Bird flu in China and Sharon Stone

Hong Kong has just reported that live poultry contaminated by the highly virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu has been found in a city market. The source of the contaminated birds is mainland China. 2700 birds were eliminated by the Hong Kong authorities as a precaution. The reports don't specify if the poultry in question is chicken or duck.

Hong Kong has banned poultry imports from mainland China for 21 days, while investigators track down the source of the infection. No human infections have been reported, but given China's tendency to censor any bad news this is not particularly reassuring.

Anyone still planning on going to Beijing for the Olympics in August? Better stick to tofu. Peking duck anyone? No, thanks.

China has been suffering from a series of unfortunate incidents in 2008. Some Chinese believe that 8 which is usually a lucky number, has become inexplicably unlucky for China. If that's true then it's bad news for the Beijing Olympics. The Olympics are scheduled to start on August 8, 2008 at 8:08 PM. That's 8-8-08 8:08.

And you thought that the communists weren't superstitious. Actress Sharon Stone has her own explanation for the bad luck in the case of the earthquake. She says it's bad karma because of the treatment of the Tibetan People. Actually I beat her to that conclusion in a post titled "Is Mother Nature part of the Dalai Clique?"

Unfortunately for Sharon Stone, the Chinese took great offense to her off the cuff remarks. They have retaliated and the official Xinhua news agency has declared her "the public enemy of all mankind". I thought that was Osama Bin Laden.



Under pressure from the Chinese, Christian Dior has dropped Ms. Stone from an advertising campaign in China. You can't have posters of "the public enemy of all mankind" plastered all over Beijing now can you.

As if that weren't enough punishment, Sharon has now been banned from the Shanghai International Film Festival. Poor Sharon.

She's tried apologizing twice, but the Chinese aren't in a forgiving mood. Maybe if she made an ad eating some Peking Duck they would forgive her.