标签： Asia

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Thousands of demonstrators converged on Belfast’s streets Saturday to push back against overt racial violence, just days after a viral stabbing incident sparked two consecutive nights of rioting that targeted ethnic minority communities across the city. The demonstration, organized to reject bigotry, saw participants hold hand-painted placards emblazoned with unifying messages including “Hate is the only threat to our streets” and “Belfast stands against racism.”

The unrest that preceded the rally traces back to a knife attack on Monday night. A graphic video of the assault – which captured a perpetrator straddling a victim on the pavement and repeatedly slashing him – spread rapidly across social media platforms, stoking tensions that boiled over into organized violence by Tuesday.

Identified by authorities as 53-year-old Sudanese national Hadi Alodid, the suspect appeared in Belfast court Wednesday on charges of attempted murder. His victim, local resident Stephen Ogilvie, remains hospitalized in critical condition as of the latest updates.

Within hours of the video going viral, hundreds of masked rioters took to the streets, launching coordinated attacks on homes and vehicles owned primarily by immigrant and ethnic minority residents. Footage captured in the aftermath of the violence showed young children being evacuated from burning residential properties, as arsonists set multiple homes ablaze. One of the targets was a Middle Eastern-owned supermarket that had only just been rebuilt after a similar racist attack two years prior.

Sham Supermarket manager Mohammed, a Syrian national, told reporters that all new refrigeration units and stock – replaced after the store was destroyed during 2024 unrest that spread from Southport, England – were lost in the latest arson attack. “The attack took all the produce,” Mohammed said. “They burned it all.”

The violence extended into a second night, after an organized “hit list” targeting homes of foreign-born residents was circulated among extremist groups, prompting masked rioters in balaclavas to continue their coordinated campaign of intimidation against ethnic communities. In the wake of the unrest, many minority residents have been left too afraid to return to their homes, creating a pervasive climate of fear across affected neighborhoods.

Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn condemned the intimidation tactics, confirming reports that commuters have been pulled over in their cars mid-commute and interrogated about their nationality. Benn called the practice “completely unacceptable” and called for unity against bigotry.

Local SDLP councillor Seamas de Faoite told reporters that Saturday’s large turnout reflected widespread outrage across the city over the racist violence. “People turned out today to show that they are appalled by what has happened,” de Faoite said of the demonstration.

The unrest comes amid a documented surge in hate crime across Northern Ireland: an official government report published in December 2024 found that reported race hate crimes in the region are now at their highest level since recording began 20 years ago.

Against a backdrop of cutthroat economic competition and strained intergenerational relationships, a new niche of Chinese social media creators has captured the hearts of millions of young users: self-styled “virtual parents” who offer gentle, unconditionally supportive words to any follower who calls them mom or dad.

Among the most popular of these creators are Pan Huqian and Zhang Xiuping, a married couple who have amassed nearly 2 million followers on Douyin, China’s domestic counterpart to TikTok. In one of their most widely viewed clips, the pair leans into the camera, soft-voiced and warm: “Have you been worn out from work and school lately? Don’t push yourself too hard. Mom and Dad know you’ve already endured so much.”

For followers like 33-year-old Shanghai-based tech worker Vincent Zhang, this simple, affirming message fills a gap that his own biological parents have never managed to close. Zhang has a daily habit of pulling out his phone during mealtimes to check in on the couple’s latest updates, and like thousands of other young followers, he regularly leaves comments sharing updates on his life and requesting birthday or life blessings from them. “My real parents are never the ones to tell me not to overwork, or that I’m already good enough the way I am,” Zhang explained. “But these virtual parents always ask whether I’m happy today.”

Pan’s own life experience laid the foundation for the content he creates today. In a 2024 interview with Douyin, he opened up about his own difficult childhood that left him deeply familiar with the pain of growing up without parental encouragement. When he was just 14 years old, Pan left home to become the main breadwinner for his family after his mother was paralyzed. For 33 years living away from home, he said, his biological parents never once offered him a word of encouragement. After his daughter was born, Pan made a promise to himself to build a different, more affectionate family dynamic – a promise that eventually expanded into his virtual parent project, where his daughter even appears regularly in his and Zhang’s videos.

For many young Chinese, strained dynamics with their biological parents stem from a clash of generational experiences and unmet expectations. Today’s young people came of age amid China’s decades-long economic boom, growing up with far greater stability and prosperity than their grandparents, who survived the 1950s famine and the upheaval of the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and their parents, who came of age as China slowly emerged from those crises to open its economy to the world. But this era of growth has also brought unprecedented pressure: in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, a sluggish national economy has left youth unemployment stuck above 15% for years, intensifying competition for every job, every promotion, and every marker of success.

Many young people report feeling burnt out from the constant rat race, and many more carry hurt from what they describe as unforgiving “tough love” from their parents, who often hold rigid traditional expectations. For Zhang, even weekly phone calls with his parents have become a source of chronic stress: they routinely criticize his choice to work in the tech industry, pushing him to pursue a more stable government job, and badger him about when he will settle down with a partner. “From the second the call starts, every choice I’ve made is wrong, something that needs to be corrected by them,” he said.

This widespread frustration has sparked a broader public reckoning among young Chinese around unhealthy intergenerational dynamics, a conversation that resonates across cultures globally. Discussions online run the gamut from young people venting about controlling parental behavior to those exhausted by pressure to excel academically or conform to traditional expectations of filial piety. Even state media has waded into the conversation, urging young people to show more understanding for their parents’ perspectives and uphold traditional family values – a framing that many young people reject, pointing to their own unaddressed generational trauma.

“I can understand why my parents think the way they do, I know they grew up with their own hardships,” Zhang said. “But I have my own generational struggles and pain too.”

The depth of this frustration has even spawned a viral cultural meme trend called “gourd soup literature,” named after a viral one-minute skit that perfectly captures the common dynamic of dismissed young people’s autonomy. In the skit, a son politely turns down a bowl of gourd soup his mother offers him – and ends up being labeled ill-tempered and ungrateful for his boundary-setting. For 28-year-old Zhao Xuan, the meme hits so close to home that she has muted her family’s WeChat group chat to avoid the constant stream of this dynamic in her own life. Where she once spent hours lamenting to friends trying to process her parents’ behavior, she now uses “gourd soup literature” memes to process her frustration through humor. “I even went to therapy, but I gradually realized crying wouldn’t change anything,” Zhao told the BBC. “My mom isn’t going to change, so the only thing I can change is my own mindset – I just treat all of it like a joke now.”

Even followers who recognize that the “virtual parent” trend is a commercialized social media product still find genuine comfort in the small doses of warmth it offers. Zhang acknowledges that Pan and Zhang’s content is likely mass-produced under a media company, and that it is far easier to offer gentle, unconditional support to thousands of “virtual children” than it is to navigate the messy history of a real biological family. Still, the content fills an emotional void he cannot ignore. Recalling a recent clip of the couple browsing a supermarket together, he said the simple, low-pressure scene brought back long-lost memories. “I really miss when I was little and would go grocery shopping with my parents ahead of Spring Festival,” he said. “We haven’t had this kind of pressure-free conversation in so, so long. A little bit of warmth is better than nothing, after all.”

A wave of racially motivated violence has shaken Northern Ireland’s capital Belfast, leaving immigrant families from Sudan displaced and terrified, as local volunteer groups stepped in to fill the gap left by absent state authorities. Earlier this week, two Sudanese families living in Belfast’s Tiger Bay neighborhood were targeted in coordinated attacks by gangs of masked men, who broke into their properties and set fire to the homes and work vehicles parked outside.

One attack trapped a single mother and her two young children upstairs as flames consumed the floor below. Too afraid to confront the attackers who had explicitly targeted people perceived as foreign, the family hid in place while waiting for emergency response that took a full hour to arrive. Next door, a father shielding his two children waited out the violence, already wondering how he would explain the chaos to his wife, who was traveling overseas for work. Both heads of household work as translators for the UK’s National Health Service, and their work cars, left parked on a street decorated with loyalist murals, were completely destroyed in the arson.

The violence followed a stabbing incident in Belfast earlier that week perpetrated by a man of Sudanese descent, and quickly spiraled into targeted attacks against the city’s entire Sudanese immigrant community. Even before the worst unrest broke out, two Sudanese community leaders – Areej Fareh and Twasul Mohammed, who run the Belfast-based women’s collective Anaka – had been working to address growing safety risks for immigrant residents. When the first night of attacks erupted on Tuesday, members of the Anaka collective, most of whom are immigrant women from diverse backgrounds, took to the streets despite the danger of flying petrol bombs and makeshift checkpoints set up to target people who appear non-local.

With no sign of police, housing officials or other state agencies responding to the crisis, the grassroots organizers launched an independent evacuation effort. They first moved out 12 families whose homes and vehicles had already been destroyed by arson. When a leaked list of additional targeted addresses circulated on social media and WhatsApp groups the following night, the team expanded their operation: using a shared network of volunteer contacts, a centralized database of displaced people and a registry of local residents with spare rooms to offer, the group ultimately relocated more than 200 vulnerable families and individuals, many of whom remain unable to return to their neighborhoods.

Fareh and Mohammed’s experience organizing against authoritarian rule in their home country prepared them to step into this crisis. The pair became friends while studying at university in Sudan, where they both organized opposition to the 30-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted in a 2019 popular revolution. Mohammed relocated to Belfast in 2016, while Fareh remained in Sudan to take part in the uprising, an experience that left her with first-hand trauma from state repression. During a 2019 protest in Khartoum, she was arrested by al-Bashir’s security forces, harassed and abused. She had already watched a close friend, a young chemist, killed by gunfire during a 2013 protest crackdown led by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Janjaweed-derived paramilitary now accused of genocide in Sudan’s ongoing civil war. By the time al-Bashir fell, Fareh made the decision to leave to protect her 15-year-old son, and resettled in Belfast.

For years after her arrival, Fareh said she felt entirely safe in her new home. “The first few years, until the attacks in 2024, I never worried that people on the street were racist,” she explained. “I was confident. Even if it was late and I was on my own I felt safe. Now I feel it all the time. If I see two men I feel worried.”

Today, a central Belfast church has been converted into a makeshift refuge for hundreds of people displaced by the violence, with volunteer organizers running a full kitchen serving hot meals to displaced residents. Even amid the trauma, small moments of community connection persist: as the World Cup kicks off, a local resident organized a casual pool on when the first tournament goal would be scored. Local organizers like Brenda, a 15-year veteran of film and television set production in Belfast, have streamlined operations at the refuge to ensure every displaced person has support.

Community housing organizer Conol Matthews, who has worked alongside the volunteer evacuation effort, argues that the anti-immigrant violence is stoked by manipulative forces that benefit from working-class division. When he encounters anti-immigrant sentiment among local working-class residents, he challenges them to ask who actually gains from the UK housing crisis that places asylum seekers and refugees in working-class neighborhoods, with private landlords charging the state inflated rents. “It’s those boys in suits,” he tells them. “They benefit. You have to live it. Maybe look not at the people living a life like yours.” Matthews has faced retaliation for his work: his phone number was leaked to loyalist extremist WhatsApp groups, and his call log is now flooded with endless anonymous threatening calls.

Despite the fear and trauma of recent attacks, both Fareh and Mohammed say they refuse to leave Belfast, drawing on their experience of resistance in Sudan to reject the narrative of collective punishment that blames the entire Sudanese community for the actions of one individual. Mohammed notes that while rising anti-immigrant sentiment is a problem across much of the West, Belfast has a unique context of colonial history that creates solidarity. “There are more good people here than bad,” she said. “It’s becoming like this all over the West, but at least here the Irish understand, they have the history of being colonized.”

For Fareh, the message to the racists targeting their community is clear: the Sudanese community will not be driven out. “We are not leaving it for them,” she said. “If you think you should leave then you have to think: no way.”

Hundreds of LGBTQ+ activists, community members and allied supporters filled the streets of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu Saturday, marking Pride Month with a public demonstration of visibility and celebration amid a wave of incremental but groundbreaking legal and political wins for queer rights in the South Asian nation.

Unlike many regional neighbors where gender and sexual minority rights remain heavily restricted or criminalized, Nepal has emerged as a surprising trailblazer for LGBTQ+ inclusion in Asia over the past 15 years. The nation’s progress traces back to a landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling that mandated the government implement policy reforms to protect non-cisgender and queer citizens from discrimination. That ruling laid the legal groundwork for one of South Asia’s most progressive gender identification policies, which today allows people who do not fit within the traditional binary of male or female to select a dedicated “third gender” category on official government documents, including passports.

That momentum was codified into national law with the adoption of Nepal’s 2015 constitution, which included an explicit ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation — a protection that put Nepal far ahead of most other Asian nations. More recently, the country solidified its status as a regional leader by becoming one of the first Asian countries to formally legalize same-sex marriage, a move that drew international attention as a milestone for queer rights in the region.

The most recent step forward came following the general election held this past March, which brought Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s government to power. In a historic move for the nation, the new administration launched a dedicated cabinet-level department: the Ministry of Women, Children, Gender and Sexual Minorities and Social Security. This marks the first time Nepal has created a standalone government body specifically tasked with addressing policy and social issues affecting women and sexual minority groups, a shift that community leaders frame as a critical step toward embedding LGBTQ+ needs into national governance.

Saturday’s Pride march was both a celebration of how far Nepal has come and a public affirmation of the growing visibility of the country’s queer community, which continues to build on the legal wins of the past 15 years to push for broader social acceptance and full equal rights.

SYDNEY, Australia — A series of concerning shark encounters along Australia’s coastline has continued, with a woman in her 30s sustaining life-threatening critical injuries during an attack off one of Sydney’s most frequented recreational beaches on Saturday.

According to official police statements, the attack unfolded at 11:15 a.m. local time in waters adjacent to Coogee Beach, where the victim was swimming when the shark struck. She sustained severe, penetrating wounds to both her legs and arms, prompting immediate action from bystanders who pulled her from the ocean and initiated emergency first aid on the sand before emergency medical personnel could reach the scene.

Following initial stabilization, the injured woman was transported to a nearby rugby field, where a rescue helicopter airlifted her rapidly to a major metropolitan hospital. As of the latest police update, her condition remains classified as critical.

This weekend’s attack comes in the wake of an unusually high cluster of fatal shark attacks that have rocked Australian coastal communities since mid-May. Three professional and recreational spearfishing divers have been killed in separate shark encounters across the country in just over a month, bringing the total number of fatal shark attack fatalities in Australia in 2024 to four, not including the critically injured victim from Saturday.

The string of recent fatal incidents began on May 16, when a 4-meter great white shark fatally attacked 38-year-old spearfisher Steve Mattabonni off the coast of Perth, Western Australia. One week later, on May 24, 39-year-old diver Michael Jensz suffered fatal head injuries during a shark encounter on the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland’s northeast coast, where bull sharks had previously been spotted in the local area. Most recently, just one week before Saturday’s attack at Coogee Beach, 35-year-old Daniel Turpin was killed by a 4.5-meter great white shark while spearfishing with family members off Michaelmas Island, near Albany in Western Australia.

Australia’s fourth fatal attack of the year occurred far earlier, in January, when a 12-year-old boy died in a Sydney hospital several days after being mauled by a bull shark in Sydney Harbor. Last year, the country recorded five total fatal shark attacks, exceeding the long-term national average.

Long-term data collected by the Australian Shark Incident Database — a collaborative project between Taronga Conservation Society Australia, Flinders University, and the New South Wales state government — shows that Australia has averaged between 2 and 3 fatal shark attacks per year since the turn of the 21st century. Experts have attributed the gradual rise in reported attacks over recent decades to multiple shifting factors: steady population growth along coastal areas, and a sharp increase in participation in ocean recreation activities including surfing, scuba diving, and spearfishing, which bring more people into contact with sharks on a regular basis.