Mid Week In Review

Wendi Murdoch stole the spot light in the phone hacking hearing not only by her long black hair and fitted jacket but by her quick tiger claw too.  She leaped to her husband's defense by swinging a tiger claw at an assailant who tried to throw a shaving cream pie to the seemingly senile Murdoch senior.  Most other people at the hearing were so shell shocked by the sudden cream pie attack that they could utter only What or WTF, including James Murdoch who is forever seen flinchingly dumb-founded mouth ajar in repeat slo mo on TV.  Only Wendi Murdoch had the good sense and reflex to give the best defense she knew how: striking back head on at the assailant.  Ang Lee was quoted saying he would have cast Wendi Murdoch to star in the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was she not too busy home wrecking and gold digging.

While China press was given carte blanche to report, in glee, the News Corporation phone hacking scandal, showcasing how corrupted the English press, law enforcement and politics and by extension Western civilization is, disaster struck home.  Whenever there is disaster there is scandal, or so it seems in China particularly.  A high speed train collision this past Saturday resulted in 39 deaths, hundreds of injuries, and plenty of questions unanswered.  The official explanation was lightning.  But nobody believed that or that was the whole truth.  Immediately after the crash, people started to question the rescue effort given way to the priority to resume service, corruption leading to shoddy design and construction and the cover-up of the true cause of the train crash.  Three rail officials were fired while news conference scheduled was cancelled without explanation.  High speed train technology is generally considered safe as in Europe and Japan; there has been no fatality reported in Japan since its inception in the 1960s.  The billions dollar high speed rail is a pet project of the government and a source of national pride, at least for some, has now turned into a disaster and an embarrassment.

Talking about train crash, Amy Winehouse lived a life alternating between brilliance and of a train wreck, but mostly train wreck, died at the age of 27.  The cause of death is as yet unexplained but many people would have attributed it to ill health due to years of drug and alcohol abuse.  Her second and last album "Back to Black" released in 2006 gained critical  and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic.  Her death I would say eclipsed the passing of her fellow country man, a man with certain last name and pedigree, Lucian Freud, arguably one of the greatest modern portrait painters.  I almost couldn't believe his death as there has been scantily coverage of the painter's passing.  At some point I just thought I read it wrong.  But yes, he was dead at 88.

More deaths and terror happened in one of the world's greenest and most livable cities, Oslo Norway.  Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik bombed and shot people to death.  In all, 8 people died in the bombing in Oslo and 68 people were shot dead in Utoeya, an island about 25 miles from Oslo by car.  Breivik admitted the killings but pleaded not guilty, essentially claiming what he did was necessary ("imperfect necessity") to save Norway and Europe from "Islamification."  Breivik is probably a secret admirer of Ted Kaczynski, aka the unabomber, or his work or both as he copied the latter's work without giving proper credit in his own 1500-page manifesto "2083 - A European Declaration of Independence."  This makes him a plagiarist in addition to being a mass murderer.  Bad very bad.