Asia Sentinel

  • Justice says the home ministry isn't allowed to block permit to publish print edition

  • The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad by Melanie Kirkpatrick, Encounter Books, hardcover, 376pp., US$17.95, Amazon

  • A fast-growing China faces growing headwinds

from the Asia Sentinel staff

  • With elections looming and the outcome probably closer than ever before, the government goes on the attack

Since the days of Gordon Gekko’s motto “greed is, for lack of a better word, good”, we have seen the world swept up by uninhibited avarice in the last two-and-a-half decades. This vice finally led to gargantuan financial debacles in many countries and cities. Zazie’s song “Etre et Avoir” (“To Be and To Have”) is a light and sweet ridicule of this particular human foible.

  • What Happens to China's Economic Relationship with Japan?

  • Civil Society Networks in China and Vietnam: Informal Pathbreakers in Health and the Environment. By Andrew Wells-Dang. Palgrave Macmillan. Hardback, 248 pp. £57.50.

  • The North Sea Commission could serve as a template for a peaceful resolution to Asia-Pacific maritime disputes

I received this definitive photo from Stephanie Toole at Mount Horrocks taken this week in the Cordon Cut Vineyard with the message “Pray we don’t get any frosts!”, illustrating how vignerons are at the constant mercy of the weather and like any agriculture, there are crucial, nail biting moments or stages throughout the year than determine success or failure that they have absolutely no control over. Commercial madness really, but your sort of need to be a bit ‘mad’ to be in the wine growing business, and you have to be downright crazy to do what Toole does, growing riesling for a late harvest wine by means of ‘Cordon Cut’ with the grapes hanging there for weeks at the mercy of the weather. ...