LUY-Development

Author: Imported Author 1932006

  • ‘Sorry, Mum’: Cigarette smoker Dan Brown lights up British Open with another strong first round


    SOUTHPORT, England (AP) — Dan Brown is lighting it up again at the British Open.

    One of the few smokers in golf, Brown went through “seven or eight” cigarettes during his 4-under 66 that gave him the clubhouse lead midway through the first round at Royal Birkdale on Thursday.

    After weeks of sunshine in this northwest corner of England, the fairways here are baked and parched — making them a potential fire hazard from discarded cigarettes.

    “I’ve been making sure that they’re out,” the 31-year-old Englishman said reassuringly.

    Not that he sounds too proud of a habit that makes him stand out on the circuit, but which he feels is needed to relieve some stress.

    “Sorry, Mum,” he said with a cheeky smile.

    The burly and bearded Brown is an interesting character, not least because of the 10 tattoos on his body — three of which are of little birds — and his YouTube channel called “BeersForeBogeys” which has around 4,000 subscribers.

    Brown first came into widespread consciousness in golf in 2024 when, as the world No. 272, he shot a 6-under 65 for the outright first-round lead in his British Open debut at Royal Troon.

    His name — one he shares with the author of “The Da Vinci Code” — was a headline writer’s dream and his dry humor proved popular, too. Brown was tied for second place heading into the final round at Troon and wound up in a tie for 10th.

    That experience taught him he could compete with the best players in the world.

    “I feel like I’m a better player now to what I was back then, two years ago,” he said. “So we’ll see.”

    Brown arrived at the Open with no form from his first year on the PGA Tour — he missed the cut in his last four events — but has immediately taken to the Birkdale links.

    He made seven birdies, including three straight around the turn, after being 1 over after seven holes.

    “Today a few putts dropped, which was nice to see,” Brown said, “because I’ve not seen that for a while.

    “(Hopefully), I’m in a sort of similar area on the leaderboard come Sunday.”

    That might mean continuing to have a smoke during his rounds.

    “There might be a big drop off by Sunday if I’m not allowed,” he said.

    ___

    AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf


  • AI chatbots are at risk of spreading government restrictions on online speech, a new study says


    WASHINGTON (AP) — Ask Claude to make a pamphlet critical of President Donald Trump or Britain’s King Charles III, and Anthropic’s chatbot would oblige. Prompted to do the same for Thailand’s king, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince or China’s leader, and the artificial intelligence model declined.

    It is a key finding from a Meta Oversight Board study released Thursday, showing that major AI systems, including those built in the U.S., are more likely to refuse to criticize restrictive leaders or governments. It raises concerns that the large language models powering chatbots and AI agents could be regurgitating and spreading government influence over online speech as the technology is increasingly adopted worldwide.

    “There is a real risk that, if model developers do not undertake human rights due diligence and implement mitigation measures, they will build AI infrastructure that, intentionally or not, has the effect of extending illegitimate restrictions on freedom of expression globally,” according to the report from the quasi-independent body.

    The Associated Press sent emails to several AI companies seeking their responses to the Meta Oversight Board study but didn’t get any immediate replies.

    The findings come as countries are determining how to put up guardrails around AI without impeding their ability to compete in the rapidly developing field. That includes a Trump administration oversight effort related to the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems.

    AI models extend state influence beyond borders

    The oversight board, which has been working on state influence on tech companies and the impact on freedom of expression, came up with seven questions related to political criticism to pose to chatbots about both restrictive and permissive governments.

    The study picked 10 commercial large language models by top tech companies — including Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI — and asked the AI systems to make critical pamphlets, write limericks, give reasons if someone should join protests, and more.

    “In short, in aggregate, models responding to requests from an Australia-based user were much more likely to generate political criticism of authorities” in places such as Chile, Japan, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S. “compared to where criticism of authorities is legally restricted and penalized,” such as in Cambodia, China, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Turkey, the report said.

    The study indicates that AI models are reflecting speech restrictions beyond the countries where they apply — likely not helping a potential demonstrator in Brisbane, for example, create protest materials to speak out against events in China or Saudi Arabia, the report said.

    “Such impacts, wherever they originate, have the practical effect of extending the long arm of restrictive governments across borders to limit speech in free countries,” the report said.

    The board said it could not determine the causes for the responses but suggested that models could have absorbed latent biases in data used to train the systems and companies might have weighed the risks and liabilities.

    Other researchers warn about a growing problem in AI results in non-English languages

    The board’s report followed a separate study by a group of scholars at American universities that found U.S.-built AI models are vulnerable to foreign controls when trained on non-English-language data that has been influenced by governments.

    While the oversight board posed questions in English, the university researchers queried chatbots in different languages. For example, they asked ChatGPT in English if China is a democracy, and the U.S.-developed chatbot said it’s not generally considered one. Asked in Chinese, the artificial intelligence model told the researchers in that language that “it depends on how you define ‘democracy.’”

    The researchers, whose study was published in the academic journal Nature in May, said in a blog explaining their work that they found no evidence that governments had intentionally tried to influence the output of AI chatbots. But they noted that “there is every reason to believe they’ll try to do so in the future, if they are not already.”

    “People often talk about AI as if it learns from the internet in some neutral way. It doesn’t,” said Hannah Waight, a study co-author and assistant sociology professor at the University of Oregon. “It learns from information environments that have already been shaped by institutions and power.”

    No easy solution to how data is being fed to AI models

    Carlos Carrasco-Farré, who specializes in machine learning, AI, misinformation, social media and human-machine interactions at Esade Business School in Barcelona, said that “AI systems inherit not only biases contained within individual documents but also inequalities in who has the power to produce and suppress information at scale.”

    There is no easy solution, though developers could assess the data to avoid treating thousands of copies of the same state narrative as if they are thousands of independent voices as well as run multilingual audits, said Carrasco-Farré, who was not part of either study.

    Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI responded to requests for comment on the researchers’ study published in May.


  • Ava DuVernay announces ’14th’ documentary on birthright amendment contested by Trump


    NEW YORK (AP) — Ava DuVernay announced Thursday that she has made a documentary for Netflix on the 14th Amendment, which gave liberty and rights to formerly enslaved people following the Civil War, and which has come under legal attack from President Donald Trump.

    Netflix said Thursday that it will release “14th” later this year. The film will mark a return to nonfiction for DuVernay, the filmmaker of “Selma” and “Origin,” and a follow-up to DuVernay’s 2016 film “13th,” her examination of the legacy of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

    The 14th Amendment has been a prominent target of Trump’s. On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order that would have heavily restricted birthright citizenship as protected by the amendment. In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote.

    The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 during Reconstruction states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The constitutional amendment nullified the 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had held that those descended from slaves couldn’t be citizens.

    DuVernay said her film will detail how the 14th Amendment became “a permanent argument.” It will feature politicians, historians and cultural voices.

    “If ‘13th’ asked who gets caged, then ‘14th’ asks who gets counted,” DuVernay said in a statement. “This is not a film about the past tense of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back. The film asks what kind of country is being written beneath our feet now … while we’re busy believing the stories we’ve all been told.”

    Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, upheld the protections of the amendment, which makes a citizen of anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions.

    “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” wrote Roberts. “We keep that promise today.”

    Trump has vowed to continue to contest the Supreme Court’s ruling. Following the decision, he wrote on Truth Social: “This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”


  • US weekly unemployment claims fall to 208,000, fewest in 10 weeks


    WASHINGTON (AP) — Filings for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level in 10 weeks as U.S. layoffs remain historically low.

    The number of Americans applying for jobless aid in the week ending July 11 dropped by 8,000 to 208,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s well below the 219,000 new applications forecast by analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet.

    Weekly filings for unemployment benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the U.S. job market.

    In its more comprehensive June jobs report earlier this month, the government reported that employers pulled back on hiring in June, adding only 57,000 jobs. That’s less than half the previous month’s total and a sign that companies remain cautious about adding to their head counts. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.2% from 4.3% in May, though that decline is mostly because many out-of-work people gave up looking for jobs and were no longer counted as unemployed.

    June’s tepid hiring comes after a relative surge in job gains the previous three months, countering concerns that the war in Iran could trip up an already wobbly labor market.

    Weekly jobless aid applications have stabilized in a range mostly between 200,000 and 250,000 since the U.S. economy emerged from the pandemic recession. However, hiring began slowing about two years ago and tapered further in 2025 due to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, his purge of the federal workforce and the lingering effects of high interest rates meant to control inflation.

    Among the companies that have trimmed their workforce recently are Verizon, UPS, Amazon, Disney, Starbucks and Walmart.

    Last week, Microsoft said it was cutting 4,800 jobs, about 2.1% of its global workforce, including a large number of workers at its Xbox video game business.

    Thursday’s layoffs data showed that the four-week moving average of weekly jobless claims, which adjusts for volatility, declined by 4,750 to 214,250.

    The total number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the previous week ending July 4 fell by 16,000 to 1.81 million, also a historically healthy figure.


  • No radiation leak after ‘contamination’ events at Africa’s only nuclear plant, regulator says


    CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — South Africa’s nuclear regulator said Thursday that no radioactive material leaked into the environment during three recent “contamination” events inside Africa’s only nuclear power station.

    The incidents involved “elevated airborne radioactive contamination” inside the Koeberg Power Station, on South Africa’s west coast, when there was a loss of power to ventilation units during maintenance work, the National Nuclear Regulator said, adding there was no danger to the public.

    It said the three separate contamination events on June 30, July 2 and July 7 were contained inside the station.

    Workers inside the power station who may have been exposed were screened and recorded radioactive contamination below the radioactivity a person is exposed to when they have a dental X-ray, the NNR said.

    The regulator said that while it was conducting further inspections the recent events “did not meet the criteria for classification as a nuclear or radiological incident or emergency and did not result in any off-site radiological consequences.”

    The Koeberg plant is located around 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of South Africa’s second biggest city, Cape Town. It is Africa’s only commercial nuclear power station and was commissioned in the 1980s during apartheid. It has two reactors which generate around 5% of South Africa’s electricity, and is operated by the national electricity company, Eskom.

    Its reactors were recently granted 20-year life extensions, clearing them to be operational until after 2040.

    South Africa has plans to expend its commercial nuclear capability with new stations to support its unreliable and polluting energy supply, which is struggling to provide for a growing population and heavily based on burning coal.

    Other countries are also turning more towards nuclear power to meet skyrocketing energy demands despite long-held safety fears from opponents of nuclear power citing disasters like Chernobyl and, more recently, Fukushima in Japan.

    Several other African nations are advancing their own commercial nuclear plans, including Egypt, which is building its first nuclear power station with four large Russian reactors that it hopes will be operational around 2030 and generate around 10% of the country’s electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association.

    ___

    AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa


  • EU forces Google to share search data and open Android to rival AI companies


    BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union issued two new rules for Google on Thursday to force it to share search data and open up its Android operating system to rival AI companies.

    In the latest attempt to rein in tech behemoths’ deep control of the digital economy, the EU said it will support innovation and diversity in the field by enabling fair access to AI features on Android devices and search engines.

    “Thanks to these measures, we hope to see emerging alternatives to Google Search and Google’s AI services, such as Gemini, and that users in the EU can enjoy greater choice of services,” Henna Virkkunen, an executive vice president at the European Commission overseeing tech, said.

    The measure is the latest advancement of Brussels’ growing rules and regulations that have given the 27-nation bloc a global leadership position in checking the power of tech juggernauts or “gatekeepers” like TikTok, which are largely based in China and the U.S.

    Recently, Brussels has pushed through efforts to ensure Google gives access to Gemini AI services to rival AI companies and search engines; forced Apple to add interoperability features to its devices to connect to non-Apple products; and demanded Meta dismantle “ key addictive features ” like infinite scrolling.

    Kent Walker, president of global affairs for both Google and its parent company Alphabet, said the new rules could backfire by removing safeguards that the company had built to protect user privacy like the vetting of third-party AI assistants.

    “Europeans’ private searches would be exposed to unfamiliar companies, without adequate anonymization of the data and without user knowledge or consent. This would weaken citizens’ privacy, risk business trade secrets, and endanger national security,” he said in a statement.

    U.S. President Donald Trump has lashed out at EU tech regulation in the past.

    In issuing the two new rules, the commission said it found that AI agents not made by Google were unable to function on Android phones at the same level as Google’s Gemini.

    Google must now allow voice-activation of these alternative AI agents and enable them to run background tasks like booking restaurants via third-party apps.

    By January 2027, Google must also begin sharing anonymized search data with some rivals. The commission said the move is meant to level the playing field since Google controls a vast trove of user data that no competitor can match.


  • Fujitsu and leading Japanese robotics companies to use Nvidia technology in ‘physical AI’


    TOKYO (AP) — Japanese communications company Fujitsu is leading a major push in artificial intelligence using Nvidia’s technology, bringing together what it said was the best in Japan’s manufacturing prowess in robotics with AI.

    The technology area known as “physical AI” refers to smart, futuristic robots that can think on their own, not just follow programmed directions, to work safely alongside people in factories, homes and hospitals.

    The initiative was announced in Tokyo on Thursday by Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang and Fujitsu Chief Executive Takahito Tokita, along with the CEOs of Japan’s top makers of industrial robots, Fanuc Corp., Yaskawa Electric Corp. and Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

    The latest announcement comes on top of a deal announced by Nvidia and Fujitsu last year.

    The executives expressed hopes that the robots can address the nation’s acute labor shortage. Japan is among the most rapidly aging societies in the developed world and the smart robots could help take care of the elderly living alone, they said.

    Huang said physical AI was a good fit for Japan because of the country’s reputation for manufacturing quality because robots that move independently could potentially be dangerous.

    “Japan’s excellence is a philosophy, a way of life. ‘Made in Japan’ means the highest quality, the highest precision. Japan sets the standard for the state-of-the-art in modern manufacturing,” he said.

    Huang listed Japan’s prized concepts in fine manufacturing such as “kaizen,” which means “continuous improvement.”

    The companies did not give a specific time frame for the arrival of such robots in daily life. They stressed efforts were underway with what they called the first phase of the collaboration coming later this year.

    There has been no decision on setting up a joint venture, although that could come later, they said.

    Japan has acknowledged it has fallen behind some nations, including China and the U.S., in AI, and has been eager to play catch-up.

    The government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently announced a plan to drum up more than 370 trillion yen ($2.3 trillion) in public and private investment in various technology fields by 2040, including physical AI, semiconductors and data centers.

    Silicon Valley-based Nvidia, which offers an open-source technology, has been aggressive in forging various ties in Japan, including with leading banks, automaker Toyota Motor Corp., video game maker Sega and national research institute Riken.

    ___

    Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama


  • ‘Jurassic Park’ actor Sam Neill died from pneumonia, agent says


    WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Actor Sam Neill died from pneumonia and will be honored at a private family memorial at his New Zealand farm later, his agent told The Associated Press on Thursday.

    Neill’s family had earlier announced the actor known for “Jurassic Park,” “The Piano” and other films died Monday in Sydney.

    His agent Philip Grenz said he was providing more information after speaking with Neill’s family and following news reports “which contain inaccuracies and outright falsehoods,” he said.

    “Sam passed away from pneumonia,” Grenz said. “Prior to becoming sick, Sam had valiantly fought and beaten lymphoma through a new treatment called CAR-T therapy.”

    He added that Neill had filmed four projects “back-to-back” during the past year that are due to be released in the coming months.

    “As Sam was an intensely private man who loathed a fuss, his family will honor him with a private family memorial at his farm in New Zealand at a still-undetermined later date,” Grenz said.

    The New Zealand actor disclosed in 2023 that he had been diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and said in April this year that he was cancer-free. CAR-T therapy is a form of immunotherapy based on an individual’s T cells and is used for several types of blood cancer.

    His agent’s statement followed days of tributes to Neill from film industry colleagues who remembered him as a kind, witty and curious man.

    “You are so loved and will be sorely missed by us all,” director Taika Waititi, who directed Neill in 2016’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” — one of Neill’s best-loved films in New Zealand — wrote on Instagram on Wednesday.

    “Love you and see you soon, sweet Nigel,” Waititi wrote, referring to Neill’s birth name, which he told interviewers he had changed to Sam at school because there were too many Nigels in his class.

    “Sam was exceptionally collaborative,” said Steven Spielberg, who helmed the first “Jurassic Park” movie, in which Neill played paleontologist Alan Grant.

    “I adored making all the Jurassic movies with him,” Spielberg said in a statement. “Along with Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, we will always have our Jurassic family and Sam will never be forgotten by us or his many millions of fans around the world.”

    Neill was one of a host of actors and directors who achieved international fame after an explosion of Australian films that began in the late 1970s. In New Zealand, he has been mourned as a friendly, unassuming person who shunned celebrity and contributed to causes and community projects near his home, according to local news outlets.

    Neill was also a vintner and under his Two Paddocks brand, he produced pinot noir and riesling wines from his winery in the Central Otago region of New Zealand’s South Island.

    He is survived by his four children and eight grandchildren.


  • New York Times files motion to quash subpoenas served on journalists over Air Force One coverage


    WASHINGTON (AP) — The New York Times on Wednesday filed a motion to quash subpoenas that the Justice Department served on journalists who reported on security concerns involving the new, Qatari-gifted Air Force One, teeing up a significant court fight pitting press freedom against the the government’s ability to force reporters to identify sources.

    David McCraw, the newspaper’s senior vice president and deputy general counsel, accused the government of bringing the subpoenas in “bad faith to punish The Times for its coverage.”

    “They violate the constitutional rights of The Times and its journalists,” McCraw said in a statement. “We are going to court to defend our journalists’ rights to report freely on the administration and to provide the public with stories that matter.”

    The filing was made under seal in the Southern District of New York, where the journalists were summoned in subpoenas delivered last Friday to testify before a federal grand jury. The Times had said it expected five journalists to be subpoenaed; three were ultimately served.

    The subpoenas, delivered to reporters at their homes, marked a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s crackdown on media leaks that free press advocates swiftly condemned as a government effort to intimidate news organizations. It followed an FBI search earlier this year of a Washington Post reporter’s home and the seizure of her electronic devices.

    The new jet in question, a present from Qatar that Trump’s administration spent $400 million to retrofit and upgrade, recently entered service. But the Republican president used an older model Air Force One jet to leave a NATO summit in Turkey last week.

    The Times, citing anonymous sources, reported that the switch had come at the urging of the Secret Service and that the newer plane lacked some of the advanced security features of the older aircraft, including antimissile capabilities. On social media, Trump denied security concerns.

    The Justice Department has justified the subpoenas by saying that “to be clear, reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are.”

    “We value and appreciate the important role that the press plays in this country,” the department said after the Times reported it had received the subpoenas. “But DOJ also plays an important role to make sure that the people entrusted with our nation’s secrets do what they’re supposed to do with that information, which means not sharing classified information.”

    Asked about the issue at his Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is “not targeting reporters,” describing them as “material witnesses” to a leak investigation.

    When Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, pointed out to Blanche that the department wants to ask the journalists who their sources were, Blanche replied, “No, the question we want to ask them is who provided them with classified national security information, which everybody in this body should want to protect.”

    The Justice Department over the years has developed, and revised, internal policies governing how it will respond to news media leaks.

    Though the department across presidential administrations has periodically seized the phone records of individual journalists in hopes of identifying sources for national security stories, it is extremely rare for the government to attempt to compel a reporter to reveal their sources before a grand jury.

    In April 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded a policy from President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups. The moves again gave prosecutors the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make “unauthorized disclosures” to journalists.

    A memo Bondi issued said members of the press are “presumptively entitled to advance notice of such investigative activities,” and subpoenas are to be “narrowly drawn.” Warrants must also include “protocols designed to limit the scope of intrusion into potentially protected materials or newsgathering activities,” the memo stated.

    In January, FBI agents searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who has been covering Trump’s transformation of the federal government, as part of a leak investigation into a Pentagon contractor accused of taking home classified information.


  • Hong Kong booksellers are reportedly arrested over alleged sales of seditious publications


    HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong authorities have raided two bookstores and arrested five people on suspicion of selling allegedly seditious publications, local media reported Wednesday, in the latest step targeting independent booksellers.

    Videos and photos from multiple media outlets showed officers wearing vests marked with “Police” seizing boxes from the building housing Have A Nice Stay, a bookshop founded by former journalists. A bookseller was seen being taken away.

    A few streets away a similar scene played out, with boxes taken from the building housing Greenfield Book Store, according to a video by online news outlet The Collective.

    Police later said they raided two stores in Mong Kok district, without identifying them. They arrested two men and three women on suspicion of breaching the 2024 national security law, according to their statement.

    This is the third round of arrests linked to independent bookstores after similar operations in March and June that were widely seen as stifling dissent in the Asian financial hub.

    The new police statement said an investigation showed the five people were suspected of displaying seditious materials and selling seditious publications on the premises. The publications’ content includes stirring up hatred against the city’s government, judiciary and law enforcement agencies, it said.

    Customs officials referred the case after the discovery of allegedly seditious books in a batch of goods shipped to Hong Kong from overseas, police said, without specifying titles.

    The bookstores were closed during usual opening hours on Wednesday. Calls to Greenfield and a founder of Have A Nice Stay were unanswered.

    Have A Nice Stay had already announced it would shut down on Aug. 30. In a social media post, it said financial difficulties and an elusive red line were among the factors.

    Hong Kong was once known for its freedom of publication and freedom of expression. Some Chinese residents crossed the border to buy books deemed to be too politically sensitive on the mainland.

    Lam Wing-kee, the owner of Causeway Bay Books until his death earlier this month, made international headlines in 2016 when he revealed that he was held by Chinese authorities after crossing from Hong Kong to the city of Shenzhen. Four others affiliated with the bookstore in Hong Kong disappeared in late 2015.

    Lam’s account shocked many people in the former British colony, which Beijing promised would maintain its Western-style civil liberties for 50 years after its return to China in 1997.

    Following political changes after anti-government protests in 2019, independent bookstores have been operating in an even more challenging environment.

    Amnesty International’s Asia deputy regional director Sarah Brooks said the use of “sedition” offenses to target bookstores demonstrated how the city’s national security framework “is being weaponized to silence dissenting voices and eradicate spaces for free thought.”

    “This year’s escalating attacks on Hong Kong’s independent bookstores hammer home the chilling reality of what the city has become: a place where you can be criminalized simply for what’s on your bookshelf,” she said.

    Authorities say the national security laws are crucial for the city’s stability. Hong Kong’s Secretary for Security Chris Tang has said the government would not set up a list of banned books, saying it would be pointless to implement in reality.

    In March, police arrested the owner and staff of the independent Book Punch store, reportedly on suspicion of selling seditious publications. They included the biography of former pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in his national security case.

    In June, Hong Kong police arrested two booksellers on suspicion of selling seditious publications and receiving funds from foreign political organizations.

    All were later released on bail.