Stuart Wolfendale

There is a chance that DAB chairman Ma Lik , who died on Wednesday, is going to be remembered, rather unevenly poor chap, for his very recent outburst denying the Tiananmen square”massacre”. Frankly, if I was in the last few weeks of my life, suffering the pains of colon cancer and its treatments, I might be given to vent politically unfashionable thoughts that lay, nonetheless close to the surface of my beliefs.

All I have today is an aching hip but, talking about Beijing, it does raise in me the ire to notice what no one else seems willing to say. Since the Olympic Games were reconstituted in Athens in 1896, they have only been held in a country with an authoritarian, one-party regime twice; notoriously in Berlin in 1936 and in Moscow in 1982 to which the Americans, quite rightly, refused to go. Motives for these choices were a mix of pandering to a threatening power and currying favour for strings free aid and assistance or lucrative contracts in an expending economy

Next year, to make it a third time, they are being held in Beijing.

******************************************

When Mr. Justice Hartmann refused an application by Stanley Ho to get a case being brought against him by his sister transferred to the Macau courts, he observed that the lady had been subjected to a concerted campaign of intimidation which included threatening messages and having her two lawyers beaten up. However the judge said that nobody knew who the mastermind behind all this was.

In fact, it could be anybody. The range of suspects is almost limitless. It could be you or it could well be me. Even though I don’t know the lady or the details of her case, I am probably one of the one and a half million or so under suspiscion. Over at police headquarters, the file sits in the Very, Very Difficult Tray. So much so, said one police source, that we aren’t even going to get in the spirit medium lady we normally use in cases like this.

Posted in All, Quickies, Thoughts for the Day