hell’s paving stones

(Photo by The Standard’s Simon Song. Image taken from the curbside collaborative blog about the 6th WTO ministerial conference by HK journo students)

HPS was a little bit sorry about the fact that we’d let the opportunity slip to post about the third (and now seemingly annual) big pro-democracy march in Hong Kong, […]

This is how the first candid national discussion of racism in Australia was aborted before time:

JOURNALIST: So you’re saying there was no element of race or racism in the riots on the weekend?

PRIME MINISTER: No, I said what I said. I do not believe Australians are racist. I thought the behaviour yesterday was quite unacceptable […]

Aussie coppers are going back into Papua New Guinea after the Enhanced Cooperation Program was resuscitated today. Apparently there will be no uniformed or plainclothes police on the beat, as there were before the Plan fell over. Federales will be put into key posts, and some more civvys are going over too. But no firefights […]

In the past few weeks there’s been some interesting developments on the ’shoe incident’ - the diplomatic quibble that’s acting as a proxy war for tensions between Australia and Papua New Guinea over the forms of aid to PNG.

On Tuesday, Sir Michael Somare, the PNGuinean PM, made a speech to his Parliament saying that he […]

(image from BBC News) I’ve wanted to make a fimo “dancing Kofi” doll in the likeness of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for some time now. Three factors stand in my way: I don’t have a car. Ergo, I don’t have a rear-view mirror. Ergo, Kofi cannot dance as he ought. […]

Photo taken from the China Daily. The sandy area is all reclaimed land. They just filled in the sea. For Disneyland.

A protest by part of Hong Kong’s fishing industry went ahead on Monday. Lantau fish farmers moored 10 of their boats off Lantau Island (which already holds the Po Lin Buddhist monastry, and Chep […]

The Papua New Guinean government today said that it would suspend its receipt of Australian aid to the country until it receives an apology for an embarrassing diplomatic mistake.

Remember it? Late last month, their Prime Minister, Sir Michael Somare, was made to undergo “lengthy security searches at Brisbane on his way to […]

(photo from the Christian Science Monitor)

Last week, Colin Powell reinforced his ’sacrificial lamb’ status in the Bush Administration by awkwardly suggesting that the non-existence of an Iraqi weapons stockpile didn’t matter so much if you could prove Saddam’s intent to arm up. He suggested it so awkwardly that the Washington Post chose to interpret his […]