HONG KONG (AP) — Jimmy Lai, the former Hong Kong media mogul and outspoken critic of Beijing, was convicted in a landmark national security trial in the city’s court on Monday, which could send him to prison for the rest of his life.

Three government-vetted judges found Lai, 78, guilty of conspiring with others to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security and conspiracy to publish seditious articles. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Lai, 78, was arrested in August 2020 under a Beijing-imposed national security law that was implemented following massive anti-government protests in 2019. During his five years in custody, Lai has been sentenced for several lesser offenses, and appears to have grown more frail and thinner.

After entering the courtroom wearing a grey blazer, Lai smiled and waved to the public gallery. Among the attendees were Lai’s wife and son, and Hong Kong’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen.

Lai’s trial, conducted without a jury, has been closely monitored by the U.S., Britain, the European Union and political observers as a barometer of media freedom and judicial independence in the former British colony, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

His verdict is also a test for Beijing’s diplomatic ties. U.S. President Donald Trump said he has raised the case with China, and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said his government has made it a priority to secure the release of Lai, who is a British citizen.

Lai could face life in prison

The founder of the now-defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security, in addition to one count of conspiracy to distribute seditious publications.

Under Hong Kong’s sweeping national security law, the collusion charge could result in a sentence ranging from three years in jail to life imprisonment, depending on the offense’s nature and his role in it. The sedition charge carries a maximum of two years’ imprisonment. A hearing was set for January for Lai to present mitigating factors before sentencing.

The Apple Daily was a vocal critic of the Hong Kong government and the ruling Chinese Communist Party. It was forced to shut in 2021 after police raided its newsroom and arrested its senior journalists, with authorities freezing its assets.

During Lai’s 156-day trial, prosecutors accused him of conspiring with senior executives of Apple Daily and others to request foreign forces to impose sanctions or blockades and engage in other hostile activities against Hong Kong or China.

The prosecution also accused Lai of making such requests, highlighting his meetings with former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in July 2019 at the height of the protests.

It also presented 161 publications, including Apple Daily articles, to the court as evidence of conspiracy to publish seditious materials, as well as social media posts and text messages.

Health concerns raised during marathon trial

Lai testified for 52 days in his own defense, arguing that he had not called for foreign sanctions after the sweeping security law was imposed in June 2020.

His legal team also argued for freedom of expression.

As the trial progressed, Lai’s health appeared to be deteriorating.

Lai’s lawyers in August told the court that he suffered from heart palpitations. His daughter Claire told The Associated Press that her father has become weaker and skinnier, and lost some of his nails and teeth. She also said he suffered from infections for months, along with constant back pain, diabetes, heart issues and high blood pressure.

“His spirit is strong but his body is failing,” she said.

Hong Kong’s government said no abnormalities were found during a medical examination that followed Lai’s complaint of heart problems. It added this month that the medical services provided to him were “adequate and comprehensive.”

Before sunrise, dozens of residents queued outside the court building to secure a courtroom seat.

Former Apple Daily employee Tammy Cheung arrived at 5 a.m., saying she wanted to know about Lai’s condition after reports of his health.

She said she felt the process was being rushed since the verdict date was announced only last Friday, but added, “I’m relieved that this case can at least conclude soon.”

Originally scheduled to start in December 2022, Lai’s trial was postponed to December 2023 as authorities blocked a British lawyer from representing him, citing national security risks.

In 2022, Lai was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison over separate fraud charges involving lease violations at Apple Daily’s headquarters. He was also previously sentenced for his roles in unauthorized assemblies in other cases related to the 2019 protests.

___

Associated Press writer Chan Ho-him in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

Size of Life

By Neal Agarwal

Illustrations by Julius Csotonyi

President Trump is wielding one of the most sweeping of presidential powers—clemency—far differently in his second term than in his first.

In the first year of his first term, Trump granted one pardon and commuted one sentence. Half of his 238 first-term pardons (wiping out charges or a conviction) and commutations (reducing sentences) were given on the final day of that term in 2021.

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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“We do one book after state testing, and we did ‘The Great Gatsby.’ … A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.”

— Laura Henry, 10th-grade English teacher near Houston

“My son in 9th grade listened to the audio of ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ For ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they watched the balcony scene instead of reading.”

— Rebekah Jacobs, Rockville, Md.

“We typically spend a ridiculous amount of time reading each book, such that in my freshman year, we read only one, ‘Macbeth.’”

— Liv Niklasson, age 16, Los Alamos, N.M.

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.

Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.

Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.

Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.

We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.

More than 2,000 people responded.

Many were longtime teachers who reported assigning fewer whole books now than they did earlier in their careers. Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.

Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.

Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.

These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.

Popular curriculum programs like the one above were created by publishing companies, in part, to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under significant pressure to raise students’ scores on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test results are also prominently featured on school-ranking and real estate websites.

By the time teachers get through their required curriculums and prep students for exams, they often have little or no time left to guide classes through a whole book.

Andrew Polk, 26, teaches 10th-grade English in suburban Ohio, not far from where he grew up. As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

But as a teacher, Mr. Polk must use StudySync, which centers on excerpts. Many colleagues do not believe students will read whole books, he said, though he noted his own experience had not borne that out.

He still assigns several longer works each year, and has taught “Macbeth,” “Fahrenheit 451” and the more contemporary “Paper Towns,” by John Green. Teenagers still feel “passion for a good story,” he said. “Students absolutely can and do rise to the occasion. It’s just a matter of setting those expectations.”

When whole books are assigned, they are most often from a relatively stagnant list of classics, according to research from the scholars Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman.

Here are the most frequently assigned books through the past six decades, according to their forthcoming study.

Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class. - The New York Times

What may have changed most is the number of these classics students have read. During the 2008-2009 school year, one survey found high school English teachers assigned an average of four books annually, with a significant minority assigning seven or more books.

A 2024 survey of English teachers by Dr. Perrillo and Dr. Newman found they assigned an average of 2.7 whole books per year. The results will be published in 2026.

Some educators explained the decline by pointing toward the Common Core, a set of national standards for English and math that most states adopted in the early 2010s, and that continues to heavily shape classroom practice.

The Core was intended to better prepare students for college, and introduced more nonfiction reading and thesis-driven writing into schools. It also suggested a more culturally diverse array of authors, and pointed educators toward a long list of titles characterized by “historical and literary significance.”

Many school districts responded by requiring teachers to closely adhere to curriculum products that took an anthology approach — exposing students to dozens of writers and many genres, but through shorter readings. StudySync, for example, includes a single chapter of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club,” 1,179 words of “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah and James Madison’s “Federalist Papers: No. 10.”

Sandra Lightman, an education consultant who helped to develop the Common Core, agreed that students should be reading whole books but argued it was wrong to blame the Core, which she said had been misinterpreted.

Advocates for the Core had pointed out that some novels commonly assigned to teenagers, like “The Grapes of Wrath,” were not challenging in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. They were akin to a second- or third-grade reading level, despite being thematically rich.

“We never intended that should be banned, only that it shouldn’t be the sole source of reading,” Dr. Lightman said. She argued that overall, curriculum products include higher-quality, more interesting reading material today than they did 20 years ago, before the Common Core.

There are other reasons some schools prefer excerpts. It can be more expensive to purchase books than to assign a variety of shorter works, which are not subject to copyright restrictions and can be easily read on a laptop or tablet.

In addition, with more than 20 states passing laws over the past five years that limit teaching about race, gender and sexuality, using excerpts allows schools to avoid passages dealing with banned themes.

Laura Henry, the teacher in Houston, noted that StudySync offers a 988-word excerpt from “Enemies, a Love Story,” a darkly comic 1972 novel by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. It deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”

Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels. The current dominant approach — reading one or two full books per year as a class, alongside many excerpts — “makes great sense,” he said, as a way to introduce students to a wide array of writing.

Still, some young adults are frustrated by the lack of book reading in their schools.

Ella Harrigan, 22, of San Francisco, said she read only one book her freshman year, “The Hate U Give.” “I opted out and did an online course instead, where I read a book about every two weeks,” she said.

Parents who responded to the questionnaire complained, too, even when their children were enrolled in advanced classes at some of the most highly regarded public schools in America, including specialized high schools in New York City and affluent suburban schools in Montgomery County, Md.

Both districts said they encourage a mix of whole books and excerpts but give high school principals and teachers significant latitude in how often to assign longer works.

Kasey Gray, a spokeswoman for Imagine Learning, the company that develops StudySync, noted that the curriculum offers some units based on full-length novels. But Ms. Gray acknowledged schools using the program may not incorporate whole books.

“We understand the real constraints educators face — limited time, assessment pressures and diverse student needs,” she said in a statement.

StudySync is distributed by McGraw Hill, and the materials come with a disclaimer of sorts:

Please note that excerpts in the StudySync® library are intended as touchstones to generate interest in an author’s work. StudySync® believes that such passages do not substitute for the reading of entire texts and strongly recommends that students seek out and purchase the whole literary or informational work.

Companies that publish competing products centered on excerpts, including Savvas and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said they, too, encouraged teachers to assign whole books.

H.M.H.’s Into Literature includes one full-length play in each year of high school. In response to requests from school districts, the company is developing more daily lesson plans built around whole novels, said Jennifer Raimi, a senior vice president for product development.

There are many schools, educators and publishers defying the trend away from whole books — even if they have to bend the rules to do so.

“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books,” said Heather McGuire, a veteran high school English teacher in Albuquerque. Over the past year, she has assigned her juniors and seniors “Hamlet,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Life of Pi” and “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”

Her students, she said, have told her they much prefer reading print books than reading on a screen.

There are some smaller players in the curriculum market, like Great Minds and Bookworms, that emphasize full books. So far, much of their business is in younger grade levels. But John White, chief executive of Great Minds, said the company is exploring expanding into high schools.

Dr. White previously served as state superintendent of education in Louisiana. Policymakers can shift classroom practice, he said, by creating new standardized tests that require students to write about books they have read during the school year, instead of just responding to short passages contained within the pages of the test booklet.

A major benefit of a whole class reading a whole novel together is the muscle it builds for citizenship and debating big ideas, Dr. White argued.

“Maybe most important is the common project,” he said, “of engaging other young people in a conversation about a book that is open to multiple interpretations.”

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