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The Hong Kong government's publicity walkabout yesterday and "Act now" promotional campaign for its constitutional reform package cannot disguise the essential hollowness of what the package contains.The Functio0nal Constituencies lie at the heart of the lack of democracy in the present political system, unfairly giving certain selected groups a greater say in the makeup of the Legislative Council...

After many years of public education, most Hong Kong people have by now grasped the basic rule of escalator etiquette: stand on the right and overtake on the left. Obviously, therefore, this is the perfect time for the Hong Kong government to launch its new TV advertising campaign, advising parents to stand next to their child on the escalator, holding hands, with both parent and child holding the...

The media have made much in recent weeks of the apparent spate of suicides at the Shenzhen factory owned by Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer parts for such leading brands as Apple and Dell. 13 of its employees have attempted suicide this year, 10 of them successfully.Now if Foxconn were a typical Pearl River Delta factory with a few thousand workers, this would indeed be an alarming...

Never trust a man who wears a bow tie--fictional FBI agent Jack Malone in the final episode of the TV series Without a Trace, shoiwn recently on ...

Who knew that Korea was once a Welsh colo...

Last night I wrote and posted a long critical piece on Sunday's Hong Kong by-elections, entitled "Giving Democracy a Bad Name". This morning it showed up in my Bloglines. Noticing a typo, I opened up Blogger to correct it, only to find that the post in question had disappeared from my blog. I didn't delete it, so what is going on here? I don't want to start succumbing to conspiracy theories -...

Yesterday's Legislative Council by-elections in Hong Kong have - like the recent British general election - given no one what they wanted. With voter turnout around 17%, the pan-democrats did not get the overwhelming public show of demand for a faster pace to democracy that they hoped for. However the government, despite a bizarre campaign of dissuasion surely unprecedented in any territory that...

Last night's news reported that a taxi driver sent to prison after crashing his vehicle while driving under the influence of ketamine had 40 previous convictions for traffic offences - which makes me wonder just how bad a driver you have to be before you lose your licence to drive a taxi in Hong Kong. Feel safe now?This reminds me of the first time my wife and I visited Taipei. Drivers there seem...

Is there anyone left in the Hong Kong Government who is fluent in English? The Chief Executive's statement denying that he approached Legislative Council Chairman Tsang Yok-Sing asking him to vote for the government's half-arsed electoral reform package ends with the sentence: "The hearsay is groundless, which we deeply regret." Surely he regrets the hearsay, not the fact that it is groundless?...

Doesn't this image from the BBC just cry out for a caption competiti...