Hong Kong morning news - 11 October

Please read for a completely unbiased ad objective interpretation of the news emanating from this morning's South China Morning Post:

Unsurprisingly, the big news out here at the moment is the Chinese chap, Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Prize for Peace but rots in a prison cell (you know how dangerous advocating democracy can be, right?). The new controversey, though, is what has happened to his wife, Liu Xia. Some sources say she ran, some say she is being detained at her apartment in Beijing, and some say she's been detained elsewhere. The SCMP quotes Freedom Now, a Washington-based human rights organisation as saying that Liu Xia hasn't been charged with a crime, but she is under house arrest and barred from speaking with friends or to the media.

Every city has its thing that bugs it the most: in Joburg it's crime, in London it's immigration, in Cape Town it's poor people... in Hong Kong it's very much property. 7 million people live in this city that's pretty tiny space-wise. So property, as you can imagine, is hecka expensive, and property dealers are the super rich folks here. But like seriously expensive and kak rich, respectively. So it's always pretty cool when a launch from a rich-ass property company fails somewhat because people won't pay HK$5.7 million (about R5.2 million) for a 401 square foot (37.2square metres) flat - that's R140 000 per square metre. Only two fo the 96 flats were sold. Yee ha!

If you want an example of a property tycoon in this part of the world, a chap called Lau Wong-fat is in kak for failing to disclose all his assets as he now has some involvement with Legco, Hong Kong's kind of parliamentry government board. Well, he accidentally forgot 390 plots of land, bringing his total of land plots and property up to 724, in this city where accommodation is so hard to come by...

137 couples were married yesterday because they wanted the 10-10-10 notable date for some or other reason. (To put that into perspective, though, there were over 10 000 weddings in Shanghai yesterday.) Also, in yesterday's newsaper, McDonalds (at selected branches) will be offering McWeddings. People can rock up, pay cheap, get everyone fed, sort out the nuptuals, and then go home. It's yet another indication that people in Hong Kong seem to take weddings really seriously.

In sport, Hong Kong are looking forward to the Rugby Sevens at the Asian Games in Guangzhou next month, even though they've been drawn in the same group as Japan, the only Asian team to beat them in the last two years. Due to the structure of the tournament, though, the two teams could still meet in the final of the competition.