China has released Australian journalist Cheng Lei after more than three years, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Wednesday, adding she was freed from detention and reunited with her two young children in Melbourne.
"The Australian people very much wanted to see Cheng Lei reunited with her young kids," Albanese said.She was only formally arrested months later and eventually charged with "supplying state secrets overseas" in a case that many saw as politically motivated.
Australia's government had long campaigned for her release, and for China to follow "basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment". She had written about bleak prison conditions in a candid note dictated to Australian officials from jail and released in August. Cheng's case has often been compared with that of Chinese-born Australian writer Yang Jun, who has been detained in China since 2019 on vaguely defined espionage charges.
China was also furious at Canberra's calls for an investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak that killed millions and plunged the world's economy into a multi-year crisis. The conflict between Israel and Hamas militants is making a global impact with Britain, Canada, France and Germany among nations...Twenty-nine people were killed and dozens wounded in a military strike on a camp for displaced people in northern Myanmar,...