China Builds Underground ‘Great Wall’ Against Nuke Attack

The Chinese Army is believed to have built an underground “Great Wall” that stretches for more than 5,000 km in the Hebei region of northern China. Citing the People’s Liberation Army’s official newsletter, the Ta Kung Pao daily of Hong Kong on Saturday said China’s strategic missile squadron, the Second Artillery Division, built a massive underground tunnel to conceal nuclear weapons, including the Dongfeng 5 intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 13,000 km.

Since 1995, the Second Artillery Division has mobilized tens of thousands of soldiers to build a network of tunnels stretching for more than 5,000 km below the mountain regions of Hebei, China’s state-run CCTV reported. “A missile base has been built hundreds of meters underground and can withstand several nuclear attacks,” CCTV said. “People refer to the network of tunnels connecting to the missile base as the ‘Underground Great Wall.’” In March 2008, CCTV broadcast a documentary which revealed that the PLA had been building underground facilities enabling it to launch a counterstrike in case of a nuclear attack.

Taiwan’s Asia-Pacific Defense Magazine also said, “The early version of China’s mid- to long-range missiles had all been deployed above ground and were vulnerable to detection by spy satellites and attacks by interceptor missiles. That prompted the Chinese military to move all of their missiles hundreds of meters underground.” As a result, the squadrons of the PLA deployed there are completely undetectable because they are based in subterranean bunkers and move around beneath the surface.

The purpose of the secretly constructed underground Great Wall is to give China a second chance after a nuclear attack, military experts said. The main objective of the Second Artillery Division is to be able to launch a counterattack against enemy targets after escaping the first volley of attacks. The Ta Kung Pao daily reported that it was unprecedented for the PLA’s newsletter to reveal classified information about the tunnels and that this demonstrates Beijing’s confidence in its military power.

bron: english.chosun.com [14-12-2009]

Another acid attack in Hong Kong; may lead to more CCTV

The authorities say they may consider setting up closed circuit television cameras on rooftops in Causeway Bay, after an acid attack in the shopping area on Saturday night left six people injured. The Chief Executive, Donald Tsang, expressed anger at the latest attack, and said police would spare no effort in tracking down the culprit.

Mr Tsang admitted to reporters after visiting the scene of the acid attack this morning, that it will not be easy to catch the perpetrator. However, police are already chasing up leads in the case.

They have identified some similarities between the latest attack and a raft of earlier incidents in Mong Kok. In all cases, a plastic bottle of corrosive acid was thrown from a similar location – an old building – onto a busy pedestrianised area in the evening.

The Undersecretary for Security, Lai Tung-Kwok, called on the public to come forward with any information, and added that authorities will consider setting up rooftop cameras in Causeway Bay – just as they have done in Mong Kok – even though 100 percent coverage, he said, will be impossible.

bron: www.rthk.org.hk

Toilet mystery on Cathay Pacific flights to Hong Kong

One flight had to make an unscheduled landing in Mumbai

Cathay Pacific says its fleet of Airbus planes has been hit by a spate of mysterious toilet blockages.

The problem has been so serious that one flight from Riyadh had to land in Mumbai when the crew discovered none of the plane’s 10 toilets were working.

In other cases, the number of passengers boarding flights had to be restricted because of toilet problems.

Airbus engineers are now fitting new toilet pipes to the airline’s fleet and carrying out deep cleaning.

Cathay spokeswoman Carolyn Leung said although the exact cause of the blockages was unclear, passengers themselves may be partly to blame.

“You would be amazed what we find in the pipes when we clean the system – not just face towels but medicine bottles, socks, items of clothing and even children’s stuffed toys,” she said.

The toilets use high-speed vacuum pipes to take waste at up to 110km/h (68mph) into a holding tank, which is then emptied between flights.

Any blockage usually affects all the toilets on one side of an aircraft.

bron: news.bbc.co.uk [25-11-2009]

Hong Kong offers to cut water demand to help Guangdong drought

Hong Kong authorities have offered to cut down on the territory’s water supply from Guangdong Province to alleviate the worst drought in 60 years.

Water levels in Guangdong from August to September are only half of last year’s but the province has continued to supply 2 million cubic meters of water to Hong Kong and 230,000 cubic meters to Macau.

Hong Kong’s Water Supplies Department director Ma Lee Tak said in a news conference that he visited Guangdong reservoirs and the government was open to decreasing water supply coming from the mainland. Guangdong authorities say they appreciate the offer but that it was still unnecessary.

Drought in Guangdong Province is a regular occurrence with a huge one  happening every few years. This year’s drought is specially severe because it follows 14 percent less rainfall happening from January to October that has led to lower reservoir levels, poor crops and a shortage of drinking water.

The drought has affected more than 55,000 hectares of farmland in the province and eight cities including Meizhou, Shaoguan, Qingyuan, Shantou and Chaozhou reports China Daily.

Hong Kong has six months’ worth of water in its reservoirs for its 7 million residents or 477 million cubic meters. According to the government website, the territory’s water reservoir system has a maximum capacity of 586 million cubic meters.

Zhuhai city in Guangdong has already taken steps to manage water supply by instructing businesses and schools to decrease use by 20 percent or face fines. On the other hand, casino enclave Macau is taking another route by trying to encourage water conservation through cash rebates for residents and businesses under its Household Water Conservation Rebate Program.

Beijing has also artificially induced snowfall twice in the past week to help the south and northern regions’ water shortages.

bron: www.china-briefing.com

9 Afghans found adrift at sea in Hong Kong waters

Nine Afghans were among 20 people crammed into a small wooden vessel found adrift in waters near Hong Kong, a police spokesman said Sunday.

Officers arrested all the passengers, also from Pakistan and Nepal, on suspicion of illegal entry, police spokesman Michael Kwan said. Police also arrested a 24-year-old mainland Chinese man who was suspected of leading the smuggling operation, he said.

Hong Kong’s marine police intercepted the vessel early Saturday off the western tip of the New Territories, a piece of land linked to mainland China, Kwan said. The South China Morning Post newspaper reported that the Afghans included a couple with their 2-year-old and 3-year-old sons, along with another woman. The rest of the passengers were men.

The Post said each had paid 4,000 to 5,000 Chinese yuan ($590 to $730) for passage from the neighboring mainland city of Shenzhen to Hong Kong. It was not clear how they had traveled to mainland China.

Former British colony Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997, but it maintains separate political and economic systems and administers its own border and customs controls.

bron: www.thejakartapost.com

In Hong Kong: Woman dies after being hit by taxi

A woman has died after being knocked down by a taxi in Tuen Mun (simp屯门trad屯門). Police say the 46-year-old was crossing Heung Sze Wui Road shortly before nine this morning when the accident happened.

She suffered head injuries and was certified dead in hospital around half an hour later.

bron: www.rthk.org.hk [31-10-2009]

In Hong Kong: Two arrests after HK$8 million cocaine seizure

The Hong Kong police have seized HK$8 million worth of cocaine at a public storage facility in Cheung Sha Wan (長沙灣).

Two men have been arrested. Chief Superintendent John Ribeiro from the Narcotics Bureau said the men are suspected of being part of an organised crime syndicate.

The drugs are thought to have been smuggled into the territory from South America.

bron: www.rthk.org.hk

In Australia: Focus on balcony horror

The cousin of a man accused of raping an overseas student before she fell to her death from a Sydney balcony in an attempt to escape is making a movie about the ordeal.

A little more than a year to the day after the 18-year-old Chinese woman jumped from her Waterloo unit after a harrowing sexual assault, the accused’s relative wants to release a film about the attack.

On October 26 last year a homeless man, Brendan David Dennison, 26, allegedly broke into the Hunter Street apartment. The woman and her boyfriend, a South Korean national, were allegedly terrorised for an hour while two other female students barricaded themselves in a locked room.

Police said the couple had tried to escape by jumping naked from the third-floor unit on to concrete. The woman died.

 

 

[photo: Reliving ordeal... Wu Liping, who has been told the story of her daughter's death is being made into a film. Photo: Adam Hollingworth]

Wu Liping, the mother of the victim, told the Sydney Chinese newspaper Australian News Express Daily that Mr Dennison’s cousin had identified himself to her as ”Evan”, an Aboriginal-German filmmaker living in Hong Kong. He said he was shooting a film based on the case called The Land of Dreams.

Ms Wu said he had told her he was making the film to ”comfort” the victim’s parents.

The man had flown from Hong Kong (香港) to attend a memorial that Ms Wu and husband He Fa Heng, the victim’s stepfather, held last Sunday at a temple in the family’s home province of Sichuan (四川省), China.

About 10 friends and relatives travelled from around China and from as far as Britain to attend the ceremony, bringing flowers and paper money. Evan could not be contacted by The Sun-Herald.

Last month Ms Wu had two operations for what is believed to be a throat condition, and said the night before one of the procedures her dead daughter visited her in her sleep. ”She said, ‘Don’t be afraid, I will always take care of you,”’ the mother said.

Her daughter’s boyfriend still lives in Sydney, where he is studying at the University of NSW. Now 19 and living with his sister, friends have said that his leg – which was seriously injured in the fall – has almost fully recovered.

The man did not respond to a request to comment but it is understood he will take the stand if asked to testify at Mr Dennison’s trial.

Since last year, more than 1200 messages have been posted about the dead woman on the instant messenger service ICQ. Her mother wrote: ”Last night, your dad dreamed of you again. He asked you to turn your face to him for a kiss, but you turned back and disappeared …We love you too much, we miss you too much. If you were not that lovely, that clever, that empathetic, we would not feel so heartbroken and pained now.”

Ms Wu said she hoped that whoever attacked her daughter would be given a life sentence.

Mr Dennison faces a total of 21 charges relating to the attack, including murder, sexual assault, robbery, and detaining for advantage. His case is set for mention on Friday, when a date for his next court appearance is expected to be set.

bron: www.smh.com.au [01-11-2009, in Europe 31-10-2009]

Tony Jaa lost in translation

We of Wocview like to display our knowledge of languages. In this case we have Tony Jaa teaching Thai in a Hong Kong interview with 2 HK comedians, amongst who we have the HK queen of goofyness Sandra Ng. At first Tony seems lost, but when he sees the humor in it, he plays along with the fun. This video is for Cantonese speakers only. The humor is that the Thai word for color is “See” which sounds exactly the same as the Cantonese word for “Shit”.

bron: www.youtube.com

Chinese movie-makers keep faith with martial arts

The Chinese film industry is hoping a little more martial arts magic will woo international audiences over the next 12 months with two productions set to take familiar stories one step further.

First up comes the US$12 million (eight million euro) budgeted The Storm Warriors, directed by Hong Kong-based twins Oxide and Danny Pang, and set to make its film industry premiere at next month’s American Film Market (http://www.ifta-online.org/) as they try to sell it to the world.

The film is taken from the wildly successful Hong Kong comic series Fung Wan (Wind and Cloud), by Ma Wing-shing, which also inspired the Andrew Lau-directed The Stormriders (1998).

That film starred Asian idols Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng, and raked in HK$42 million (3.6 million euros) from the local box office that year. It still ranks as Hong Kong cinema’s 12th all-time top earner.

The Pangs — who built an international reputation thanks to the success of horror film such as The Eye (2002) — say they have tried to reinvent the martial arts genre with their production, reuniting Kwok and Cheng and mixing live action and cutting-edge computer generated imagery.

They also claim the story should stand on its own and not be thought of as a sequel, even thought it features the same characters.

The same line is being taken by the people behind the US$29 million (19 million euro) budgeted Shaolin Temple – which shares the same name as the 1982 film that launched the career of martial arts star Jet Li, and is obviously set around the same legendary martial arts school.

The film is set to star box office draws Jackie Chan, Andy Lau and Nicolas Tse — alongside more than 1,000 monks from the temple.

The film starring Li took in 100 million yuan (9.7 million euros) in China and saw the Shaolin monks start to take their martial arts skills on international tours, a trend which continues today.

But director Benny Chan — who made the award-winning New Police Story (2004) with Chan — told Chinese media that while his production shares a number of things in common with Li’s film, he plans to move the story of the monastery forward from the seventh century to the early 20th century.

Shaolin Temple will have its fight scenes choreographed by Hong Kong’s Corey Yuen (Red Cliff, X-Men) and is set for an end-of-2010 release.

bron: www.independent.co.uk