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Saturday-Sunday, March 12-13, 2005
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 Apocalypse
next
Hong Kong has virtually shut down as hospitals
are inundated with thousands of suspected bird flu cases.
After months of warnings from health officials, an avian influenza virus
capable of rapid human-to-human transmission is a reality. The virus has
mutated quickly from an earlier form passed from poultry to people.
At the flu's
frontline
Two hundred million subsistence farmers in East Asia
are in daily close contact with the potential conduits of a human bird flu
pandemic - domestic fowl. Each of them keeps a small clutch of ducks, geese,
chickens or turkeys, says the United Nation's Food and Agriculture
Organization.
Deadline for
murder
Pagadian City newspaper editor and publisher Hernan
de la Cruz may own several guns, but that has not made him feel any safer. Four
journalists have been killed in this sleepy southern Philippine port city since
2000, making it the most dangerous city for journalists in a country that is
already one of the deadliest in the world for reporters.
 Opera
kids
It is Saturday morning. Seven-year-old Kitty Ho, who lives in Tai Po, has a
day off from school. But that doesn't mean she will stay at home watching TV,
playing video games or going to the park to play with her friends. Saturday is
opera day, and a busy time for her.
Dream for sale
One day in 1979 a Mexican grocer drove past a
ranch for sale in a lonely valley north of Santa Barbara, California.
Oil pipes lay strewn about like abandoned skeletons. The house was collapsing
and piles of stone littered the barren property.
 Gun
bazaar bites bullet
Sitting in his father's shabby one-room firearms shop in Pakistan's wild
northwestern tribal region, 16-year-old Dilnawaz Khan puts the final touches on
a small but deadly pistol shaped like a simple fountain pen.
Dilnawaz is one of 12,000 workers in Pakistan's largest weapons bazaar - a
mostly unregulated crush of small shops on the dusty streets of Darra Adamkhel,
a lawless village where customers can find anything from an assault rifle to an
anti-aircraft gun, usually at cut-rate prices.
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Sideways: The road trip
Buellton, California, is not a fancy
town. It doesn't pretend to be. It's hard to be pretentious when you're known
for the motel shaped like a windmill that hovers over the freeway.
The Days Inn used to be little more than a cheap room for work crews to dust off
and grab a beer or a stopping point for tourists on their way to bigger and
better things.
And then came the hit movie Sideways
.
Quirks
of taste
The industrial and residential new
town of Fan Ling, a suburb just two train stations away from the border at Lo
Wu, is rarely visited by anyone who doesn't live or work there. This is about
the last place in Hong Kong you would expect to find a museum.
 The
Cutting Edge .. Spoonfed indulgence
It is hard to decide what to say about Spoon, the Alain Ducasse-operated
super-restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel in Kowloon. One wants to be
enthusiastic. Spoon is one of Hong Kong's best restaurants, and absolutely one
of its most expensive, at the very top rank along with Gaddi's in the Peninsula
and a handful of others.
In
time for autism
Dr Pauline Filipek sizes up her tiny patient in her toy-strewn clinic in
Orange, California. As the 22-month-old boy enters the room, he doesn't look at
Filipek or anyone else. He plows into a pile of toys on the floor, sometimes
walking or crawling over them. He does not speak.
 A
cautionary tale
When I sat down at my PC to begin this column, the first thing I noticed was a
new message from Microsoft's anti-spyware program. While I was gone, it had
spent 19 minutes scanning 1,899 memory processes, 48,627 files on my hard drive
and 8,442 keys in my Windows registry.
Spyware threats detected: zero.
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 American
geisha
Every move Komomo makes
is rooted in Japanese ritual.
The way her body sinks to kneel, or how she uses just the fingertips of her
right hand to slide open the wood-framed Japanese doors. The way she moves like
smoke across the room on her dancer's toes.
Inside this cramped okiya
, a household where aspiring geishas such as Komomo study the way dance, music
and conversation can spin an enchanting mood, every action is a piece of
performance art based on Japanese tales whispered down through generations.
Vocal
hero
By most measures, Yeardley Smith is a success. An Emmy Award, a reported
US$5.5 million (HK$42.9 million) salary and a place in entertainment history as
part of TV's longest-running cartoon sitcom are testament to that.
 Will
the real Moby please stand up?
Just before I set off to New York to interview Moby, I had to send an
apologetic e-mail to a friend canceling a weekend with him. My friend's e-mail
back - grudging, amused, admiring - pretty much sums up Moby's place in the
public mind. "Curse that bald-headed woofy organic green-tea-drinking vegan!''
wrote John: "But how exciting - I think he rules.''
Literary
mash-up
Bringing a largely English-language literary
festival to a place where the three bestselling English publications are
probably The Da Vinci Code, Who Moved My Cheese?, and Harry Potter
invites some pondering.
Paradise
calling
Mohammed Moulessehoul appears gentle, even a bit shy, when he
walks into the Hong Kong University lecture room to talk about a past spent
killing terrorists in Algeria.
A reserved man who speaks liquid French, in his ochre suit and green turtleneck
he looks more like a 1960s jazz pianist rather than the self-proclaimed "brain
behind the fight against terrorism'' in the Sahara desert in 1980s Algeria.
Double take
There is more to Christopher Doyle than a thirst
for beer and a gift for cinematography.
But the avant garde 53-year-old Australian - who likes to go by the name of To
Ho Fung ("like the wind'') - happily indulges in the two as he opens his
one-man art exhibition, a fusion of video clips, hanging film strips and layers
of colored paint splashed on film negatives.
Bad to the
Boney M
There's a scene in the docudrama Touching
the Void where mountaineer Joe Simpson is close to death. He's severely
dehydrated after crawling across the ice in the Peruvian Andes for three days
with a shattered kneecap.
Now, hallucinating, the Boney M disco hit Brown Girl in the Ring
embeds itself in his brain in a taunting loop.
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 Goldmine
or glut?
The new Mexan Harbour hotel at Tsing Yi will share
housekeeping equipment as well as sales and marketing staff with its sister
hotel, the Rambler Garden. Both hotels have 800 rooms.SIMON
SONG
All told, the number of hotel rooms should rise by 23 percent to more
than 47,000, says the tourism board.
Hong Kong had more than 21.8 million visitors, including more than 12 million
mainlanders, last year, up from 16.5 million in 2003.
Hotel owners hope developments like Disneyland and AsiaWorld-Expo, the new
international convention center set to open near the airport in December, will
keep visitor momentum going.
Turning up
the MP3 volume
Matsunichi Communications chairman Pan Su-tong
tells Mark Lee about the firm's development strategy
Lee: What is the reason for the recent growth of the MP3 player market?
Pan: When we launched our first MP3 player in 2002, the market was still
unfamiliar with the concept. We were therefore one of the pioneers of the MP3
phenomenon in Asia. But the term MP3 has now become a byword for digital
entertainment, and it embodies much more than just digital music, which was
what it started off as. Some of the new models we're launching later this year
will offer other functions such as a digital camera and movie playback.
And it's not just about personal entertainment either. Many users plug their MP3
players into their computers and download documents and large files, so it's
also becoming a work tool.
The versatility of MP3 players now lets users perform many personal
entertainment and work functions.
Worldwide, about 40 million MP3 players were sold in 2004. That's according to
IDC, the market research firm.
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China
Mobile raises dividend by 83pc to woo investors
China Mobile (Hong Kong), which has more users than any other
mobile phone company, has raised its annual dividend by 83 percent after
reporting an 18 percent profit gain, a move that may help it recapture the
favor of investors now spoiled for choice with mainland telecom stocks.
Tycoon Li no
longer Asia's richest
Li Ka-shing, the billionaire whose rags-to-riches
rise distilled the capitalist ambitions of many in Hong Kong, has been
dethroned as Asia's richest person - a title he held for the past four years -
by the Indian steel magnate, Lakshmi Mittal, according to Forbes magazine.
Kerry bond
sale raises $2.5b
Kerry Properties, a land developer and logistics
operator controlled by the family of Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok, raised
HK$2.5 billion by selling bonds convertible to shares as it plans to expand its
investment in real estate.
Profits
unchanged as property fails to boost Towngas
With its core piped-gas business stagnant, Hong Kong
and China Gas (Towngas) has become dependent on property sales to give its
bottom line a boost.
Jump in CPI
renews fears of inflation
A sharp jump in the mainland's consumer price index
(CPI) last month, after January's tame performance, has renewed inflation fears
and prompted more calls for an interest rate hike.
Cosco Group
to seek listing for container shipping unit
The mainland's largest shipping firm China Ocean
Shipping (Group) Company (Cosco Group) said it plans to list its unit Cosco
Holdings, whose assets will include the group's container shipping business as
well as its locally listed container-to-ports outfit Cosco Pacific.
Metals pair
vow to combat costs as results disappoint
Hong Kong-listed China metals producers Jiangxi
Copper and Chongqing Iron & Steel said they will take measures to combat
high raw material prices this year after revealing disappointing annual
earnings.
Li refuses to
be part of Tsang's team
Arthur Li, the most publicly disgruntled of the
suitors for the job of chief executive, has told associates he intends to
resign as Secretary of Education and Manpower and is refusing to join Donald
Tsang's team despite Beijing asking him to stay on.
New flu
strain spreading in the city, warns center
A new strain of flu is spreading in Hong Kong, warned a government health body,
but added existing vaccines should offer some protection.
Motorists hit
with $10 rise in Eastern tunnel tolls
The toll for both private cars and taxis using
the Eastern Harbour Tunnel will rise to HK$25 from May 1.
SAR
leads way as experts worldwide arrive for bone surgery course
A joint effort by two universities has put Hong Kong
in the forefront of studies into the regeneration of facial bones.
Peace the
winner in 'cricket diplomacy'
A bitter partition over half a century ago based on
religion, three wars, several near conflicts and a continuing dispute over
Kashmir: nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan have much to disagree
about.
US seeks to
transfer detainees
The Pentagon is reportedly seeking to cut by more
than half the number of detainees at its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
where the United States has been accused of abusing and torturing inmates.
Foreign fund
fails to unseat SK chief
The head of South Korea's biggest oil refiner, who is
fighting a jail sentence for fraud, has won a shareholder vote to carry on in
his post, beating off an activist fund's bid to oust him.
Experienced
Australia up for challenge
Australia has made two changes to its team for next
week's Rugby World Cup Sevens in Hong Kong.
Batting for
jackpot
The mayor came calling on Major League
Baseball a few months ago with a showgirl attached to each arm. He didn't get a
team, but Las Vegas is a city that usually gets what it wants, and it wants big
league ball.
Brash teen
runs into top favorite
Hungarian Sesil Karatantcheva's
come-from-behind win over Marlene Weingartner set her up for a shot at
top-ranked Lindsay Davenport.AP
Sesil Karatancheva shook off a subpar serve that produced 16 double faults,
advancing to the second round of the WTA Indian Wells event with a
come-from-behind victory over Marlene Weingartner.
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;)
