Here's an interesting news report quoting People's Bank of China official Zhang Tao as saying that housing prices in China are, relative to both income and rental prices, disproportionately high compared with the ratio in other countries. Zhang attributes this…

Twenty-eight drivers have been arrested for drink driving in a four-day city-wide road-safety campaign during the Easter holidays.

The Monetary Authority warns HSBC customers to beware of an email purporting to be sent from the bank asking them to use an embedded hyperlink to connect to a bogus site to verify their account details. It prompts users to enter their online bank account user name and password.

I've been relatively silent, for the most
part, when it comes to the U.S. presidential election. None of the three
remaining candidates excite me all that much, and the statements each of them
has made on foreign policy issues make me rather nervous – some of McCain's more
belligerent comments are downright scary.

There have been some real whoppers when […]

The FT yesterday gave us another reminder that China's policy when it comes to the value of the RMB is all about the domestic economy, not about international pressure:
But the bilateral prism through which Washington sees the issue gives a distorted picture of the reasons for the renminbi’s strengthening, say analysts, and also exaggerates the […]

I recently wrote about a crackdown by the drug authorities on illegal online drug sales (really, it's true) and used the occasion to suggest a disconnect between the SFDA and the MII, the latter being responsible for regulating the Internet. Interagency cooperation over here is problematic in most cases.

Based […]

The Chinese IT Service Alliance has been initiated by the Consumer Electronics After-sales Service Commission of the China Electronic Chamber of Commerce with Red Express Service, a subsidiary of Hisap High Technology Corporation, as one of the key members. The purpose is to provide industry self-regulation of China's domestic IT service market.

Kowloon City Magistracy has jailed a 65-year-old man three months for offering bribes to a Kowloon Hospital administrator in return for his deceased girlfriend's medical report.

Police are appealing for information on an Ngau Tau Kok traffic accident on March 19 in which an 82-year-old man died.

This has nothing to do with China, but from an intellectual property perspective, this is quite interesting:
The next potential casualty of America’s deficient copyright regime is MP3Tunes, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Web entrepreneur Michael Robertson, which lets users store digital music files in a Web-based locker they can access from anywhere. MP3Tunes lets […]

Director of Marine Roger Tupper says a salvage operator has stablised the Ukrainian-registered tug that sank off Lantau Island on March 22, to prevent the wreck from further sinking.

A rescue operation has been launched to locate 18 crew members of a tug that collided with a ship off Lantau Island on March 22.

Back to business. For all you IP groupies, here's the latest IP newsletter put out by the State Intellectual Property Office.
Nothing too exciting in there, although I am impressed that SIPO actually spends the time and effort to put this together. IP publicity/propaganda is important these days.

Yes, I've been writing too much about press coverage and politics and not enough about law, business and economics, but you respond to what is out there, right?
And what's out there is real crap. Case in point, this amazing tripe penned by Father Raymond de Souza. Here's the only sentence you need to read to […]

So apparently Bush and Hu Jintao spoke on the phone. That's nothing more than a waste of long distance telephone charges. If you disagree, feel free to check out the waste of space that is this article on the subject.
When you have a U.S. President with no moral authority any longer (sorry, but it's true), […]

Lots of folks have been following this case for a couple years. The main interest here is that involves a Chinese IPR holder suing a U.S. company for patent infringement. Not common at all.
Looks like Netac must have had something going on – PNY settled with them. Check out the Xinhua article for more details, […]

Police have charged a 30-year-old man for the murder of a 27-year-old prostitute in North Point on March 17.

Customs officers have arrested a 33-year-old man with 657 grams of high-grade cocaine worth more than $500,000 in his pockets.

There is now a petition circulating in China addressed to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao asking that the government withdraw the ban. Here's an English translation; here's the Chinese original. Interestingly, some of the language tracks that of the report…

This is really starting to piss me off:
The IOC Needs to Step in or Perhaps Move On
The article is from the Washington Post. This kind of thing really shouldn't be written by a sports columnist, who is just parroting a bunch of other poorly-researched pieces out there. Note in particular the emphasis placed on that […]

Here's a video of Time reporters Simon Elegant and Austin Ramzy trying to visit Hu Jia's wife Zeng Jingyan at her apartment at the ironically named Bobo Freedom City apartment complex. Zeng is under what amounts to house arrest, although…