Eideard

South Korean police have dug up a stash of 11 billion won [$10 million], most of it buried in a garlic field…

The money is believed to be the proceeds of an illegal internet gambling operation, for which one of two brothers is already in jail.

Their brother-in-law helped out by burying the cash, and then helped himself to some of it, police said. When he then accused a landscaper of stealing a chunk of cash, police moved in and unearthed it, they said…

According to the police version of the story, the brother-in-law, a 52-year-old man identified only as Mr Lee, bought the garlic field in south-western Gimje.

His gambling relatives had felt pressured by police investigations and asked for his help in hiding the money, Yonhap news agency reported. He worked at dusk and dawn, as if farming, to bury the containers.

His own greed led to his downfall however, police say: First he dug up about 400m won and spent it, without telling the brothers he had helped himself.

Then he tried to blame a workman who was helping to landscape the plot; that man complained about being falsely accused, leading police to the field.

The 11bn won was part of 17bn won the in-laws allegedly earned in profits by operating an illegal internet gambling site in South Korea with a server in Hong Kong, Yonhap reported…

Police plan to confiscate the cash and seek an arrest warrant for Mr Lee.

You know, a terrific reason for making gambling illegal is to confiscate the proceeds. More profitable than a kickback.

Five years ago when Costa Crociere S.p.A first entered China, the cruise travel industry was an untapped market.

Today, the Genoa-based cruise operator, which has a 70-percent market share in China’s cruise travel sector, has to compete with other operators – all aiming for a slice of the strong momentum from Chinese tourism.

In 2010, there were 95 cruises departing from the coastal cities of China and 128 international cruises visited those cities, demonstrating a 19-percent year-on-year increase, according to industry figures…

In 2010, Costa Cruise saw almost all of its cabins for short destinations in Asia fully booked…

For 2011, Costa has plans for 41 cruises in China including six port calls from Hong Kong and 35 from Shanghai…

There are also great hopes for a new trend in the cruise market, catering for the needs of retirees who plan to take a cruise. According to industry statistics, 70 percent of senior citizens in China plan to travel abroad…

In addition, a cruise is also a popular way for companies to hold annual conferences or reward their employees, said Costa’s Liu.

Interesting – to see recreation, entertainment, vacation models from completely different cultures making the jump. It’s not a surprise to see it happen; but, I’ll bet there are some hilarious tales of cultural adaptation that were unpredicted.

A bizarre case of a young Asian man successfully boarding a plane disguised as an elderly Caucasian man has the governments in Hong Kong and in Canada scrambling to review their security procedures at airports and placed an airline under scrutiny for its passenger screening procedures.

The story of the Asian man in his 20s who stowed away aboard a Hong Kong-to-Vancouver flight continues to play prominently in newspapers and TV news broadcasts as well. And it has captivated a public puzzled over how screening staff at airports would fail to halt a person who wore a silicone mask disguised to be significantly older than his actual age of a different race…

What is known is that the man boarded the plane wearing the disguise and presenting a U.S. passport of a Caucasian man born in 1955. The aging face contrasted with the traveler’s “young-looking hands,” according to a Canadian Border Service bulletin issued over the case. Sometime during the flight the man removed his disguise, further alerting airplane staff who notified the Canadian authorities. Border officers met the man as he arrived in Vancouver…

Golly! They actually noticed the difference.

No link to terrorism has been suggested in the case.

Phew! I’m glad I needn’t worry about that for another day or two.

RTFA and you can add all the excuses to your list of Homeland Insecurity favorites.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Google is tweaking its China website in a last-ditch effort to save its search business in the world’s largest Internet market after butting heads with Beijing over Web censorship.

The google.cn search site will stop automatically redirecting users to Google’s uncensored search portal in Hong Kong — instead, visitors will be required to click a link to access the Hong Kong site…

“It’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable, and that if we continue redirecting users, our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed,” Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote on the company’s corporate blog.

“Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn so Google would effectively go dark in China,” he wrote…

The website tweak is Google’s latest attempt to strike a delicate balance between standing up to China’s policy of Internet censorship while maintaining a presence in a market considered key to its future growth…

Google, which battles Baidu for China’s 380 million Internet users, said in January it might quit the country over censorship and after it was hit by a hacking attack that it said came from within China.

But after keeping its promise to end self-censorship by automatically rerouting users to its Hong Kong site, Google now seems reluctant to abandon the Chinese market entirely…

China’s foreign ministry on Tuesday declined to comment on Google’s decision to end automatic rerouting, but Drummond said he hoped it would be acceptable to the Chinese government…

I don’t recall all of the chronology; but, I recall an interview on Chinese TV with one of the founders of Baidu. He’d been involved with folks from Yahoo and borrowed start-up money from them. When he went to pay it back – I believe it was a million dollars – he offered them cash or stock in Baidu. They took the cash.

Disclaimer: I own enough BIDU to get a couple of good Chinese meals if I sell it.

Google moved its China Internet search service to Hong Kong in a bid to resolve its dispute with Beijing over censored search results while keeping a foot in the world’s largest Internet market.

But comments on Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, suggested that Google’s attempt to strike a balance may not go over well with Beijing. Xinhua quoted a government official as saying Google has “violated its written promise” and is “totally wrong” by stopping censorship of its Chinese language search results.

Google said on Monday it intends to continue research and development work in China, as well as maintain a sales staff, even as it effectively stopped serving search results from its mainland Chinese site Google.cn and redirected traffic to an unfiltered search site in Hong Kong.

For the average mainland Chinese Web surfer, the change is unlikely to make much difference unless they can get around government-imposed firewalls that block searches for sensitive topics like the Dalai Lama…

“This is not the end of the saga, this is just the end of the chapter,” said Colin Gillis, analyst at BGC Financial. “You sort of make China look like the bad guy and you think you’re going to be selling Google phones? Good luck, we’ll see how that goes…”

“The Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement,” Google said in a post on its official Web blog on Monday.

The White House also said it was disappointed an agreement could not be reached between Google and China to allow the company to keep running Chinese search services…

Google said its decision to re-route traffic to an uncensored Hong Kong site in simplified Chinese that is specifically designed for users in mainland China is “entirely legal.”

You get the feeling everyone wishes the relationship could continue; but…

And I should note as a disclaimer I’m a shareholder in Baidu. Worth enough to buy Dim Sum for the whole family.

Police in Hong Kong are trying to trace members of a group on the social networking site Facebook which appeared to call for a mass suicide.

Nearly 190 people joined group, which allegedly urged them to kill themselves on 21 December, said Chinese media.

Attention was first drawn to the site by a student who told social workers about it after attempting suicide.

The South China Morning Post said the person who started the group had written that it was “meant to be an inside joke”, where people talked humorously about ways to take their lives.
But some of the 188 people who joined it had reportedly written posts in which they shared possible suicide methods and asked for people to join them in dying.

The group has been since taken down but police said they were trying to contact all members and its creator…

Chinese state media reported that photographs had been posted on the site of a female member of the group attempting to kill herself at school.

If we were to make jokes about a topic like this – and I guess pretty much anything is always a potential topic for a joke – I guess I’d try to set up a site for TeaBaggers to commit mass suicide at a Sarah Palin rally.

Nah. Too bad that suicide is still an acceptable solution to emotional and sociological quandaries for religious cultures. Sad.

HONG KONG: When the Michelin guide announced that Chan Yan-tak had become the first Chinese chef to get a top ranking of three stars, a scrum of local journalists hurried out of the news conference and jumped into taxis to seek out an interview…

The world’s big Michelin-starred names – the Robuchons, Ramsays and Ducasses – generally achieve success by breaking free of former employers and opening eponymous restaurants, followed by offshoots, cookbooks, TV shows and other trappings of the celebrity chef.

Chan, a stout, plain-spoken man in his late 50s, has done none of these things. It was only because of an odd stroke of luck that he was in contention at all: He had already quit the industry to be a stay-at-home dad when, in 2002, the Four Seasons began looking for a master Cantonese chef for its new hotel here and coaxed him out of retirement.

The fact that the world’s best-known restaurant guide had practically ignored one of the world’s best-known cuisines until now was not lost on Jean-Luc Naret, the Michelin Guide’s director. The guide had been criticized in past years for not giving due credit to top Japanese and American restaurants, and Naret did not want this to happen with its first ranking on Chinese soil.

“We followed Mr. Chan for years, before he went to the Four Seasons,” Naret said. “We went to Lung King Heen 12 times this year.”

Michelin is famously terse in its write-ups. It affords one sentence to Lung King Heen’s harbor view and interiors, and one to its food. “Ingredients here are of the highest quality – particularly the seafood, which is impeccably fresh; all dishes are expertly crafted, nicely balanced and enticingly presented.”

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A Canadian think tank on Tuesday hailed Hong Kong as a bastion of economic freedom, despite concerns about restrictions on foreign investors that want to buy into companies listed on the city’s stock exchange.

The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute said Hong Kong has now taken top spot in its annual Economic Freedom of the World report for three decades.

The honour is “a tribute to the importance of letting people get on with their lives,” said Mark Mullins, executive director of the Fraser Institute, during a luncheon at the Conrad Hotel in Hong Kong. More than a decade after Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, it is “a terrific example for the world,” Mr. Mullins added.

Of course, the folks writing the article contradict themselves with the canard about “fears still remain, blah, blah”. If anything, those fears have diminished in the eyes of investors since independence from the Brits.

Beijing is accused in some quarters of favouring domestic interest groups over foreign companies looking to expand into Asia, including mergers and acquisitions of Hong Kong-listed mainland businesses…

Mr. Mullins said Beijing must resist being “tempted” to policies that restrict the freedom of Hong Kong’s market. “This sort of transaction in Hong Kong in the past would have gone through,” he added.

There are more than few working families in North America and Europe that wish for a government that cared a bit more for that tiny bit of regulation that might encourage domestic jobs and enterprise.