A Hong Kong basketball coach has been released on bail after he was arrested for allegedly slapping a student on a school court, an incident captured in a viral online video.

Yung Kam-wah was released early Tuesday morning, TVB reported.

The 54-year-old was arrested on Monday on suspicion of common assault after an online video showed a basketball coach forcing a student to slap himself several times.

The incident allegedly happened at Hon Wah College, a secondary school in Siu Sai Wan, independent local media Create City Stories reported last week.

Hon Wah College issued a statement last Tuesday, saying that the incident took place at the school during the 2023-24 academic year, Cable TV reported.

The school added that it had contacted the student to provide support and had suspended Yung from coaching duties.

On the same day, Yung issued an apology on Facebook.

“I want to express my deepest apologies to the student in the video. No matter what rules were broken, what mistakes were made, or what the circumstances were, I should never have punished a student this way,” Yung wrote in a Chinese-language statement.

“I realise that this caused him distress and hurt him, and I sincerely apologise.”

Local media also reported that Hon Wah College students said Yung had been abusive toward pupils for a long time.

“Our generation needs education of love. Under harsh education, students will just want to give up. Our school basketball team used to do well. However, I saw many friends, who were members of the basketball team, quit the team over the past few years because they could not stand the harsh education there,” a student told reporters in Cantonese.

Yung, a former player for the Hong Kong men’s national basketball team, currently serves as the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Basketball Association and works as a sports commentator.

Coal miners in the sleepy Chinese county of Qinyuan sometimes dine at Zhang’s skewer eatery, especially on payday, so a gas explosion that killed at least 82 of these workers left her feeling sorrow for their bereaved families.

The tragedy unfolded in northern Shanxi province, with preliminary findings showing the company operating the mine had committed “serious” violations, state media reported Saturday.

The blast caused China’s worst mining disaster in 17 years, with search efforts ongoing to find two people still missing, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

A total of 247 workers were underground at the time of the blast, which occurred at 7:29 pm (1129 GMT) on Friday at the Liushenyu coal mine, according to state news agency Xinhua.

“This is the first time such a big accident has happened here,” Zhang, who only wanted to be known by her surname, told AFP.

Many of these men were their families’ main source of income, she said.

“Think about it. He’s at that age where he has both elderly parents and young children to support. Then he works in the coal mine, goes down the shaft and never comes back up,” Zhang added.

“How are they supposed to go on living?”

‘Someone’s father’

Police blocked AFP reporters from entering a road leading to the mine but a building bearing its name with the Chinese characters lit up by orange lights was visible in the distance.

Security officers sat by the curb, strictly guarding the gantry of the roads, only allowing authorised vehicles in. Ambulances and police cars entered.

A security guard at the entrance brushed off AFP’s questions as to whether any progress in rescue efforts had been made, saying he didn’t know anything.

But the guard said he hadn’t slept at all Friday night because work was too busy with people coming in and out.

At a gas station near the mine, workers shooed AFP journalists away when they were asked about the mining disaster.

“We can’t just casually comment on these things,” one man told AFP, without giving his name.

“We’re not aware of the details — we don’t know the exact cause or the specific situation.”

He said he hoped the number of deaths “isn’t that high”, before he hurried back inside the station.

At another restaurant selling Sichuan cuisine, a worker with the surname Li told AFP he had noticed ambulances whizzing by his place, frequently patronised by coal mine workers.

But he said he hadn’t been too emotionally affected, despite initially being surprised by the death toll.

“Working in a coal mine, this kind of accident is inevitable,” he said, adding that he hoped the missing people would be found soon.

A total of 128 people were sent to hospital for treatment, CCTV said.

One of the hospitals that took in people injured in the mine tragedy was cordoned off with tape. AFP spotted multiple police cars surrounding its perimeter.

Qinyuan county is peppered with coal mines, and outside one an electronic sign reads: “Go to work happy, go home safely”.

Zhang, grilling meat skewers on a stove, said she had that same wish: for the missing miners to be found safe and sound.

Even if the pay was good, coal miners were “basically earning money with their lives at risk”, she lamented.

She expressed hope that authorities would do all they could to prevent accidents like this and increase mine safety.

Zhang said she feels for families who lost loved ones in the mine explosion.

“He is also someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s husband,” she said.

Hong Kong authorities cannot rule out theft in 16 of 142 lost property reports filed by residents of the fire-ravaged Wang Fuk Court housing estate, the security minister has said.

Secretary for Security Chris Tang said on an RTHK programme on Saturday that in 48 cases, the police and the residents were able to retrieve the missing items.

“About 20 per cent [of the reports] concerned flats that were severely burned, for which we, as well as the residents, believe the items had likely been incinerated,” Tang said in Cantonese. “In 30 per cent of cases, the residents could not clearly describe the items, making it difficult to follow up.”

But Tang said in the remaining 16 cases, the missing items might have been stolen, and that police were investigating.

Wang Fuk Court residents were allowed to return to their homes twice since April to collect personal belongings, months after a massive inferno in November ripped through seven blocks of the Tai Po housing estate, killing 168 people and displacing others.

The entire estate’s eight blocks have been cordoned off by the authorities since the blaze. Some residents raised alarms about a possible security loophole as they suspected valuable items at their homes had been stolen.

In March, weeks before residents made their first home trips, police arrested three men hired to carry out reinforcement works at Wang Fuk Court for allegedly stealing jewellery from unoccupied flats. Authorities said they had stepped up security at the estate since then.

Increased emergency hotlines

Tang also said on the Saturday programme that the Fire Services Department (FSD) had increased its emergency phone lines from 30 to 48 in recent months, with the figure expected to reach nearly 70 in the next two to three months.

After the FSD completes its command system upgrade early next year, there will be 100 available hotlines, Tang added.

The public inquiry into the blaze previously heard that hundreds of emergency calls during the fire had overloaded the FSD’s system, leading to backlogged calls and failed connections. In one case, a woman died after the police failed to pass her call to the FSD.

Tang said on Saturday that the 30-line system had been enough for handling fires in the past until the Tai Po blaze.

“We realised 30 lines were not enough in an event like this, so we felt the need to immediately increase that. But we have to strike a balance between resources and needs, and we think that 100 lines will be enough,” Tang said.

He also mentioned the government’s proposal to revamp the city’s fire safety laws, saying it aims at ensuring the FSD has the “final responsibility” in the oversight of buildings’ fire risks.

After the revamp, the FSD will actively refer structural fire hazards, such as exit points for workers in a building’s fire staircase, to the responsible departments and follow up on the matter, Tang said.

The proposed amendments will cover the Fire Services Ordinance and three subsidiary pieces of legislation on fire safety equipment in buildings, the professionals who oversee them, and the FSD’s powers to abate fire hazards, the government announced last week.

A one-month public consultation regarding the proposed revamp is underway. Residents have until June 25 to submit their views in writing.

One Hong Kong hiker has died, and another one survived after being rescued from a Japanese mountain, according to media reports.

Japanese TV Chubu-Nippon Broadcasting (CBC) reported on Tuesday afternoon that two men, believed to be Chinese nationals, were stranded on Mount Okuhotaka, Japan’s third-highest peak, resulting in one fatality.

According to CBC, Japanese police received a report on Sunday that a 22-year-old man, who lived in Tokyo, and a 30-year-old man were stuck on Mount Okuhotaka – the highest peak of the Hida Mountains – in Gifu Prefecture due to poor weather conditions.

The two were reportedly trapped at a 3,163-metre rocky ridge known as “Gendarme,” located west of the Mount Okuhotaka summit.

Earlier search and rescue operations were called off due to persistent bad weather, CBC reported. “A search operation by a Nagano Prefecture disaster relief helicopter began this morning, and both individuals were recovered by 3pm,” it said.

The 30-year-old was sent to hospital in a conscious state and survived, but the 22-year-old was pronounced dead.

Some Threads users said on Monday that two Hong Kong residents were stranded in the Hida Mountains, also known as the Northern Japan Alps, the city’s local media said on Tuesday.

The Hong Kong Immigration Department told local media on Monday that it had received requests for assistance regarding the incident.

The department told HKFP on Tuesday that it had sent staff to accompany the victims’ families to Japan to provide assistance.

My parents started dating back in the ’80s and for a while, they were long-distance. Since this was before our current era of smartphones and email, one of the ways they kept in touch was mail: My father would send cassette tapes to my mom with songs that reminded him of her, and they would both send letters reminiscing about the last time they were able to spend time together. 

I love these letters because it’s a peek into my parents’ lives before me. I can feel the paper. I can see my mom’s beautiful penmanship. And from time to time, they also remind me that many of us would have to think long and hard to recall the last time we wrote something by hand.

According to Shawn Datchuk, a professor of special education at the University of Iowa and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center, schoolchildren are writing less, too — and forget about cursive.

“The vast majority of states have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten and extends a little bit past the first grade,” he told Vox. “On average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms.”

This week, we explore how the ways we teach handwriting in the classroom have changed over time, and the impact it’s having on education as a whole. Plus: What are we missing when we don’t write by hand? We find out all of that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Datchuk, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Ten minutes does not seem like a lot of time. Looking back on my own education, it felt like so much more. When did handwriting become less of a priority?

Changes really started to happen around 2010, and that was when the Common Core academic standards were adopted across the United States. In those standards there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and to start to adopt typing. The standards explicitly say students should make this transition to keyboarding right after the first and second grade.

That’s so early! 

Right? Then in those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding and completely drops cursive handwriting.

I remember being so excited for third grade in particular because where I went to school, that was when they started teaching cursive. Is it just not being taught at all anymore in K-12 schools?

Over the past several years, there’s been a swing back towards cursive. The latest count is approximately 26 states across the United States have passed some sort of legislation reinserting cursive into their statewide curriculum. 

There is some compelling evidence that handwriting, whether it’s print or cursive, is closely related to reading development. Following the Covid-19 pandemic across the nation, we saw dips in reading scores. There is some thought by educational stakeholders and legislatures that perhaps if we focus on handwriting — in this case, cursive — maybe that will improve student reading scores. 

I also hear consistently from parents, guardians, and teachers that they’re very interested in minimizing screen time. Then there’s also a camp of people out there who may have a strong patriotic inclination and they say that, well, the Declaration of Independence is written in cursive, so we should teach kids cursive because it looks so different than print. That way they can study the founding documents.

You’ve worked in education for a very long time, and I’m curious what you make of the changing trends in handwriting. Is pen and paper actually better compared to screens? Do we know if one is better than the other?

That’s a complicated question, but for younger kids who are learning how to read, there does seem to be some benefit in specifically using pencil and paper. There is such a close connection between reading and writing. When students learn how to handwrite, they’re basically committing to memory not only what a letter looks like, but also its name. 

Let’s say you’re teaching a student, “This is a letter M,” and then they learn and commit to memory, “Oh, these are the different strokes or loops of M, and that also makes the mmm sound.” They’re committing that to memory, and so that allows them to draw on that for when they’re reading. 

For older high school students, there also seems to be some logic in how distracting screens can be. I taught high school before. I also currently teach undergraduate students, and there’s a lot of different things that pop up on screens, whether it’s online shopping or checking messages or checking emails that can distract from learning important content. 

Now, let me kind of flip over the other side. Screens are definitely here to stay, and I think pencils and paper are also here to stay. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. That also adds a whole other layer of complexity to this. For instructors and parents and guardians, perhaps the better question to ask is not so much which is better, but “How much time do my kids need with each one of these ways to communicate, whether it’s with a paper and pencil or whether it’s with a computer or tablet or smartphone?”

We talked a little bit about this evolution of technology. You have pen and paper, you have computers, you have smartphones, now we have AI. Is AI another reason to keep handwriting alive?

Unfortunately, I think so. With the rise of artificial intelligence, computer-based writing brings up difficult-to-determine questions on authorship. Lots of professors are struggling with questions on when we do a new assignment, how much of it is computer-generated versus how much of it is attributable to the hard work that students have done. 

I definitely see a shift back to the blue books. I know that the [University of] Iowa bookstore here has started stocking blue books on their shelves for the first time since I’ve been here, and I’ve been here over a decade. 

What do you think students lose if they stop writing by hand regularly?

Besides the academic benefits that I discussed earlier, I do think that one of the strongest reasons that I can think of to engage in handwriting is what we consider a moral reason: Handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us. I think that’s one of the reasons why a handwritten note resonates so emotionally with us as humans. 

For instance, when my mom had a recent birthday, I sent her a handwritten card. On Mother’s Day, my sons and I wrote little notes and my 4-year-old drew a picture for my wife. And then, I’m in my mid-forties. One of the rites of passage of being a middle-aged person now [is that] my wife and I went through the process of getting a living will put together. Last night I was making handwritten notes on the living will because I knew that it was something that I really needed to think through carefully and deliberately.

What we kind of see with even lots of college-age students is that when you engage in writing with a pen or pencil, you tend to synthesize or think more deeply about that information than when you’re just typing.

Melanie Bartos (Uni Innsbruck )stellt aktuelle Zusammenhänge zu Wissenschaftskommunikation ( #wisskomm ) dar .

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#wisskomm auf der #rp26: Heute Abend werde ich über den Weg der @uniinnsbruck zu offenen Plattformen nach dem Prinzip von Open Science Communication berichten!
„Offenheit als Strategie: Wie Wissenschaftskommunikation das Netz wieder schöner macht“:
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https://re-publica.com/de/session/offenheit-als-strategie-wie-wissenschaftskommunikation-das-netz-wieder-schoener-macht

A Hong Kong court has dismissed the bid of a government-appointed administrator of the fire-hit Wang Fuk Court to extend the deadline to hold a meeting with homeowners.

In Tuesday’s judgment, Judge Gary Lam, presiding officer of the Lands Tribunal, denied Hop On Management’s application to delay a statutory deadline to hold an owners’ general meeting, saying the court had no jurisdiction to make such a decision under the Buildings Management Ordinance (BMO).

Hop On – appointed as the administrator of the Tai Po housing estate in January following the deadly blaze – had applied to the tribunal to postpone the May 13 deadline for convening an owners’ meeting, as well as the June 13 deadline for holding the meeting.

It also asked the court to suggest alternative methods for notifying homeowners, as providing mailed notice was considered “impracticable and/or ineffective” after the fire in November.

‘Substantive right’

Judge Lam said in the ruling that postponing the deadline would affect homeowners’ right to have a meeting.

He wrote that the right to request a corporation meeting, in his view, “a fundament[al] substantive right of an owner so that the owner would be afforded [the] opportunity to come together to be informed, discuss and deliberate, and/or participate in and [make] decisions concerning the management of the buildings.”

“The right to convene and hold a meeting is the two sides of the same coin,” Lam added. “To vary the timeframe would in my view vary the substantive right created by statute.”

In addition, Lam said, “not a word” in the ordinance suggests that the timeframe for holding the meeting can be varied, “let alone that the Tribunal or any other Courts would have any jurisdiction to vary the timeframe.”

“I am of the view that it is plain and obvious the BMO confers no jurisdiction on the Tribunal” to extend the deadline, the judge said.

Lam also said that Hop On remained in breach of its statutory obligations and added that it should “convene and hold the meeting as requested as soon as possible” to minimise any further potential breaches.

He also noted that Hop On’s difficulty with contacting owners was “not insurmountable” as it had managed to collect addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of 1,601 owners out of 1,984 units at Wang Fuk Court, while the Home Affairs Department had given the firm the owners’ contact numbers.

On April 29, Hop On, a subsidiary of real estate giant Chinachem Group, received a petition with 247 handwritten signatures asking the firm to meet with flat owners to discuss long-term resettlement and related financial matters.

The total number of signatures supporting the petition exceeded the 5 per cent threshold needed to convene a meeting stipulated by the Buildings Management Ordinance.

According to the ordinance, the management committee should issue notice of the meeting within 14 days and hold the general meeting with owners within 45 days.

A former professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has been sentenced to 20 weeks’ imprisonment over bribery to secure the admission of a mainland Chinese student to the university.

Liu Hongbin, who served as a chair professor at HKUST when the bribery took place, was sentenced on Thursday at the Kwun Tong Magistrates’ Court, local media reported.

Liu previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy for a public servant to accept an advantage and two counts of offering advantages to public servants.

He admitted to accepting HK$40,000 in bribes in March and May 2025 from a friend who works as an insurance agent to help secure a mainland Chinese student’s admission to a master’s programme at HKUST.

At that time, Liu was a chair professor at the Department of Ocean Science and director of the Master of Science in Environmental Health and Safety programme, which the student applied for.

While the student was not qualified for the master’s programme, Liu ordered a lecturer to interview the student and suggested that the lecturer admit the student, the court heard earlier this month.

After the student received a conditional offer from HKUST, Liu gave HK$5,000 to the lecturer and HK$1,000 to another staff member who was responsible for admissions.

The lecturer then reported the bribery to the department manager and handed over the money. The staff member also handed over the money to the department, local media outlet The Witness reported on Thursday.

According to case details revealed in court, Liu was born in mainland China and became a permanent Hong Kong resident in 2002.

In mitigation, the defence said that Liu had seen the disbandment of his research team at HKUST and suffered from depression following his arrest.

Acting principal magistrate May Chung did not accept the defence’s argument that Liu committed the crime because he was affected by others, pointing out that he has been living in Hong Kong for many years, is highly educated, and taught at a university.

In response to media enquiries, HKUST said that Liu had resigned from the university.