This Is It – first look at Michael Jackson trailer

Michael Jackson fans have been given their first look at the trailer for This Is It, the movie featuring footage from his final days.



The film is a behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals for Jackson's London comeback shows, which were scheduled to take place this summer. He died on June 25, shortly before the run was due to commence at the O2 Arena.

The two-and-a-half minute clip shows Jackson performing his fabled dance moves. They appear to contradict reports that he was emaciated and suffering from exhaustion in the weeks before his death.

In the trailer, Jackson says of his comeback: "This is the moment. This is it. It's an adventure, it's a great adventure. We want to take them places that they have never been before."

The film will have a limited two-week release from October 28.

Kenny Ortega, the movie's director and choreographer of the shows, has described This Is It as "Michael's gift to his fans". He said: "Fans will see Michael as they have never seen him before: this great artist at work. It is raw, emotional, moving and powerful footage."

Sony paid a reported $60 million (£36.4 million) for rights to the film, which was stitched together from more than 100 hours of footage shot in Los Angeles between April and June.

The MTV Video Music Awards opened last night with a tribute to the late superstar, which featured a performance by his sister, Janet.

The Telegraph. Sep 15, 2009.

7-Eleven cafes to sell local cuisine

The first shots have been fired in a Hong Kong fish ball war that is pitting the city's traditional street-food vendors against the world's most ubiquitous convenience chain.
The front line in this culinary battle is busy Tong Chong Street in Quarry Bay, where last month a new 7-Eleven shop started selling laksa, fish balls, egg tarts and milk tea from a large kitchen counter.

The retailer, which has almost 1,000 shops in Hong Kong, is expected to roll out more such counters across the city as it vies for a slice of a market that for generations has been dominated by small street traders.

Curried fish balls, siu mai, milk tea and pineapple buns are Hong Kong cultural icons for the armies of hungry office workers and labourers who grab them on the street to munch on their way to work. Whether they take to a version served up by a global retail giant, though, remains to be seen.

The 7-Eleven version, dubbed  7 Cafe, is apparently off to a good start, with sales of up to 600 cups of milk tea a day at a promotional price of HK$3 on Tong Chong Street. That is about one-third of the price charged by nearby food vendors.

Tong Chong Street is packed with office workers and schoolchildren on most days.

"We were surprised by the popularity of some products - for example, the milk tea ran out on the second day," said Tim Chalk, commercial director for Hong Kong and Macau at Dairy Farm, which owns the 7-Eleven franchise locally. "It is a worldwide trend for convenience stores to move to hot food-on-the-go."

But nearby street food vendors are unimpressed by the quality of the fare served up by 7-Eleven, even though it has hired an executive chef from a five-star hotel to ensure the food is safe and tasty.

Ming Kee, a street-food counter that has been selling breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea on Tong Chong Street for 18 years, concedes that it has sold fewer breakfasts and milk tea lately, but does not think 7 Cafe poses a threat.

"Do you think 600 cups of milk tea is a lot?" Ming Kee owner Wong Ming-sang asked. "When Hoixe Cake Shop started selling milk tea two years ago, it sold 1,000 cups a day."

Hoixe, a franchised bakery, was shut down last month and its site is now occupied by 7 Cafe. "Although [7 Cafe] has opened, our business has returned to normal," Wong said.

From IFC in Central to public housing estates in Tin Shui Wai, fish balls, siu mai, meat balls, milk tea, egg tarts and pineapple buns are part of the city's daily fare and are popular with people of all ages.

With a menu spanning breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, the 7 Cafe is also competing against arch-rival Circle K, Cafe de Coral, McDonald's and other food vendors in the Tong Chong Street neighbourhood.

Chalk said the HK$3 milk tea deal would be extended to the end of this month. But Wong said Ming Kee had no intention of cutting prices as that would mean lowering quality.

"Price is not the only factor," said Wong, who sells milk tea for HK$9 a cup. "We use Holland's Black and White Cow milk, which is the most expensive evaporated milk in Hong Kong. [7 Cafe] uses Nestle, which is cheaper."

Competition from 7-Eleven comes at a bad time for the city's street-food vendors. Wong and the other food vendors on Tong Chong Street are chasing fewer white-collar customers from nearby Taikoo Place, the complex of office towers owned by Swire Properties.

The city's unemployment hovered at a four-year peak of 5.4 per cent last month, but economists widely expect the worst is yet to come.

Wong and his family owned their premises, so they were faring relatively better than vendors who faced rising rents. The Wongs also own the 300-square-foot shop occupied by the Circle K convenience store, which is in between 7 Cafe and their own food counter.

The operator of the Circle K chain, Convenience Retail Asia, declined to comment on 7 Cafe's impact on its business. Circle K sells milk tea, toast and pizza on a made-to-order basis.

Circle K, which signed a six-year lease two years ago, faced a 9.75 per cent increase in rent next year as part of its contract, Wong said.

Chalk said 7-Eleven's reason for choosing Tong Chong Street was mainly because of its busy traffic of white-collar workers.

Despite the stiffer competition, the owner of Chinese dumpling shop King of Siu Mai, next door to 7 Cafe is undaunted.

"Consumers are curious about new things, but the curiosity normally lasts for three days and our customers come back," King of Siu Mai owner, Ah Ming, said, pointing to the crowd of customers in front of her shop.

Thomas Wong, a regular customer at King of Siu Mai, said 7 Cafe provided a choice, but he would stick with his favourite dumpling store. The store has sold fish balls, siu mai and meat balls for more than 10 years on Tong Chong Street. "I have been coming here [King of Siu Mai] for years, and have no intention of trying out [7 Cafe]," he said.

Retail competition has become so punishing in Hong Kong that the  7 Cafe is even "cannibalising" the customers of the 7-Eleven store immediately next door. Chalk said sales at the 7-Eleven had dropped 5 per cent since the new store was opened. The two stores offered different products, Chalk said.

While the buzz that 7 Cafe created on Tong Chong Street has died down, other bustling areas of the city are set to feel its impact soon. Chalk said the Tong Chong Street 7 Cafe was the first of many in the pipeline. Dairy Farm, which owns half of the 945 7-Eleven stores around the city (the rest are franchised), plans to convert the group's stores into 7 Cafes.

Future 7 Cafes, which would occupy 1,000 square foot of space, would be located in high-traffic locations, including Causeway Bay, Central, Admiralty and housing estates. Chalk would not say how many were planned.

SCMP. Sep 7, 2009.

Russian president orders swift anti-alcohol controls

Russian President Dmitry Medvedvev on Friday gave his officials three months to enact tough restrictions to try and curb alcohol abuse.

Last month, Medvedev described alcoholism as a "national disaster", which undermines public health and hampers the economy, urging the public to unite in fighting against it.

Russia has one of the world's highest per-capita rates of alcohol consumption, linked to life expectancy. According to official figures, just 40 percent of this year's school leavers will reach the pension age of 55 for women and 60 for men.

Earlier attempts to introduce curbs on alcohol, including a major campaign by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev launched in 1985, brought little practical results and undermined government popularity.

On Friday, Medvedev ordered Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to introduce new restrictions on advertising alcoholic drinks and to allow local authorities to ban the sale of alcohol in specific locations and at specific times of the day. Medvedev also proposed replacing fines with criminal punishment for those who sell spirits and beer to those under 18, who are banned from buying alcohol.

The proposals, which echo similar measures introduced during Gorbachev's campaign, will be unpopular in a country where easy access to alcohol and public drinking in parks and streets are seen as traditional rights.

Medvedev also ordered the government to initiate new measures limiting the illegal production and sale of spirits.

Russian officials say about 30-50 percent of Russia's vodka market is illegal and untaxed. Many officials say a state vodka monopoly would bring order to the market and make it easier to control.

The proposed measures will hardly affect importers of alcohol, whose share of the local market does not exceed three percent. Most imported wines and spirits are sold in legal shops, which will not be affected.


Reuters. Sep 11, 2009.

Google Book Search

Google Book Search is the ambitious plan to digitize every book - famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth - found in the world's libraries, as part of the company's core mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Beginning in 2002 as a "secret books project," according to an official history at the Google site, Google Book Search has become a planned multibillion-dollar effort that has had to overcome many obstacles, both the sheer effort of scanning so many pages of text as well as conforming to copyright laws.

Google started in 2004 to partner with many of the greatest library collections in the world -- the New York Public Library, the University of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, among others -- to digitize their collections, paying the scanning costs. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

In October 2008, Google reached a settlement with authors and publishers to end a class-action lawsuit that challenged the legality of the scanning project. Under the agreement, Google will pay $125 million and create the framework for a new system that will channel payments from book sales, advertising revenue and other fees to authors and publishers, with Google collecting a cut.

The $125 million will go to compensate authors and publishers whose books are still under copyright and help find the copyright holders for so-called "orphan works," out-of-print books that are still within the law. These copyright holders, who are considered part of the group, or class, that settled with Google, are hard to find, since many never expected their works ever to be in print again. It is the resurrection of these works -- making them available at the click of a mouse -- that many consider among the greatest benefits of Google Book Search. That, and the millions of public domain works that will be easily searched and called up by computer users around world.

The proposed settlement has attracted opposition from various corners of the book world, and the Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation.

A coalition has also formed to oppose the proposed class-action settlement, which is awaiting court approval. Tentatively called the Open Book Alliance, it includes nonprofit groups, individuals and library associations. The coalition is led by Gary L. Reback, an antitrust lawyer in Silicon Valley, and the Internet Archive, a non-profit group that has been critical of the settlement. The group plans to make a case to the Justice Department that the arrangement is anticompetitive. Members of the alliance will likely file objections in court independently.

In August 2009, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo announced plans to join the Open Book Alliance.

"This deal has enormous, far-reaching anticompetitive consequences that people are just beginning to wake up to," said Mr. Reback, a lawyer with Carr & Ferrell, in Palo Alto, Calif. In the 1990s, Mr. Reback helped persuade the Justice Department to file its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft.

European publishers, authors and copyright holders have also objected to the proposed settlement in the American courts. On Sept. 7, 2009, representatives of those groups spoke out at a hearing sponsored by the European Commission against the proposed deal. They said it would give Google too much power, including exclusive rights to sell out-of-print works that remain under copyright, a category that includes millions of books.

Google has tried to mollify European opponents by clarifying that a digitized version of a book considered out of print in the United States, but still commercially available in Europe, would not be sold online without explicit consent from the European copyright holder. The company has also offered European publishers representation on a board to oversee a "book rights registry," which will distribute royalties from digital book sales under the plan proposed by the settlement.

New York Times  Sept. 8, 2009

Police saddened as young girls lured into 'compensated dating'

A brand-name strap for her mobile phone was the only thing on a 14-year-old girl's mind when she agreed for the first time to provide sexual services for reward.

Two years later the girl, now 16, was among about 100 girls interviewed by Chief Inspector Chung Chi-ming, who has led police operations against "compensated dating" in the past 12 months.

Chung, of Kowloon West regional crime unit, said he felt very sorry to see young girls in Hong Kong engaging in enjo kosai - a practice originating in Japan where men give money and luxury gifts to young girls for their companionship and, often, sexual favours.

Satisfaction of materialistic desires was one of the major reasons girls participated in the de facto prostitution practice, he said.

Some girls also came from broken families.

Chung said one girl had run away from home because of family disharmony and was lured into prostitution by criminals who suggested to her that a group of girls should live together like a family.

Police raided two such syndicates last year and found 10 girls, of whom the youngest was only 14.

The girls had to follow the rules set by syndicates and could be beaten if they did not conform.

"The girl told us it was like living in a prison and she could not escape," Chung said.

Police had also found pimps operating individually on the internet to arrange clients for girls. One, they found, was an 18-year-old student about to enter university.

"He told us it was like doing business on eBay," Chung said. "It is really a pity to see a young man, who did not have any criminal record, go to jail for his lack of morality."

Police over the past year have arrested 22 people, including syndicate members and online pimps, in relation to compensated-dating offences, and at least 13 girls have been referred to the Social Welfare Department. But Chung said police were only dealing with the tip of the iceberg and the solution lay in education and prevention.

Chief Inspector Sandra Chiu Yui-luen of the Kowloon West crime prevention office said police would write to primary and secondary schools in the district, and conduct seminars for school principals to alert them to juvenile crime.

"The girls might earn money pretty easily for a brand-name handbag, but once they start, it is a road of no return, and they will soon find their losses are much greater than their gains," she said.

SCMP Sep 5, 2009

Parents need help over costs of textbooks, says watchdog

The Consumer Council yesterday called on schools and the Education Bureau to consider helping parents with the rising costs of primary and secondary school textbooks.

One solution, the watchdog said, was for schools to purchase textbooks and pass them along from one group of students to the next.

'This is environmentally friendly, it can also ensure students will get the right edition,' said Ambrose Ho, chairman of the group's publicity and community relations committee. 'Students will learn to value property which would be commonly shared, [they will] learn to recycle and learn to treasure precious resources.'

The council has already put its suggestion to the bureau, which is 'considering various options', Mr Ho said.

A bureau spokesman said it was 'in the process of setting up a working group to look into the rise of textbook prices and use of e-textbooks'.

The council's annual survey on textbook spending found costs have increased over the past year. 'Based on data from 53 primary and 45 secondary schools, the council has found the average textbook expenditure was HK$2,153 for primary and HK$1,947 for secondary,' Mr Ho said.

'This year's expenditures have shown an increase of 5.9 per cent for the primary sector and 6 per cent for the secondary sector compared with last year's expenditures of the same sampled schools.'

Mr Ho said some schools invited bookstores to hold sales on their premises and parents were offered discounts if they bought a complete set of textbooks. But there were drawbacks - other bookstores may decide not to stock the books and parents may not easily find places to buy used textbooks, he added.

There was, however, 'a welcome trend', Mr Ho said. 'More schools now are organising their own ... second-hand sales and encourage second-hand donations.'

The bureau spokesman said schools could decide whether to invite bookstores into their facilities but 'before making a decision, schools should solicit support from parent-teacher associations, and should take into account the pros and cons'.

'Schools should also keep parents and students well informed of details of such an arrangement, and let them know they have every right not to purchase textbooks in schools,' the spokesman said.

'With regard to the suggestion of schools purchasing textbooks, the bureau notices some schools are working this way and hopes more schools would consider following suit.'

Discussion question: Do you think the prices of textbooks are not reasonable? Are the methods suggested in this article helpful in easing parents' financial burden?

Text P for panic

Amid the global storm, a soaking for the biggest Chinese bank in Hong Kong

IN THE West it is not uncommon these days to hear rumours flying around financial markets about troubled banks. But in Hong Kong on September 24th the rumours were disseminated by text messages, and they were not directed at shareholders. They were received by depositors at the Bank of East Asia, Hong Kong’s largest locally owned lender. As the day wore on, people lined the pavements outside the bank branches, quietly determined to withdraw their cash. “No worry, it is our culture,” said one man, explaining the calm. He had been sent by his boss to transfer the money to HSBC, Hong Kong’s historic financial rock.

The 90-year-old Bank of East Asia blamed “malicious rumours” for the incident and said they were false. The text messages had referred to the bank’s losses through exposure to American International Group (AIG), the global insurance giant that was in effect taken over by the American government on September 16th, and Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street bank that collapsed a day earlier. To allay fears, the bank disclosed that it had exposure to AIG and Lehman of HK$473m ($61m), just under 1% of regulatory capital. It extended its opening hours, dispatched guards to ensure queues were orderly and distributed leaflets noting that it was heavily capitalised and liquid, a position endorsed by the local monetary authority.

Hong Kong has experienced bank runs before, most recently in 1997 during the Asian financial crisis. Deposit insurance used to be non-existent and it remains small, covering only the first HK$100,000. But banks in the city are thought to be well capitalised and fairly insulated from the global credit crunch. They are in better shape than others in the region, such as Australian banks, which have seen interbank funding costs soar, leading the Federal Reserve to open a dollar swap line this week with the Reserve Bank of Australia.

The Bank of East Asia is a special case in Hong Kong, however. In February its well-connected boss, David Li, settled American insider-trading charges. More recently, a “rogue trader” cost the bank HK$93m. On September 19th Moody’s, a rating agency, shifted its outlook on the bank’s debt to negative (although it is still investment grade).

In response to the run, the Hong Kong authorities voiced their support for the bank, and a tycoon bought shares. They rose on September 25th as normality returned. But banks everywhere should pay attention. As storms batter global finance, depositors’ fingers are on the panic button. And that button may now be on their mobile phones.

Discussion question:

Hong Kong people are getting more accustomed to sending SMSs and emails to their friends and relatives of the so-called "inside news" ranging from typhoon forecast to financial "tips". Do you think this can create problems? If yes, what are the potential problems?