Miscellaneous News

Hong Kong SAR chief executive Carrie Lam has condemned Monday's violent acts committed by some protesters who stormed the Legislative Council (LegCo) building, saying she hopes that Hong Kong society will return to normal as soon as possible.

Protesters used a roll cage trolley as a ram and iron poles to shatter the glass doors of the LegCo building, which "really saddens a lot of people and shocks a lot of people," Lam said, criticizing "the extreme use of violence and vandalism."

"During the period, we had been under siege of the protesters. They kept on using violent tactics to try to intrude into the LegCo. It was until nine o’clock at night time, several incidents happened that made us to do a temporary retreat," said the commissioner of police Lo Wai-chung.

He told reporters that during the charging protesters threw in some white smokes, and the police had no other choice but to temporarily retreat from the LegCo.

It is not true to say that the government has not responded, Lam added, noting that the HKSAR government

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on June 15, if it is the cause of the social tensions.

"The rule of law is exactly what I have been talking about tonight. I hope we all agree that this is something of paramount importance to Hong Kong SAR and will continue to guide the government's reactions and responses to social issues and to demands and aspirations of our people," she stressed at the end of the press conference.

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signgraph said:

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The **NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA** in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers- that-be much embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental" – part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."

Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy – William Blum

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