HONG KONG

Hong Kong student protest ends with police clashes (DW)

Roughly 1,000 student protesters gathered outside Hong Kong's government headquarters on Friday, marking the final day of week-long demonstrations against the Chinese government.

Last month, China's top legislative body, the National People's Congress, announced that a new "broadly representative committee," comprising roughly 1,200 people, would nominate candidates for Hong Kong's next chief executive in the 2017 election. The move was seen as a reversal of China's promise that the elections, the first since the 1997 handover, would be decided by universal suffrage.

Five days of demonstrations against the new law culminated on Friday with violence when some 100 participants attempted to storm the building, prompting police to respond with pepper spray.