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you're
looking for. 1.
Are our remote beaches being plundered by sand bandits?
2.
Is Hei Ling Chau The Best Site For The Superjail? 3.
Superjail is doomed by lack of options, security chiefs
are told 4.
Wozniak becomes latest ambassador for yuppie scooter
1. Are our remote beaches being plundered by sand bandits?
CLIFFORD
LO, SCMP 20 May 2003 Who
is stealing sand from our beaches? The
question, raised by a nature lover on the letters page of Sunday's South China
Morning Post, has sparked an investigation by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation
Department. It will probe whether illegal dredgers have made off with sand from
three beaches and a sand bar, as suspected by physics teacher Stephen Woo Yan-chuen.
Mr Woo told the
Post that he suspected illegal dredging on Kat O Island (Crooked Island), Wong
Wan Chau (Double Island) and in Sai Kung East Country Park, based on trips he
made to the sites over the past eight months. He
said there was once a 20-metre-long white sand bank at the southwestern tip of
Kat O Island but it had disappeared when he visited the site earlier this month.
Last October,
he was shocked during his trip to Wong Wan Chau when he discovered huge sections
of orange-golden sand had been dug away on Tung Wan Beach, leaving a series of
large pits and ditches on the beach. He
also reported that fine white sand apparently had been dug away from Tai Long
Tung Wan and Tai Long Tai Wan in Sai Kung Country Park when he visited there last
August. Any dredging at the locations would be illegal. The
physics teacher expressed shock that such beautiful natural sights had been damaged.
He said it was unlikely that such large volumes of sand could be washed away by
natural causes. But
it was possible that mainland sand bandits had sneaked into Hong Kong waters to
carry out the illegal dredging, he said. A
government source said the sand could have been dug away by local villagers to
help provide concrete for houses in remote areas. Yesterday, the Agriculture,
Fisheries and Conservation Department promised to investigate.
2. Is Hei Ling Chau The Best Site For The Superjail?
SCMP,
20 May 2003 
3. Superjail is doomed by lack of options, security chiefs are told
STELLA
LEE, Chief Reporter, SCMP 20 May 2003 Security
officials are being warned that the controversial $12 billion superjail proposal
might fail to obtain environmental and community approval because of a fundamental
planning flaw. The
warning came after last Friday's decision by legislators to split the funding
for the feasibility study into building the prison on Hei Ling Chau. It
has been 29 months since the project was first raised in Legco. The prolonged
debate had dwelt mainly on the security aspects of the radical shake-up of the
prison system. But the issue has shifted recently when green groups strongly protested
against the plan to put the jail complex on Hei Ling Chau, off Lantau. Ng
Cho-nam, who teaches environmental impact assessment at the University of Hong
Kong's Geography Department, said the government could have avoided the debate
with green groups had it thoroughly considered the environmental issues in the
early stages of site selection. "The
problem now is that the government does not have any statistics to convince us
that Hei Ling Chau is the best choice from an environmental point of view,"
he said. According
to Professor Ng, environmental impact assessment laws require a project proponent
to study and compare the environmental impact of the project on different sites.
He said the $7 million preliminary feasibility study Legco approved for the jail
proposal last week should include such a comparative study. Otherwise, the government
risked repeating the Long Valley debacle. In
1999, the KCRC unveiled plans to build its Lok Ma Chau line across Long Valley's
wetlands. But this was dropped after it failed to win government approval on environmental
grounds. It now plans to build a 7km rail tunnel in the valley. Hei
Ling Chau and Kong Nga Po, near the border, were shortlisted for the superjail
project by the government in 2001 because they were large enough, developable
and met a list of nine criteria. In
comparing the two sites, officials look into their operational effectiveness,
planning, environment and other considerations. The
Security Bureau only pointed out briefly in a document presented to legislators
in June 2001 that Hei Ling Chau and Sunshine Island were proposed for conservation
in an official study due to the islands' ecologically important habitats and valuable
natural landscape. It said reclamation might compromise the conservation. In
July last year, Hei Ling Chau was picked as the government said the island had
"less potential for alternative development in the long run from an overall
planning point of view" than Kong Nga Po, which is one of the areas covered
in the "Hong Kong 2030" planning study. But
a bridge needed to be built between Hei Ling Chau and Lantau for operational and
emergency reasons, while reclamation was necessary for the prison site. The
location of the proposed prison hardly figured in the debates of the Legco's security
panel when it took up the proposal. Instead,
legislators were more concerned about whether the scale of the project would pose
security and management problems in future. The
government later backed down, cutting by half its original proposal to build a
$28 billion, 120-hectare jail for 15,000 inmates. The
scaled-down proposal will provide 7,220 places and bring the total Hong Kong prison
capacity to 13,860. It will replace eight of the existing 24 prisons, putting
real estate worth billions of dollars on to the market. The
chairman of Legco's security panel, Lau Kong-wah, said he did not anticipate environmental
concerns to pose a big problem to the construction of the superjail. "The
green groups usually have many opinions on many development projects. But we must
adopt a practical approach. We respect their views, but we have to balance other
concerns like security and cost-effectiveness," Mr Lau said. If
the project is given the green light, construction is expected to start in 2006
and be completed in 2012. The
government said the complex would ease the overcrowding at Hong Kong's prisons.
The sheer size
of the superjail would also ensure a significant economy of scale, allowing the
government to cut operational and manpower costs.
4. Wozniak becomes latest ambassador for yuppie scooter
NEIL
TAYLOR, SCMP 20 May 2003 One
of the oldest and reportedly most successful pornographic Web sites on the Net
can be found at www.whitehouse.com. It's
a fact that has been a long-time source of irritation to the residents of 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington. But as owner Dan Parisi has argued, "white
house" is such a generic term, regular trademark rules do not apply. So
Republicans found a way around the thorny problem by sneaking a little domain
name clause into the recent "PROTECT" Act of 2003 (also known as Prosecutorial
Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today Act), set up
to crack down on sexual violence against children. The
new clause, named the Truth in Domain Names Act, makes it illegal for porn purveyors
to use "misleading" domain names. Anyone who does so is liable to a
two to four-year stretch behind bars. Mr
Parisi's Web site now uses the address whitehousesex.com, so it looks like the
gambit worked. Ironically,
last time the Senate considered using the acronym "PROTECT", it was
for the Promote Reliable Online Transactions to Encourage Commerce and Trade Act.
Gossip, rumours
or scuttlebutt to share? Send them all to Neil Taylor by e-mail at backspace@scmp.com
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