As you’ve probably seen elsewhere, the Finance Committee has approved the HK$67 billion dollar high speed rail link.   Is there anyone who is surprised by this?  Is there anyone who didn’t see this as a foregone conclusion?   Hey, I love the high speed rail trains that I’ve taken in Japan and Taiwan.  I think they are a good thing there and I’m sure it can be good for Hong Kong.  But did it have to be this route and at this cost, both in terms of actual dollars as well as misery to the lives that will be uprooted?  Demonstrations outside Legco unfortunately did not remain calm and it remains to be seen what fallout, if any, may come from that.

In other news, Yahoo has now said that they have also been targets of the sophisticated cyber attacks reported by Google.  They’ve said that they’re “aligned” with Google.  Yahoo’s mainland partner, alibaba.com, has said that Yahoo “was reckless given the lack of facts in evidence.”   You may have also seen reports that Microsoft has announced that they will not make any changes to their China web strategies regardless of what Google is doing.  Which leads me to wonder if Steve Ballmer is just Allan Zeman on a much larger scale?

There is a letter in today’s SCMP letters column that refutes some of the bullshit in that previous letter from the anti-gay group, Caring Friends.  But there is an even more curious letter – a resident of Ontario, Canada, writes in to express “disappointment” that Portugal will be allowing gay marriage and commending New Jersey for voting gay marriage down.  The rest of the letter is a bunch of ill-considered bigotry and religious claptrap.  The question remains, why did someone think that a letter by a Canadian about legislation in New Jersey and Portugal should take valuable column inches in a Hong Kong newspaper?  Whose agenda is being pushed here?

Share