Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

Helen Clark by Stealth

After John Key announced that he will keep the "Working for Families", I really start to wonder, what's the difference between this guy and the Big Sister Helen? Especially the scheme was label by the same person who wants to be our Prime Minister as "Communism by stealth"?

No wonder that Mr key is more like a "Helen Clark by stealth".

Nah that's just a joke. Actually Mr Key is on the right way.

The reason why the old Don fell short by few seats in the last election is that, while people were tired with the Labour, they were not yet ready to accept a right-wing party to govern. Don went too right, and that's definitely very unattractive to Labour and centrist voters.

National improved a lot in the last election, but it was came by squeeze seats out of future coalition partners  - Labour lost only one seat in that election

What John Key is doing, is to show Labour voters that, I got all Auntie Helen would offer to you people, and I have stuffs like big tax cut, which she doesn't have.

I think it would be a effective strategy to get labour votes, as long as people don't care about their children and grandchildren...

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Bounty on Rice.

as you may know, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be in Auckland this weekend.

Auckland University Students Association(AUSA) has offered a bounty of $5,000 for any student who can make a successful citizen's arrest of Rice.

I like this idea but this $5,000 bounty is unlikely to be claimed by anyone as it is very unlikely to make a "successful" citizen's arrest of a high level diplomat.

And for $5,000 it is really not worth to risk your own life, but I reckon there will be at least one attempt if there are students who actually work in the hotel where Rice stays.

Just hope no one gets hurt ...

BTW, when I was searching this news in AUSA's site, I accidentally found out that there is a large number of spam links hidden at the bottom of each page. Anyone know how to do this? I need a bit of PageRank boost as well, haha.

More on the Xin Xin Ma kidnap case.

The accused kidnapper reappeared in North Shore City District  Court today.  Nothing important, really.

However, I was expecting the name of the kidnapper being released today, but instead, the name suppression of the accused was extended to 4th August. It's a subject of huge public interest, well, at least most Chinese people I know are eager to find out the name of that guy.

Compare with other countries like America or Canada, Chinese in New Zealand is a small community, so if that real estate agent did his job well, it is likely that quite a lot of us may meet him before or knew him pretty well.

I hope the court got a good reason for the name suppression. At least now it seems that the rumours will keep flying around for another week or two. before we know the kidnapper's name.

----------------

IUPDATE: I just obtained the personal details of the accused, including the name. However, as the suppression is still in place, I'm unable to publish all details here.

All I can say is, this case is not as simple as it may looks like.

About ... Winston

The first thing i wanted to do when I heard that Winnie is in trouble is to laugh out loud, "haha", like Nelson in the Simpsons.

This man was an expert to find other's dirt and plays it, and now the tide is turning.

Anyway, I actually trust Peters this time. I believe he really didn't know anything wrong on his legal fund. Reason? Simple, Peters is a very experienced politician, he knows if he lies on this issue it probably means the end of his life, oh political life I mean.

But whether he intentionally lied really doesn't matter now, public don't care.

I  am not familiar with parliament rules so I cannot comment on whether Peters breached any rules. But in my untrained eyes, there is clearly a conflict of interest when racing businesses start to donate Money to Racing Minister.

About that $100,000 dollars,  I don't know whether donation to a legal fund should be decleared, but there is, again, a conflict of interest. A job-wanting person gives the man who is responsible to dish jobs out 100 grand is clearly not right.

If Peters did not declare either of both he's clearly in deep trouble. Maybe this is the last year that we will see Winston Peters jumping up and down in the parliament.

Oh I'll miss him. He's quite good most time actually, at least there's very few harms he has done. In the situations where Peters is not useful, he'll at least say something entertaining, like the comments regarding immigrants.

IE8 Beta 1

I have spent bit of time yesterday to make this blog more IE8 compatible. It was first time I checked this blog under IE8 Beta 1, not too bad, just some floating problem in CSS. Added two clear:both; and it looks as good as usual.

If you've encountered any bugs after the change, please tell me so I can "try" to fix them.

There's one weird problem, however as you can see in the picture.

It turns out that wordpress automatically convert some punctuations to UTF-8 compatible codes. For example, (') and (...) would become (’)[’] and (…)[…], which look like fullwidth form punctuations in CJK characters. We use them in Chinese, but that curly apostrophe looks just terribly ugly in English.

I was quite surprised that I didn't realise this problem before. That little apostrophe appeared fine in IE 6-7 and FX 2-3, I guess that's because they are not really up to that mysterious "the standard".

But if IE 8 keeps this "standard" in the final version, that little apostrophe would become a headache for  wordpress based UTF-8 coded blogs. Wordpress should consider at least put this somewhere in the settings that allows people to disable this converstion easily.

After consulting with Google,  I understand there are two solutions. One, if you know what you are doing, get into the /wp-includes/formatting.php file, and kill the conversions that have offended you in wptexturize function.

Or there is a plug-in called Quotmarks Replacer that solves this problem. What it does is to disable(or should I say filter) the wptexturize function altogether, so all the punctions will appear as the same as the ones you actually typed.