Hearthstone player banned for supporting Hong Kong Protests

On October 6th, Ng Wai Chung, a professional gamer known as Blitzchung, competed in a live match of the online card game Hearthstone while wearing a mask in support of the Hong Kong protests.  After the game, as Blitzchung was being interviewed by two Taiwanese streamers, he shouted “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times!” The stream immediately cut to a commercial break and the on-demand video was deleted.  Blitzchung has been banned from professional Hearthstone and both streamers have since been fired by Blizzard, the company behind Hearthstone. Tencent Holdings Limited, a Chinese conglomerate, has a 5% stock in Blizzard entertainment.

President Trump betrays the Syrian Kurds

In a shocking departure from the policy laid out by the United Nations, President Trump announced on the morning of October 7th  that he would withdraw the 150 military personnel defending the Syrian Kurds from Turkey. Turkey has long viewed the Kurds as a terrorist threat, and has immediately moved to move military forces into their territory.  The goal of Turkey is to establish a “safe zone” 20 miles deep and 300 miles along the Turkish-Syrian border for the remaining one million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.

US Ambassador’s wife uses diplomatic immunity as defense 

Anne Sacoolas, the wife of the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, has fled the country after killing UK citizen Harry Dunn in a car crash on August 27th.  Though she initially agreed to comply with the police investigation, Sacoolas has fled the country and has claimed diplomatic immunity as her legal defense. The US embassy has refused to waive Sacoolas’s diplomatic immunity despite receiving a formal request from the British police. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has pledged to take the issue all the way up to President Trump to find a resolution.