In a protest against Giorgio Armani’s continued use of fur in its latest collection, animal rights group Peta yesterday deployed two "angels" to rally the crowd outside the fashion house’s flagship store in Central.

"Armani promised us it would stop using fur last year," said Rebecca Chui Shin-ping, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which is known for its aggressive campaigning. "But in his new collection he is using rabbit fur even for children’s clothes."

Armani said yesterday: "As a luxury fashion house, which has always been attentive to this issue, we feel we are being unfairly targeted in comparison to our competitors. In September we gave our commitment to Peta to refrain from future use of any animal furs other than humanely sourced rabbit fur."

However, Peta said its investigations found mainland farms that supplied fur to Armani were torturing rabbits. "Workers at the farm pull rabbits from cages by their ears and shoot them in the head with electric stun guns," its statement said.

Dressed in lingerie with wings and a halo, the protesters held up signs and attracted a small crowd of onlookers as they walked outside the store in Alexandra House. They stayed for about an hour.

Ms Chui said Peta started targeting the fashion house this year after it "broke its promise". Giorgio Armani had said he was convinced by Peta "not to use fur", according to a report on Time.com in July last year.

To press Armani to stop using fur, Peta planned to organise similar protests in the United States, Taiwan and the Philippines, Ms Chui said.

Ashley Fruno has been frequently used as a model for animal protection rights not just for PETA but has been active in Australia! It is pretty effective I’d say!

Hello Kitty’s birthday to be held in MMORPG Celebrations, events, charity in Hello Kitty Online begin November 1st, 2008

Hello Kitty turns 34 on November 1, 2008. To celebrate the occasion, Sanrio Digital today announced a birthday party for Hello Kitty that will be held inside Hello Kitty Online www.hellokittyonline.com,  the eagerly anticipated MMORPG. The celebration begins on Saturday November 1st, and will include a birthday party lasting through the week-end, a week-long series of in-game quests and events, and a charity event that lets players convert effort they spend inside the game into real cash donations to charity.

Hello Kitty Online is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game) based on the popular Sanrio characters. The game transports players into the cute and cuddly world of Sanrio Land and is fully integrated with official Sanrio portal SanrioTown.com, which utilizes blogs, email, video sharing, games and more to create a digital and social experience accessible at any time, even in-game. The game is currently in Founders’ Beta phase. The present version of Hello Kitty Online will shut down on November 8, 2008, to allow the development team to continue work on the game and prepare for Open Beta. Current players, however, will retain their characters and certain benefits in future versions of the game.

While other MMO games are busy celebrating Halloween this weekend, Hello Kitty Online is getting ready for a celebration of a far greater caliber. Tomorrow marks the 34th Birthday of Kitty White, the big-headed icon we commonly refer to as Hello Kitty, and Hello Kitty Online is preparing a birthday celebration fit for a character that’s been on more erasers than the words "I love you." Festivities kick off tomorrow with a weekend-long birthday party, with KW herself appearing in-game, which I suppose we are supposed to be thankful for. "Gee, thanks for showing up at your own party."

The celebration continues into the week, with a contest to see which guild can build New York City landmarks the fastest and a charity event called "Food for Friends", in which guilds will produce food items in-game, with the total amount created translated into cash donations made by Sanrio Digital to UNICEF and the Asian Youth Orchestra.

Only 6 (six) more days to go.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just press PLAY!

A new Hello Kitty Laptop? It looks less blingy than the other one and has a printed coating look with various Hello Kitty printed all over it, cute!

Japan’s relentless drive to merge terminal cuteness with ultimate technology has taken a curious turn. It seems that Sanrio, parent company of the ubiquitous Hello Kitty brand, is determined to leave no stone unturned when it comes to marketing their all-conquering brand. How else to explain the newest appearance of the mouthless wonder: on the Roomba robot vacuum. Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner that can clean your place automatically (by rolling and roving around your living room silently and quietly)

Roomba, a product of the cool-sounding iRobot company, is a self-contained robotic vacuum that patrols your home or apartment in search of dust and dirt. Like all roombas, the vacuum cleaner employs sensors to help it avoid stairs and, basically, is one of the only Jetson-ish home appliances to ever successfully cross the line from cartoons to reality.

However, the curious Japanese propensity to cutify, well, everything meant that sooner or later the Roomba would get a makeover. In this case it’s sooner - September 30 is when the Hello Kitty Roomba hits Japan’s department stores and online retailers. Better have your Hello Kitty credit card handy though (yes, it exists), at 84,500 yen - about $800 - the Hello Kitty Roomba is anything but cheap and as a home appliance it’s anything but a child’s toy. (via Impress Watch)

Hong Kong voters chose a new legislature, with pro-democracy parties retaining a law-blocking veto and the pro-business Liberal Party losing its top two leaders in surprise defeats.

Democrats held onto more than a third of the 60 council seats, potentially giving them power to alter bills that will shape the political future of the southern Chinese city, according to final results from the Hong Kong Election Commission. Liberal Party Chairman James Tien and Vice Chairwoman Selina Chow both lost their seats. Turnout was about 45 percent, compared with 55.6 percent in the 2004 election.

“The biggest loser would definitely be the Liberals, the so-called pro-business party,” Andrew Shuen, co-founder and research director at Hong Kong-based Lion Rock Institute, said in an interview today. “The people of Hong Kong want change. They voted for candidates who didn’t seem to have a chance to win.”

Candidates from parties supporting Chief Executive Donald Tsang had been expected to benefit from warmer ties with China and a surge of patriotism following the Olympics, political analyst Joseph Cheng said before the election.

China still picks the city’s chief executive. Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997, and the Chinese government has said it won’t allow direct elections for Tsang’s successor in 2012 or before 2020 for lawmakers.

Democrats’ Luck

“The democrats have been lucky,” Ivan Choy, a political science professor at Hong Kong’s Chinese University, said late yesterday.

The result may lead to gridlock in the 60-seat legislature, Shuen said. While the result gives the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong and its pro-government allies a majority in the Legislative Council, they fell short of the two-thirds it needs to push through bills.

“There are no winners in this election,” Shuen said. “The DAB has a mandate but not enough seats, while the democrats have enough seats but not a mandate.”

The other 30 seats in the legislature are drawn from so- called functional constituencies that represent special interests and industries, which usually support pro-China parties loyal to the city’s Chief Executive.

“We have to apologize to our supporters for doing badly,” Tien said today at a press conference broadcast on local television stations. Selina Chow resigned from the executive council and as vice chairman of the Liberal party, government- backed Radio Television Hong Kong reported. Tien also quit.

Democrats fought this election without two of their star figures: Martin Lee, the veteran legislator who helped found the Democratic Party, and Anson Chan, the former deputy leader of the government, who both decided not to seek re-election.

Flying fighter pilot dog, the new generation cute warrior.

Too cute for words! Discovered and published, can’t wait!

so I got to admit that as a fan of all things cute and Hello Kitty, the whole Hello Kitty Online thing flew by me the first time round, and then I sort of looked on at the sideline as everyone was raving about it. It didn’t stop just during the closed beta, it kept going and going and going.

First off, I am a fan of this, really! But for those of you who remember we heard news about this up and coming game for so long, I was not even sure it was real! And now I missed that first big beta! I will be there the next time and will take it seriously!

The true story of a female lion reunited with their human foster parents after a few years. Christian is the name of a pet lion bought from the famous Harrods department store in London in 1969. After about a year with his owners the lion had grown too big to remain with them. After a chance encounter with the stars of the film Born Free, the owners handed the pet lion over to the "Lion Man", conservationist George Adamson in order to be rehabilitated into the wild in Kora National Reserve, Kenya. A movie was made documenting the translocation from England to Kenya. In this footage, a year has passed and it looks like this pet lion has adapted to living with a pride of lions when his old friends come back to visit him.

More on wikipedia.