Category: World events
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About 6 weeks in, we are now up to 100 total cases of Coronavirus in Hong Kong. We haven’t experienced any dramatic increases in cases, but neither is there any sign of it going away. The “panic buying” of rice, toilet rolls and cleaning products seems to have passed, and the supermarket shelves are full…
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Thank a lot, Cable TV, I really wanted to see the latest ISIS beheading video. It’s not available on other media outlets (who have this strange idea that showing these videos only gives ISIS more publicity), and no need to search for it on the old Interweb thingy. Just exactly what I wanted to watch…
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From today’s Sunday Morning Post: “Has Putin got it in him to succeed in a second term as President?” I don’t follow Russian politics very closely, but I feel sure that he has already served two terms.
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Dilbert – 27 October 2011 Today’s news Japan MP Yasuhiro Sonoda drinks Fukushima water A Japanese official has drunk water collected from the quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, after reporters challenged him to prove it was safe. Yasuhiro Sonoda appeared nervous and his hands shook as he downed a glass during a televised news conference.…
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It amazes me that cities are still so keen to stage events such as the Olympics. Far from increasing the number of visitors it actually drives them away. Hotels put up their prices and most people assume that flights will be either unavailable or very expensive, so they go somewhere else. Locally we had this…
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Interesting article from The Guardian (We all go together when we go), based on Paul Krugman's new book about the current financial crisis: The shadow banking system is formed by financial institutions that aren't banks from a regulatory point of view but nonetheless perform banking functions. The system includes innovative financial products such as CDOs…
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Ten years ago I probably knew nothing about Thailand. Five years later I felt I knew something. What did I know? Well, that King Bhumibol Adulyadej was admired and revered by the Thai people, and Thaksin Shinawatra was an effective prime minister – it so happens that my first visit to Thailand was during the…
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Watching Cable TV news tonight is franky a bizarre experience. Gordon Brown seems to be the hero of the day, and thus we get to see the highlights of his political life, including the time his best mate Tony Blair bought him an ice cream (I guess you had to be there…). Just a few…
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Today’s SCMP has a lengthy Bloomberg story about the credit-rating weasels – Bringing Down Wall Street as Ratings Let Loose Subprime Scourge by Elliot Blair Smith: “I view the ratings agencies as one of the key culprits,” says Joseph Stiglitz, 65, the Nobel laureate economist at Columbia University in New York. “They were the party…
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It now appears that AIG is going to avoid Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but it’s striking how much power the credit rating agencies have in determining whether it fails or not. By threatening to lower AIG’s credit rating, the agencies precipitated a crisis. This in turn sent AIG’s share price down, which was enough to persuade…
Ordinary Gweilo 