Top news
Including only teachers' salaries and the opportunity cost of time spent in the classroom by Hong Kong students EARTH has estimated an annual waste equal to about HK$4.8 billion or US$611 million. This total includes neither the opportunity cost of time spent doing homework nor the cost of language textbooks devoted to the study of the English language. Nor does it include the private sector inefficiency that necessarily results when the government drowns the private sector with unneeded, low quality language proficiency.

This is only Hong Kong's loss. Can you imagine what is must be for all of East Asia?

Government relations

No change.

Community relations

• Hong Kong friends kept EARTH alive this month. This newsletter's additions have been a direct result of their support.
  

Website additions and maintenance

New additions

• Quality Assessment
  
• Section five was added with a stand alone entry entitled Hong Kong's Bottom Line: The opportunity cost of English language study in Hong Kong. It is a well-hone combination of fact and factually based fiction, that should convince any reasonable person that Hong Kong needs to reassess its current language policy.
• Accompanying section five are one new graph, fourteen new tables, a factual cartoon cum graph, several additional links, and more documentation. You might just want to begin with the cartoon, because what follows is anything but funny.
  
• As has become EARTH's habit, a review of last month's up-loads was undertaken. As a result, a large number of small errors and one not so small error were corrected.
  
  
• EARTH's Viewpoint - Five, four, three, two, one and still counting. (pdf document - 28KB) José Luiz Rodrigues Zapatero's withdrawal of Spanish troops is a boon to world democracy. The US should remain in Iraq until a freely elected Iraqi government has been installed and order is restored. With or without Bush it will be painful. Preferrably without.
  
  
• Tsong Kit for Beginners - Part 2 Chapter 3 has been completed and uploaded.
  

Maintenance

• Having discovered an important technical source of broken links many pages found under the section Quality Assessment were reformatted and the links restored.
  

Software update

• There were no new purchases.

Strategy Update
It  is somewhat amazing that EARTH has come as far as it has. It is for this reason that you can probably expect more from the HKLNA-Project. The section entitled Quality Assessment is nearly finished, and depending on the availability of data, one or two more months will be required before completion. Whereupon EARTH will begin creating a promotional slide-show in Quicktime format for the entire HKLNA-Project.

Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Dr. SIU Hin Ho, Lai Tsai (my Hong Kong girlfriend!), and Klaus Colanero for their direct and encouraging support. Supporting remarks were also provided by Prof. Dr. Peter Baron, as well as YANAGI Toshio, and Roger C. Stewart. It also appears that the folks at ProZ.com have renewed their interest in the HKLNA-Project, and maybe even EARTH. To EARTH's other creditors, please be patient; EARTH is doing the best it can with extremely limited resources.

Closing Remarks
Please do not forget to take advantage of EARTH's quality translation service.  EARTH's survival might very well be the HKLNA-Project's success!

Sincerely,

R. A. Stegemann
hsmr@pacific.net.hk