MY DISTANT COUSINS, JOURNALISTS CELIA HATTON AND PROFESSOR GREGG BIRNBAUM.

 

     Celia Hatton, my Anglo-Canadian second cousin's daughter, is currently an Asian news editor for the BBC. 

   Celia has a strong voice about Chinese affairs and conspiracy theories. She is the spitting image of her Anglo-American grandmother, my dear 'Auntie' Audrey, who lived kitty-corner from me in Mannamead, Plymouth, and Celia's parents are both from Plymouth. Her mother was financed by a local Nancy Astor scholarship to study in Virginia.

Celia's great grandmother Olive Hunt was my grandfather Emmanuel Leonard's favourite sister., and one of my favourite relatives. I remember helping to paint her cottage on Thornhill Way when I was a teenager,

View from the Sir Francis Drake Bowling Club

Mannamead, Plymouth. The former house of the Tory Lord Mayor, Leslie Paul, is on the right.

      My wife Valerie and I visited the Hatton family in Hamilton, Ontario in 1978 when I was on sabbatical in Kingston, and I recall us all eating pasties in Niagara on the Lake together. Celia's father Mark Hatton  (Ph.D., London 1972) is now an emeritus professor at McMaster University.

     Rumours about who Celia is married to abound. Her mysterious partner has also influenced the right-wing BBC view of Chinese politics., Celia's reporting is regarded as prize-winning in the West, and she has been much praised by CBS.

I am concerned about the way the BBC continues to give its unequivocal support to the neo-liberal post-colonialist post-Kuomintang Taiwanese government that represses 700000 or so foreign workers, most harshly in the fishing industry, and denies full taxpayer and property rights to the populace.

 Taiwan's annual military budget of $11.5 billion compares with China's $252 billion and the USA's $778 billion. Taiwan therefore depends upon the USA and other Western powers for its defence.

Many of the Taiwanese islands, e.g. the Kinmen Islands, are perilously close to the mainland, and should have been politically integrated with mainland China years ago.

CHINA DENIES ASSAULT ON FOREIGN JOURNALISTS  (March 2011)

""But video is freely available on the BBC showing uniformed and plain-clothes police officers surrounding the BBC's Damian Grammaticas, roughing him up and pulling his hair before pushing him into a van and then repeatedly slamming the door on his legs""

Ernest, Edward, and Emmanuel Leonard

The journalist Professor Gregg Birnbaum of New York City is one of my many distant cousins. His Canadian mother Joy was a (daughter or) granddaughter of my great uncle Ernest Leonard and his wife Rosie Leonard, and Joy was married to the controversial President of the New York Stock Exchange Bob Birnbaum during the 1980s. My parents Cecil and Gwen  visited Joy and Bob during that period, and took them pasties purchased in Teddywedgers on State Street, Madison, Wisconsin, My colleagues at UW Madison were most impressed,

Teddywedgers, Madison, Wisconsin