Excerpts from an article in today’s SCMP:

Residents of Ho Chung Village in Sai Kung had to leave their cars outside the village last night while others were trapped inside when a developer went ahead with construction of a village house directly over the only access road.

Construction workers rolled in with their machinery at 10am and dug a two-metre-deep hole in the road, which has been used for access although it crosses private land.

Villagers now have no way in or out for their vehicles until a route previously used for access – now covered with containers and construction debris and owned by another developer – is cleared or until the government opens a new road.

This is not expected to happen for four or five months.

The Lands Department said the site was on private land and an application to build a small house there was approved by the Sai Kung District Lands Office Conference in May 2006.

Sai Kung district councillor Hiew Moo Siew told the residents on Monday that the other access road would be cleared before construction began, but the work went ahead without this being done.

“This is a huge village,” said another resident David Babbs, 52, who has lived there for two years. “Didn’t the Planning Department think about access roads?”

The police notice left on cars at 7am yesterday stated: “Please be informed that the access road to Nam Pin Wai Ho Chung New Village will be closed for a construction work commenced at 10.00 hours on 2009-09-04. You are invited to make sure the road is free before driving back.”

So many things wrong here that one hardly knows where to begin. But let’s start with the Lands Office, which knew about this in 2006. So three years to deal with this and nothing.

And what of the residents? At least some of them must have known about this situation in advance.

And the owner of the land in question, who previously never asserted his rights over the land, allowing public passage to all for years, and who knew that this construction would severely inconvenience hundreds of people but eventually decided, “fuck it, I’m gonna do it anyway, it’s my right!”

There’s also another “news article” on compensated dating teenage prostitution that offers nothing in the way of news, just a rehash of what we already know, which is that teenage girls who want to earn money to buy things get into the sex industry when they are as young as 12 or 14 years old, that there are plenty of web sites (many with triad involvement) luring girls into this and that often once they start there is no turning back. No where in all of this is there a mention of the childrens’ parents responsibility in all this nor any commentary on how the shopping mentality of this society leads to this sort of thing, or what may be done about it short of having police come into schools to give speeches, which I guess could have a minor impact. I don’t have any answers here but I think it’s high time for the newspapers to stop referring to this as “compensated dating” and call it what it is – prostitution. At least put more of a stigma on it, stop using euphemisms to describe it.

And do something, anything, to catch the men who are doing this and put them in jail for five years for pedophilia. If you can’t stop the kids who want the latest styles, stop the men who fund this – put the fear of the law or god or whatever into them. The kids can’t be hookers if they can’t find johns. Newspapers need to emphasize that grown men who pay 14 year old girls for sex are sick, twisted individuals who should get butt-raped in prison for five years in exchange for what they’re doing.