Three weeks after the online business-to-business giant Alibaba’s $1.7 billion IPO in Hong Kong, company founder and chairman Jack Ma (马云) has set another record by spending $38 million USD on a 7,000 sq. ft. penthouse (that’s about $5,400 per square foot) in Branksome Crest, a luxury apartment building in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels district. According to The Standard, Ma’s five-bedroom duplex has set a new record for property prices in all of Asia. Pre-IPO, Ma’s $900 million earned him 76th place on this year’s Forbes list of China’s 400 richest people (published just days before the IPO). Hey, there’s always next year: post-IPO, Ma’s personal net worth is now an estimated $1.6 billion, putting him on par with China’s top 50 fat cats (大款).
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Netanyahu’s New Government: Warming to Peace Talks with the Palestinians?
A flurry of gestures toward the Palestinian leadership suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his new role as leader of a center-right government, is warming toward the resumption of peace talks — or at least giving the appearance of warming; call it a rosy glow rising from a pair of announcements on Monday. One was about Palestinian prisoners who had been carrying out a mass hunger strike for weeks inside Israeli prisons. With several prisoners near death, Netanyahu approved an agreement that improves prison conditions and permits visits by family members in the Gaza Strip, the heavily guarded enclave that Palestinians have been allowed out of only for medical emergencies. Greeted by Palestinians as a victory, the deal eased concerns that a prisoner’s death might combust what are usually routine protests planned for Tuesday’s commemoration of Nakba Day, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s 1948 victory over Arab forces trying to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.
Palestinians Mark Their Day of “Catastrophe”
Protesters challenge Israeli troops in the West Bank while commemorating the Nakba, or “day of catastrophe” in Arabic, which marks the day when Israel declared its statehood in 1948—an act which forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and into a life of exile
Rebekah Brooks, Husband Charged in Phone-Hacking Scandal
The convoluted saga of the British phone-hacking scandal seems to have been dragging on longer than a back-to-back performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Yet despite the demise of Rupert Murdoch‘s News of the World, the launching of a public inquiry into British press standards, three police investigations and more than 40 arrests, the scandal has yet to draw real blood. The closest it has come was a report released this month by a Parliamentary committee, which accused Murdoch of turning a blind eye to the hacking at his paper and declared him “not a fit person” to run an international company — a damning conclusion that nonetheless seems to have had little immediate effect.
