So, today I am going to talk about Hong Kong’s popular pro-democracy newspaper/tabloid, Apple Daily, its shutting down this weekend. This comes against the backdrop of 5 of Apple Daily’s editors and executives being arrested by Hong Kong’s authorities under its new Security Law that was introduced a year ago. Now, to understand why and under which charges these 5 editors and executives were arrested, we have to take a step back and unpack the Hong Kong’s new security law and understand what it stands for and how it was passed. The law itself came into effect last year in June just a few hours before the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China from British control. When the city was handed over to China in 1997, it was done so under an agreement called the basic law, which was meant to protect Hong Kong’s freedom to peaceful protests, free speech and independent judiciary amongst some other basic democratic rights, under the same agreement Hong Kong was meant to pass its own national security law but that never happened because residents of the city did not want it and did not support such a law. In fact, in back in 2003 there was an attempt to pass national security law in Hong Kong and the people took to the streets protesting against it and it never came to fruition. So, this time around when the law was passed, in June 2020, not many people were aware of its provisions and it was passed under secrecy and some of the key provisions of this security law are Crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, which are very vague phrases and according to the text of this law, it is applicable to not only the residents of the city but also to non-residents and also to people who do not live in the city, and people fear that the whole law could mean anything.