The Blues - an Oversea's Fans View

Sunday, 20 December 2009 14:10 Last Updated on Sunday, 17 January 2010 07:47 Written by Mark Whitworth

Ni hao ma? Wo hun hao!

This article was written for the Birmingham City v. Spurs match day programme for Saturday 30th January 2010.

Deadline: Sunday 16th August - 13.30hrs. Years had gone by since my last visit to Old Trafford. Of course, the first game of the season meant the first match back in the Premiership for all of us, but it was even more special than that; over the last ten years my fingers and toes allow me to count the Blues matches I’ve attended. This is not for lack of desire; the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen me first living in Moshi, a Tanzanian town under the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, and now in Suzhou, China.

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The Little Mermaid

Saturday, 31 October 2009 13:13 Last Updated on Thursday, 03 December 2009 23:11 Written by Mark Whitworth

The Little Mermaid to Offer Swimming Lessons in Shanghai

This article was written specifically for the Shanghai Daily who were not interested; it derives in part from "The Economic Wave". The photograph of the Little Mermaid is courtesy of Microsoft Clipart.

Denmark is due to despatch the Little Mermaid to the Shanghai Expo next year; on her return to Copenhagen will they consider re-siting the statue to ensure her tail does not hang in the water? 

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Death Penalty Vote

Tuesday, 20 October 2009 08:41 Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 October 2009 13:18 Written by Mark Whitworth

CHINESE PUBLIC VOTE FOR DEATH PENALTY ON UK CITIZEN

An online poll of Chinese people registered 99% support for the decision to execute Akmal Shaikh, the British man convicted of smuggling four kilos of heroin.  Shaikh was arrested after flying into Urumqi, in the far north-west of China two years ago. In an unusually protracted case, by Chinese standards, he was sentenced in November 2008, his final appeal being rejected recently and only a decision by the Supreme People’s Court not to ratify the sentence can now save him.

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The Future of the Panda

Monday, 19 October 2009 08:54 Last Updated on Monday, 23 November 2009 08:16 Written by Mark Whitworth

CONSERVE AND CUDDLE OR LIVE AND LET DIE?

At the end of September the British TV naturalist, Chris Packham, stirred up a storm by suggesting that the giant panda should be allowed to die out.

The recent arguments fired up by the BBC’s Chris Packham regarding the fate of the giant panda have been tossed back and forth like a shuttlecock in a game that can be seen played across south and east Asia every morning at sunrise. The parks fill with polite elderly friends, each of whom no longer sees the point of the game and sometimes they fail to see the shuttlecock at all. They will die soon and sixty years of hitting a feathered object over a net together will have become an irrelevance; a microscopic fact in world eager to push on without them and the financial burden they represent. The giant panda, unlike these old people, is an irrelevance, but like the senior citizens it does represent a huge cost burden, deflecting both our resource and our thinking from other, more worthy acts of conservation.

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