Around 40 percent of those arrested are students, some of whom face up to ten years in jail on rioting charges.
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