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​Editor’s Note: Under the weather this week. One full story today, plus two shorter takes on stories that I could not give full treatment. Back to form next Tuesday.

The Global Fight for Freedom

1. "Obliterated" from This Piece of Land
2. That Thing That's Not Happening Gets Bloodier
3. Putin's Humiliating African Withdrawal

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking. *Indicates a territory as opposed to an independent country.

"I will continue to defend my home—Hong Kong—until they silence, obliterate me from this piece of land."
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Joshua Wong typed those words on June 30, 2020, hours after Beijing's National Security Law passed. He resigned from Demosistō, the pro-democracy party he had co-founded after leading the 2014 Umbrella Movement as a teenager. By nightfall, the party dissolved with a final post: "We will meet again."
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They have not. Wong is in prison. Demosistō is gone. So is most of what made Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
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Beijing tore up its 1997 promise of "one country, two systems" in stages. The first wave came hard and fast. After the 2019 protests drew millions into the streets, more than 10,000 were arrested. Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily was shuttered in 2021. At least 900 journalists lost their jobs. The annual Tiananmen vigil was banned. NSL conviction rate: near 100%.
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Over 300,000 residents have fled the city since.
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Then came the slower suffocation. In 2024, Beijing imposed a second security law—the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance—criminalizing sedition, espionage, and "external interference." The League of Social Democrats disbanded last June. The Democratic Party—Hong Kong's oldest—dissolved in December. At least 219 unions, gone. Public broadcasters were ordered to air 30 minutes of national security propaganda each week. In February, the now 78-year-old Lai was sentenced to 20 years—a death sentence in all but name. In March, Beijing criminalized refusing to unlock your phone for police: 12 months in prison. That same month, officers arrested the owner of an independent bookstore for selling a Lai biography. The 53-year-old Professional Teachers' Union dissolved.
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This is what Hong Kongers lost: the right to read what they want to, to teach what they want to, to grieve who they want to. To keep their phones private, to organize a labor union, to publish a newspaper. They lost the city itself.
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The New York Times tracked down Chan Chi Sum, jailed at 20 for handing out fliers. After his release, he watched friends drift. "They all…became the people they wanted to be," he said. "But I didn't get to become who I wanted to be."
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Hong Kong isn't grabbing headlines anymore. Left behind is just the quiet agony of silenced voices and obliterated dreams.
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That's exactly the victory Beijing wanted.
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On My Radar This Week...

A pair of stories I was investigating before illness sidelined them—both deserved fuller treatment.
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In Nigeria, the media continues to whitewash the slaughter of Christians—even as the bodies pile up on the holiest days of the Christian calendar.
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On Easter Sunday, armed Fulani militants stormed a church service in Ariko village, killed seven men, and dragged 37 worshippers—33 of them women—into the forest. Hundreds of women previously kidnapped from southern Kaduna have been raped and tortured daily in those camps, according to a local NGO founder. One week earlier, gunmen massacred 40 Christians in a Palm Sunday attack on the Agwan Rukuba community in Plateau State—echoing last year's Palm Sunday slaughter of 54 Christians in Zikke village. That same night, militants raided a wedding in Kaduna's Kahir village, killing 13.
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The New York Times' response? Accusing Republican Rep. Riley Moore of "falsely claiming" a genocide is underway, citing analysts who insist the violence is "much more complex" and largely "fueled by criminals."
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That framing leans on ACLED's much-cited claim that only 5% of civilian attacks explicitly target religion. But ACLED doesn't code victim religion as standard data, excludes attacks on identifiably Christian villages unless attackers shout religious slogans, and discontinued its religion-tracking project years ago. The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, reanalyzing ACLED's own data, found Christians killed at 5.2 times the Muslim rate.
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I'll be reaching out to ACLED with specific questions about their methodology, and how the media has portrayed it. Stay tuned.

At dawn on Saturday, a suicide car bomb obliterated the home of Mali's Defense Minister General Sadio Camara—killing him, his wife, and two grandchildren. It was the opening salvo in the most devastating coordinated assault on Mali's military junta in five years.
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Al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM and Tuareg rebels struck simultaneously across the country—Bamako, Kati, Gao, Mopti, Sevare, Kidal—using car bombs and armed drones in what analysts called an "unprecedented" escalation. JNIM claimed it captured Kidal and Mopti outright. Since 2022, JNIM attacks on Sahel urban centers have more than tripled.
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The most damning detail? Russia's Africa Corps mercenaries—successors to Wagner after Prigozhin's 2023 mutiny and death—negotiated a humiliating withdrawal from their Kidal garrison rather than fight. Putin is hemorrhaging men into Ukraine and can't spare the manpower to prop up Mali's junta.
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The Kremlin sold African dictators a security guarantee. That guarantee just collapsed.
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Junta leader Assimi Goita seized power in back-to-back 2020 and 2021 coups promising to restore security. Five years later, jihadists are blowing up his defense minister 15 kilometers from his own residence.

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