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HONG KONG (Reuters) - Less than a week after being jailed for unlawful assembly, Hong Kong democracy leader Joshua Wong was summoned again to court on Tuesday for an ongoing contempt of court charge related to the 2014 "Occupy" pro-democracy protests.

Wong, 20, was jailed on Thursday for six months by Hong Kong's second highest court for a separate incident during the protests, dealing a blow to the youth-led push for universal suffrage in Hong Kong and prompting accusations of political interference.

Wong had been sentenced last year to community service for unlawful assembly, but the Department of Justice in the former British colony applied for a review, seeking imprisonment.

Tuesday's hearing involves a separate, overlapping charge for Wong related to a court-ordered clearance of a large protest site during the 2014 civil disobedience movement that Wong helped lead.

Another student leader, Lester Shum, also faces the same charge alongside 18 other defendants, including Raphael Wong, who is not related to Joshua Wong.

Joshua Wong and 10 others have already "admitted liability" to contempt of court for defying a court injunction to clear away a protest encampment in the Mong Kok district after nearly 79 days of street occupations, that later sparked sporadic violent clashes between police and protesters.

According to Hong Kong law there is no maximum penalty for contempt of court, one defense lawyer told Reuters, and it is up to the discretion of the presiding judge.

On Sunday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to decry the jailing of Wong, and two other democracy activists - Nathan Law and Alex Chow - for between six and eight months.

Some protesters held up placards during the demonstration, one of the largest in recent years, that said "Shame on Rimsky", referring to Justice Secretary Rimsky Yuen. Reuters reported earlier that Yuen had overruled other senior legal officials when they initially advised against pursuing prison terms for the three activists.

Wong was taken to court in a prison van, and appeared relaxed with a buzz haircut after having spent five nights in jail, pumping his fist in the air at one point.

"Many people protested on Sunday. Thank you so much," he shouted out from the dock.

Shum, another former student leader, told reporters the young democracy activists could stay relaxed and determined, "because Hong Kong people are standing with political prisoners".

He was flanked by a group of clapping supporters who carried banners with the slogans: "Umbrella movement is indomitable. Civil disobedience is fearless."

Hong Kong's leader, Carrie Lam, however, said on Monday the jailed activists aren't "political prisoners", addressing spreading international criticism over the jail terms, including from countries such as the United States and Germany.

Hong Kong's Department of Justice said in a statement that the cases were handled "according to the applicable laws and that there is no question of political persecutions."

Additional reporting by Christine Chan; Writing by James Pomfret; Editing by Michael Perry

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Hong Kong democracy leader Joshua Wong back in dock days after being jailed - Reuters

There is a Great Divide in the Labour Party. It was there for all to see in September 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn was first elected leader and some of its most talented MPs refused even to countenance serving in his Shadow Cabinet.

It was visible in June 2016 when 80 per cent of Labour MPs declared publicly that they had no confidence in Corbyn as leader. We could see it with every disastrous by-election and local government election result, when the media found it easy to persuade the leaders critics to abandon anonymity and go on the record to condemn him and demand his resignation.

Since the snap 2017 general election, when Theresa May came riding over the hill to Corbyns rescue, we have seen the first serious attempt by recalcitrant MPs to grit their teeth and applaud their leader, a leader who, after all, led an energetic campaign and managed, if nothing else, to persuade voters that...

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Both sides of Labour say they stand for party democracy. Both sides are hypocrites - Telegraph.co.uk

1. Introduction Democracy, Influence, and Protection of the State

Arianna Huffington ran a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009, in which she argued that the net would bring participatory democracy and informed self-government to America, to an extent not seen anywhere on Earth since the Athenian Agora and The Golden Age of Pericles. While this would be an outcome to be greatly welcomed, it was never certain. Indeed, a well-functioning democracy was never certain even in Athens. The Golden Age of Athens lasted less than 25 years. Athens was then sold out by the serial traitor, Alcibiades, who sold Athens out to Sparta, and who later betrayed Sparta to the Persians. Had there been anyone more powerful than the Persians, no doubt Alcibiades would have found a way to betray Persia.

As will be clear below, I now believe that the internet has damaged civil discourse and the role of the Agora, the marketplace for ideas. However, the Greek Agora did have a mechanism for protecting democracy, based on little shards of broken pottery, ostraca. Every year the population of Athens voted. The most popular, powerful people in the city could be banned for a period of 5 years or longer. Citizens wrote the names of dangerously popular, dangerously influential people on shards of pottery, and the winners were sent away, or ostracized. They were not ostracized for crimes they had committed, or even for crimes that they were likely to commit. They were ostracized for their oversized influence and their ability to subvert democracy through the strength of their personality.

2. My Pessimism about Democracy in the Age of the Net

I was more pessimistic than Arianna, believing at the time that there were two alternatives for the impact of the net on American democracy, each equally likely:

Achieving an idealized participatory democracy assumes that the electorate will enjoy fair access to information and that it will gain true comprehension, and that it will not be influenced by the relative ease of preparing soundbites for one position or another. Perhaps the net would make all literate Americans informed, and perhaps the best candidate, with the best platform, with a plan to deliver the greatest good for the country, would be assured election.

Alternatively, candidates with the darkest message, with the simplest delivery, appealing to the basest instincts of their voters, would lead us to fascism.

Still, both Arianna and I accepted the idea that the net would provide fair access to all ideas.

3. With the passage of time, it is clear that I was wrong, and insufficiently pessimistic

The net has not delivered fascism, which was my greatest fear, but it has become the most divisive force in the history of American politics. Traditional journalism still believes in pursuit of facts, and in dissemination of truth. That does not mean that traditional journalism is always neutral, and crusading journalists have been a part of the American tradition since before the revolutionary war. But traditional journalists are forced to work very hard to defend their positions, to ferret out the truth. Yes, the Washington Post led the assault on Richard Nixon after Watergate, and yes, the Washington Post had then, as it does now, a liberal editorial board. But the Post and its investigative reports Woodward and Bernstein, had to work very hard to support everything they wrote.

The alternative to traditional journalism, alt-journalism, believes that words are merely tools, and that facts are merely a matter of personal preference, to be selected, discarded, or fabricated depending on their usefulness. And, indeed, now that Bannon has transitioned back from the White House to his prior role in alt-journalism, his view of his mission clearly has very little to do with the objective pursuit of truth

Ive got my hands back on my weapons. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now Im about to go back, knowing what I know, and were about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.

Contrast this mission statement with The New York Times motto, To give the news impartially, without fear or favor or that of the Washington Post, Democracy Dies in Darkness.

Clearly, Bannon believes that journalism in pursuit of truth is wasted. And, clearly, the man who did more than anyone else to make the Trump presidency possible is going to do whatever he can to use the net to advance it. And, finally, the Trump presidency does not seem to be based on any vision of health care policy, economic policy, or on any other policy other than preserving its own power.

4. What can be done to preserve American democracy?

The ancient Athenians would have known what to do. The most powerful, influential, disruptive forces in the United States today are clearly Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. The ancient Athenians would have banished them from Athens. Are there authors, playwrights, and editors on both the left and right who would also be considered influential and equally disruptive? Probably. And the ancient Athenians would have banished them as well.

Banishment was not based on being right or wrong. Banishment was not based on having political foes without having enough offsetting political friends. Banishment was not based on expressing any single opinion, and was not considered as limiting the right to speak. Banishment was based on an individuals having strong opposition to what was perceived as excessive influence.

Since it is clear that a majority of Americans believe that President Trumps tweeting and public statements are disruptive, and that he has the distinction of being the most unpopular president in American history, it is clear that he would have the honor of winning an ostraca vote. It is not clear who else would rank in the top 5, or the top 10, or however many winners we might feel the need to select.

Banishment is more than a little extreme. Its not clear that you can banish a sitting president, or the current Senate Majority Leader, or the House Minority Leader, although all three might end up winning an ostraca vote.

A more modern solution would be to take away President Trumps cellphone and ban Steve Bannon from the net if they were ostracized. Perhaps CNN, or MSNBC, or Fox, might lose an anchor as well. We would probably have to leave ostracized politicians in office, but we could limit their access to airtime on radio and television. We would be left with a much more centrist media, and with much more centrist politicians as a direct result.

This doesnt place limits on freedom of speech. It simply muffles the loudest voices.

The Republic, Western Democracy, and the entire planet, would all be better off.

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A Modest Proposal for Protecting American Democracy from Americans Or What to Do When Impeachment Seems Too ... - HuffPost

Victims of communism and Nazism remembered on Black Ribbon Day, 77 years after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Aug. 23.

"At a time when the fundamental values of the European Union are openly questioned by the rise of far-right movements and neo-Nazi parties across Europe, the above-mentioned initiative is very unfortunate,"Kontonis said in his letter to the organizers of the conference, which was also quoted in the Greek media.

"The initiative to organize a conference with this specific content and title sends a wrong and dangerous political message that is the result of the agreements that followed the Second World War, revives the Cold War climate that brought so much suffering to Europe, runs contrary to the values of the EU, and certainly does not reflect the view of the Greek government and the Greek people, which is that Nazism and Communism could never exist as the two parts of the same equation," the minister said.

"The horror we lived through Nazism had a single version, the one we described above," Kontonis continued. "Communism, on the contrary, gave birth to dozens of ideological trends, one of which was Euro-communism, born in a communist regime during the Prague Spring period, in order to combine socialism with democracy and freedom."

The European Parliament in 2009 declared Aug. 23 as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Communist and Nazi Regimes, 70 years after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on that day in 1939.

Estonia has invited representatives of EU member states and Eastern Partnership countries to participate in the conference to be held in Tallinn on Wednesday.

Greek Minister of Justice Stavros Kontonis is a member of the prime minister's party Coalition of the Radical Left, popularly known by its syllabic abbreviation Syriza.

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Greek minister turns down invitation to conference on crimes of communism - ERR News

It was this promise of a creative solidarity unhindered by racial segregation that propelled Thompson, Hughes and the cast to invest their hopes in Black and White. When production the fell through, tempers flared. Some of the cast accused the Soviet Union of betraying the African-American cause to curry favor with Washington, from which the Soviet Union was hoping to receive official recognition. Hughes, perhaps the most seasoned artist of the group, attributed the failure to creative differences (too many people with opinions). Reflecting on the project years later, he wrote: O, Movies. Temperaments. Artists. Ambitions. Scenarios. Directors, producers, advisers, actors, censors, changes, revisions, conferences. Its a complicated art the cinema. Im glad I write poems.

After the production of Black and White fell apart, many members of the cast stayed in the Soviet Union, believing it was their best place for their artistic careers. The actor Wayland Rudd was hired by one of Moscows experimental theater companies. The writer Loren Miller stayed to edit a Soviet anthology of African-American poetry. Lloyd Patterson, a recent college graduate who had signed on to the project merely looking for adventure, became a designer for film sets. His son Jimmy, still a baby, appeared in a famous 1936 Soviet film Circus in which a young white American woman with a black child flees the United States for racial sanctuary in Soviet Russia. Hughes stayed for several months in Soviet Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan, reporting on Soviet reforms for various American publications, including the NAACP journal The Crisis. He was reportedly the first American poet whose work was translated into Uzbek.

Despite its demise, Black and White did not deter other black artists from taking a chance on the Soviet film industry. The singer and actor Paul Robeson arrived in Moscow in 1934 at the invitation of Sergei Eisenstein, the director behind such revolutionary classics as Battleship Potemkin, October and Strike. Inspired by the play Black Majesty, penned by C. L. R. James, an Afro-Trinidadian communist scholar and writer, Eisenstein had invited Robeson to potentially star in a film about the Haitian Revolution.

I feel like a human being for the first time, Robeson told reporters after he arrived in Russia. Of all the African-American artists and activists who traveled there, none developed as enduring a relationship with the Soviet Union as Robeson. Upon his arrival, he was received ecstatically by the Soviet theatrical establishment, which invited him to sing an aria onstage from Modest Mussorgskys opera Boris Godunov. Despite Soviet atheism, he was asked to sing Negro spirituals over the radio and at government parties. His song Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child became newly emblematic of his relationship to his home country; the Soviets had put his recording of the song over an animated short film about racism and labor exploitation in the American sugar industry.

But by the time Robeson was beginning his great romance with the Soviet project, McKay and many African-Americans (including the novelist Richard Wright) were moving away from it. McKay, like many of the Russian artists he collaborated with in Moscow, would have a falling out with communism. The instigating event, for him, was Soviet Russias failure to cease trade with Italy even after Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, then ruled by Haile Selassie. The invasion was widely seen as an affront to the very idea of black sovereignty. McKay would turn his political disillusionment into Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem.

Wright would soon join McKay in his disillusionment. In 1944 he wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called I Tried to Be a Communist. Frustrated by the American Communist Partys tepid response to his novel Native Son, Wright wrote to a friend that the party encourage[s] the creation of types of writing that can be used for agitprop purposes, but had a tendency to sneer at more creative attempts.

Hughess overt involvement in communism also waned by this time, but perhaps more out of necessity. He was under intense scrutiny from the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused him of being at one time or another part of 91 communist organizations. Hughes, though, like Wright, did sense that too close an affiliation with a political organization or ideology could prove to be artistically stifling. Explaining to a friend why he never officially joined the Communist Party, he said, It was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept.

Robeson was one of the last black sojourners to see in the Soviet Union an alternative to the racist and exploitative culture of the West. Between the Nonaligned Movement and a resurgence of black nationalism, the brand of communism bred from the Global South seemed to many by the 1960s and 70s to be a sharper weapon against racism and colonialism. As the black feminist writer Audre Lorde wrote when she reflected on her 1976 trip to Moscow, Russia became a mythic representation of that socialism which does not yet exist anywhere I have been.

Russia has long served as a repository for different kinds of mythology, from the Third Rome to the Red Scare. The myth of Russia as a racial paradise was perhaps one of its best, both as a muse to black artists across the diaspora and as a strategic tool in the African-American fight for political recognition. But as an early adherent, Hughes implied that the Soviet Union was just part of a larger narrative of black creative and political revolution; as the refrain of his 1938 poem Ballad of Lenin reads:

Comrade Lenin of Russia,

High in a marble tomb,

Move over, Comrade Lenin,

And give me room.

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was a committee in the House of Representatives and a model for Senator Joseph McCarthys investigations into Communists in the government; it was not Senator McCarthys committee.

Jennifer Wilson (@jenlouisewilson) is a postdoctoral fellow in Russian literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

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When the Harlem Renaissance Went to Communist Moscow - New York Times