Six degrees

Kobe Bryant, of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, was in Hong Kong this month on a promotional tour. The shooting guard appears to be making the speediest of recoveries from a ruptured Achilles tendon – having sustained the injury in April, Bryant has hinted he’ll be ready to join in pre-season training with the Lakers next month. While he was in Hong Kong, Apple Daily reported that Bryant’s bodyguards turned down a request from Sabrina Ho Chiu-ying, 22, to have her photo taken with him. Ho is the daughter of Macau casino tycoon Stanley Ho Hung-sun …

Kerkorian, a former eighth-grade dropout, boxer and second world war pilot, is known by the nickname “the smiling cobra”. He earned his first bucket of gold – US$9 million – by selling land he’d bought in 1962, on the Las Vegas Strip, to the company that would build the Caesars Palace hotel. In 1967, he bought 33 hectares of land on the city’s Paradise Road for US$5 million and built the International Hotel, at the time the largest in the world. The first two performers to appear at the hotel’s enormous Showroom Internationale, in 1968, were Barbra Streisand and Elvis Presley …