HONG KONG, – A missing Hong Kong bookseller who published books critical of China’s leaders returned to the financial hub on Thursday after a three-month absence and said again he hadn’t been kidnapped, the government said in a statement.

Lee Bo, a British passport holder and bookseller specialising in gossipy books on the private lives and power struggles of China’s leaders, crossed the Lok Ma Chau checkpoint into Hong Kong escorted by an immigration official, the Hong Kong government said in a statement.

Lee and four associates went missing over the past half year, sparking fears Chinese authorities were overriding the”one country, two systems” formula protecting Hong Kong’s freedoms since its return to China from British rule in 1997.

Many people in free-wheeling Hong Kong and some foreign diplomats fear mainland agents illegally captured both Lee and Gui Minhai, a Swedish national.

Lee, who travelled to China without his regular China travel document, was questioned by Hong Kong immigration authorities on his return. “Because Lee Bo had not provided comprehensive information on how he crossed the border, at this stage he hasn’t been arrested,” the government statement said.

Immigration authorities said they would continue to investigate whether Lee had broken any laws.

Lee told police that he had been assisted by unspecified”friends” in getting into China and hadn’t been “kidnapped”, according to the statement.

He reiterated that he’d travelled to the mainland to assist in an investigation into Gui, who now faces charges for selling and distributing books that are banned in China.

Lee wasn’t reachable on his mobile phone for comment.

Lee, however, had earlier voiced concerns that Gui had been taken by agents from China for “political reasons”, according to a series of personal emails reviewed by Reuters.

Chinese authorities have declined to clarify key details of the disappearances and investigation into Gui, but said law enforcement officials would never do anything illegal, especially not overseas.

Bokakhat, India – Wearing a red and grey-striped blanket, a 12-day-old baby rhinoceros is bottle-fed by keepers at a wildlife rehabilitation centre in northeast India, after being found alone in a remote forest region.

Rangers from Kaziranga National Park found the rhino calf lying in a stream and abandoned by his mother in the Bagori forest range in India’s famous tea-growing state of Assam.

Dehydrated and in distress, the calf, a greater one-horned rhino, was brought to the nearby Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC), which cares for orphaned or displaced wild animals.

Staff have begun hand-raising the rhino, bottle-feeding him milk replacement powder and vitamin supplements and allowing him to interact with other calves to reduce stress.

“When he came he was unable to walk properly, he was very weak and suffering from hypothermia,” Dr Panjit Basumatary, a veterinarian at the CWRC, told AFP.

“Now he is almost back to normal, another week or two of care and we think he should survive,” he said.

The baby rhino will be released into the wild when he is about three years old, the vet said, as he will be less vulnerable to being attacked by tigers or other wild animals.

Kaziranga National Park is home to two-thirds of the world’s greater one-horned rhinoceros population, according to the park’s website, as well as the highest density of tigers in a protected area.

Excessive hunting has left the Indian rhinoceros, which once roamed over wide swaths of the country, now classed as vulnerable, after its habitat was reduced dramatically.

The world’s fourth-largest land animal, it can weigh up to 3,000 kilos.

HANOI – Vietnam rebuked Taiwan on Thursday for taking journalists to a disputed South China Sea island, saying the trip was “illegal and worthless” and against the international community’s wishes.

The foreign ministry’s comment on Wednesday’s trip, the first by international media to the Spratly archipelago’s Itu Aba island, was an unusually fast response by Vietnam, which often takes days to raise objections about territorial disputes.

Vietnam, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei have competing claims to the Spratly islands.

“Taiwan sending reporters … despite concerns and objections of Vietnam and the international community, is a serious violation of Vietnam’s sovereignty, escalating tension and with no benefit to peace and stability,” the ministry’s spokesman, Le Hai Binh, said in a statement.

Binh said Vietnam had sufficient evidence to prove it had jurisdiction of the Spratlys and activities undertaken without its permission were “illegal and worthless”.

“We resolutely oppose and demand Taiwan respects Vietnam’s sovereignty,” he said.

Itu Aba is coming into focus as the Philippines challenges the legality of China’s claims to most of the South China Sea, which it asserts through a controversial and largely unexplained nine-dash line on its maps.

The media trip was part of a Taiwanese propaganda campaign on Itu Aba, which also included a high-profile visit by President Ma Ying-jeou in January.

Taiwan president visits disputed Taiping island in Spratly archipelago at South China Sea

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

Reuters, AFP, Digital Globe

Beijing – Four staff of a Chinese media outlet that carried an anonymous letter calling on President Xi Jinping to resign have been missing for over a week, a colleague said Thursday.

A letter appeared on the Wujie News website earlier this month accusing Xi of a litany of policy mistakes and asking him to step down for the good of the country, before it was deleted.

Media criticism of top leaders is almost unknown in China, where the press is strictly controlled by the ruling Communist Party.

Four staff including CEO Ouyang Hongliang and managing editor Huang Zhijie have been “out of contact” since last week, a reporter at the magazine who asked not to be named told AFP.

“I think they are assisting an investigation,” said the staffer, adding that the media outlet may be shut down.

A Chinese journalist, Jia Jia, was held last week at Beijing airport while on his way to Hong Kong, with rights groups linking his detention to an attempt to warn Wujie’s CEO about the letter.

But his lawyer has said that his detention may not be connected to the document.

Wujie has not published any original articles on its website since Wednesday last week, and has not updated an account on the Wechat social media platform since Friday.

Xi has tightened already strict controls on the media since coming to power in 2012, and recently urged state-run outlets to “reflect the will of the party”.

Chinese coverage of Xi is typically limited to accounts of meetings or speeches, or gushing with praise.

He has presided over a slowdown in growth and a clampdown on civil society that has seen hundreds of people arrested.

The letter, seen by AFP in a cached form, berated him for centralising authority, mishandling the economy and tightening ideological controls.

“Due to your gathering of all power into your own hands and making decisions directly, we are now facing unprecedented problems and crises in all political, economic, ideological, and cultural spheres,” it said.

Signed “Loyal Communist Party Members” it added: “For the Party cause, for the long-term peace and stability of the country, and for your own personal safety and that of your family, we ask you to resign from all positions of Party and state leadership”.

Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily on Thursday first reported that four staff were missing and added that the outlet was “facing closure”.