Tuesday, March 18, 2008

observations on hong kong, based loosely out of yahoo! news

for the second or third time this month, hong kong made it into the yahoo! news headlines, which surprised me. generally, american media (digital and print) is heavily concentrated on the states, and on western politics (europe, latin america, things that directly affect the US, in other words). i can't remember reading much about hong kong under the "top world stories" in recent years (then again, I wasn't looking for it). anyways, here's the top 3 things that you would have learned about hong kong from yahoo news in recent days:

1) there was a big scandal with compromising photos being released of some young celebrities. i didn't see them, but i can't imagine they were anything worse than most of the US stuff that gets released "accidentally."

2) there was a flu outbreak. for the record, this massive outbreak has not affected my everyday life. there's plastic over the buttons in the elevator to ease sterilization efforts. that's it. while my heart goes out to the families who did lose children, there have only been 10 cases admitted to the hospital in the past week. that's out of the approximately 7 million people who live in hong kong. don't worry about us, the odds are with us right now.

3) there's now a serial killer on the loose, who has killed 4 sex workers. first, the fact that we use such a euphemism here gives you an idea of the prevalence of such an "industry." i read today that there are approximately 100,000 sex workers in hong kong. that's ridiculous. i understand being concerned about the murderer on the loose, but what's our reaction to the sex industry? nothing. meanwhile, we're up in arms about some photos of some celebs let out online. get real folks!

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