Turkey, DR Congo, Hong Kong.

Today's three stories you should know.

Jan 30, 2022

Turkey

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sacked the head of the country’s statistics agency, apparently because he didn’t like newly-published inflation figures. Inflation hit a 19-year high of 36.1 percent, angering both Erdogan, who thinks economic figures exaggerate the poor state of the economy, and the opposition, which claims the rate is even higher. “Can you imagine that hundreds of my colleagues could stomach or remain quiet about publishing an inflation rate very different from what they had established?” the fired statistics chief, Sait Erdal Dincer, said in an interview recently as pressure mounted. “I have a responsibility to 84 million people.”

DR Congo

Fifty-one militia members have been sentenced to death in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the 2017 murders of two UN experts. Swedish-Chilean Zaida Catalan and American Michael Sharp were taken from their cars and killed alongside their interpreter, Betu Tshintela. Catalan was beheaded. The case is somewhat murky with one version of events being that the militia had a grudge against the UN for failing to protect it from attacks by the government. But there have also been claims the murders were a premeditated setup organized by DRC’s security services.

Hong Kong

One of Hong Kong’s last surviving memorials to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was today removed under the spurious pretext it was being done as part of “regular maintenance work.” The mural has been painted across a university bridge for more than 30 years and students traditionally repaint it each year before the massacre’s anniversary. It read: “The souls of the martyrs shall forever linger despite the cold-blooded massacre. The spark of democracy shall forever glow for the demise of evil.”