HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong’s leader announced a cut in liquor taxes on Wednesday, in a bid to revive the Asian financial hub's reputation as a travel destination with a vibrant nightlife and dining scene.
After fulfilling Beijing’s long-standing imperative to enact a homegrown national security law, which has furthered concerns about the curtailing of civil liberties in the city, Chief Executive John Lee now faces challenges with economic competitiveness against regional rivals like Singapore, Japan and mainland Chinese metropolises.
Changes in residents’ lifestyles and a wave of middle-class emigration during the COVID-19 pandemic have dampened local spending. Many residents now prefer to spend their weekends in mainland China, attracted by its lower prices and a wider variety of entertainment options. Meanwhile, visitors from the mainland are spending less in the city than before.
Vacant shops are commonly seen in the city's most popular shopping districts, and revenue at the city’s bars was down about 28% in the first half of 2024 from the same period in 2019, preliminary official data showed.
In his annual policy address, Lee said the duty rate for spirits with an import price of more than 200 Hong Kong dollars (about $26) would be slashed from 100% to 10% for the portion above that price starting Wednesday. He said he hoped it would foster the logistics, storage, tourism and high-end dining industries.
The government previously told lawmakers that after wine duties were abolished in 2008, imports jumped 80% in a year and the city welcomed hundreds of new wine-related businesses.
Lee highlighted the city’s various global rankings near the end of his speech at the legislature, but said past performance does not guarantee future success.
“We must remain confident in ourselves and uphold our morale, standing firm against any efforts to downplay our success story,” he said.
Lee, a former security chief handpicked by Beijing to lead Hong Kong, pushed through the new security law in March. Critics fear the law will further erode the civil liberties promised to the former British colony when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
That law follows similar national legislation Beijing imposed in 2020 to quell huge anti-government protests. Since that law took effect, many of the city's leading activists have been prosecuted, forced into self-exile or silenced. The Hong Kong government said the security laws are necessary for the city’s stability.
But in the wake of such dramatic political changes, many middle-class families and young professionals have emigrated to Britain, Canada, Taiwan and the United States.
To attract more wealthy migrants, Lee revised a plan that awards residency to applicants who invest a minimum of 30 million Hong Kong dollars ($3.9 million) in some types of assets. Starting Wednesday, purchases of homes valued at 50 million Hong Kong dollars ($6.4 million) or more can count toward up to a third of the requirement, he said.
Simon Lee, an adjunct faculty member in finance at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, said slashing taxes on liquor will help stimulate trades of spirits. But he added that the impact on tourism and bar businesses isn’t expected to be significant because the numbers of those consuming strong alcohol may be limited.
Lee, the city's leader, also pledged to turn the city into an international hub for post-secondary education by offering scholarships to overseas students, and promised moves to develop the “silver economy” and “low-altitude economy" — Beijing's buzzwords for markets like elderly care, private aviation and drones. He also announced plans to build an international gold trading market and create a “new commodity trading ecosystem.”
Lee also proposed to regulate the city’s subdivided flats, which are notorious for their tiny size and poor living conditions but provide a relatively affordable housing option in one of the world’s most expensive housing markets.
Some 110,000 households live in such homes, and one of Beijing's top officials for Hong Kong affairs has called for Lee's government to abolish them.
Lee said owners of subsidized flats must ensure each home has windows, an individual toilet and a minimum floor area of 8 square meters (86 square feet) after a grace period.
Lo Kin-hei, chairman of the Democratic Party, one of the city’s few remaining pro-democracy parties, expressed concerns about the impact of the new rules, saying it could force people living in larger but windowless homes to move to smaller flats with windows.
“Can the standards directly translate into improvements in the lives of residents who reside there?" he said.
Hours before Lee's speech, a small group of activists from the League of Social Democrats, another pro-democracy party, held a tiny demonstration outside the government headquarters. They called for universal suffrage for chief executive elections and a retirement pension scheme.
“Return to democracy, improve people’s livelihood,” they chanted.
FILE -People walk past a night club in Hong Kong's Wan Chai district, Nov. 5, 2014. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
