CLOSE YOUR EYES. Make a wish. Now blow out those candles! One of the great things about these modern “globalized” days is that we can all adopt each other’s traditions. And the big favorite across much of the world now is the children’s birthday party.
The idea of annual gatherings, where you mark someone’s age…
ELON MUSK’s “project x” team has started intense work behind the scenes to make a copy of China’s WeChat app for the western world.
Top executives are filing out of Twitter HQ in San Francisco, leaving the company’s arriving leaders free to follow their plans - first, to increase free speech on the app, and…
Hong Kong's new leader John Lee showed himself determined to build on Hong Kong's many success stories in his maiden Policy Address, given yesterday. Below is a summary of the main points. Or scroll down for a link to a video summary of the story.
CHILDREN; GIVE THE crayons a break. Primary school kids…
(Caption: concepts of 'human rights' and 'democracy' must be revisited to be more inclusive. Image: Brooke Cagle)
GOODBYE, “HUMAN RIGHTS” AND “DEMOCRACY”. Hello, common values. It has become obvious that so-called "universal" concepts are not universal at all and must be urgently revisited, a panel of top international political scientists said today.
The…
HONG KONG IS arguably the world’s top university city, a new survey reveals today.
Five of the top 100 academic institutions on the planet are located in Hong Kong, according to an annual study published this week by Times Higher Education of London.
Hong Kong beat London and Paris for number of academic top performers…
TAIWAN MUST DIVERT huge amounts of its people’s money to spend on weapons, US war strategist Elbridge Colby said yesterday. “I honestly don't get why Taiwan isn't spending 10% or more of its GDP on defense,” he wrote.
Ten per cent or more?
For comparison, most countries spend about 2%, or less, and the United…
A VISITING HONG KONG scientist has just won the Nobel prize for experimentally proving that the real world… isn’t real.
Wait, what? The world isn’t real?
Correct. And even though the physical world is not real, it has nonetheless given scientist Alain Aspect the Nobel Prize for Physics, along with two other scientists in the…
SEE THAT HEADLINE? “U.S. Aims to Turn Taiwan Into Giant Weapons Depot”.
This is not from the news spoof website called The Onion. This is an ACTUAL HEADLINE in the New York Times today.
The article doesn’t present this as a bizarre and incredibly dangerous thing to do. It presents it as an ordinary news…
TEN YEARS AGO, many people expected the e-commerce revolution to change the way that humans bought and sold things.
Except it didn’t. Not at first. There were some early adopters, but the average person on the street was still hesitant. What if you ordered something … and it didn’t arrive? Or the wrong thing was…
THERE ARE RED FACES all over the media this week after an insane story about a coup in China was shared around the world.
Huge numbers of journalists, east and west, took a clearly invented tale about the arrest of Chinese leader Xi Jinping seriously. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire, as they say, and there…