Nov 14

BBC - Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has told MPs that ground-to-air missiles will be deployed to protect the 2012 Olympic Games in London if deemed operationally necessary.

He was asked to confirm this by the former defence secretary Liam Fox.

It was Mr Hammond's first appearance at Defence Questions since taking over from Mr Fox.

The comments follow reports of concern in the United States about security plans for the Games.

The Guardian claimed the US was furious about security plans and wanted to send up to 1,000 of its own people, including 500 FBI agents but the Home Office says it has "full confidence" in the plans.

Mr Hammond was asked by his predecessor to confirm whether there would be a "full range of multilayered defence and deterrents" in place for the 2012 Games including surface-to-air missiles.

He replied: "I can assure him that all necessary measures to ensure the security and safety of the London Olympic Games will be taken including - if the advice of the military is that it is required - appropriate ground-to-air defences."

International sports has a place in international relations. There's something about meaningless competitions in games on a global scale that forces international tensions to the fore, and highlights conflicts.

Just ask the Soviet men's water polo team in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Or the 1972 US men's basketball team at Munich. Or the Israeli wrestling team at the same games.

Mega Congrats to Canada!

Apparently, some people don't like the fact that the Canadian women's hockey players celebrated like hockey players the world over. Amanda's reply is about all that really needs to be said:

If this is really a matter of role modeling, I’d say that the Canadian women’s hockey team are great role models for young women. Seeing a bunch of strong women go out there, kick ass, and then be proud of themselves for it, while telling naysayers to shove it up their asses? That’s the sort of thing young women need to see. Young women already are inundated with self-esteem stripping messages about how it’s naughty to win, shameful to be proud of yourself, and unsexy and threatening to be competitive. Nor do they need more messages about how achievement is only acceptable in women if it comes with self-effacing perfection.

Competitive and proud? I find that sexy, not threatening in the least.

What happened, eh?

Steve Connor | Feb 3

The Independent - With terrorist threats, dire transport links and overspent budgets you'd be forgiven for thinking that the 2012 London Olympics had enough problems to worry about. But another nightmare scenario has just been added to the Olympic dream – a communications blackout caused by solar storms.

After a period of unprecedented calm within the massive nuclear furnace that powers the Sun, scientists have detected the signs of a fresh cycle of sunspots that could peak in 2012, just in time for the arrival of the Olympic torch in London.

Over the past two years, fewer sunspots have been recorded than at any time since 1913. But now scientists have detected signs that the next cycle has begun and it could peak in two or three years.

They believe that this peak in the next solar cycle could generate the eruption of vast solar explosions that could fling billions of tonnes of charged particles towards the Earth, causing intense solar storms that could jam the telecommunications satellites and internet links transmitting live Olympic coverage from London.

"The Sun is now waking up. The first significant active regions of a new solar activity cycle are forming. In the last two weeks, we have seen the first major flares of a new cycle," said Professor Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

Kim Murphy | Jan 12

LA Times - Vancouver engineers its own urban dream - The city imposes notions of sustainability in its decisions on what, where and how to build. Still, it's not quite the utopia.

The result has come to be known as "Vancouverism," an urban motif of public transit instead of freeways, a low-carbon energy infrastructure and gleaming high-rise condominium towers in sunlit, walkable neighborhoods laced with urban parks.

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games next month provide a showcase for how Vancouver is trying to evolve. A $1-billion development that houses the athletes' village generates up to 70% of its power from converted sewage, and the vaulted ceiling of the Richmond speed-skating venue emphasizes that most renewable of resources, wood.

Over the last 20 years, Vancouver has managed to more than double the number of people living downtown while also reducing its carbon emissions per capita to the lowest levels of any big city in North America. The central city has refused to allow a single freeway and recently began to further tighten the noose around automobiles, closing lanes on crowded streets in favor of buses, bikes and sidewalks.

The city has hit up developers to build parks, recreation centers, libraries, day-care centers, and open, public waterfronts to a degree almost unknown anywhere else.

CBC News | November 26

CBC - U.S. journalist Amy Goodman said she was stopped at a Canadian border crossing south of Vancouver on Wednesday and questioned for 90 minutes by authorities concerned she was coming to Canada to speak against the Olympics.

Goodman says Canadian Border Services Agency officials ultimately allowed her to enter Canada but returned her passport with a document demanding she leave the country within 48 hours.

South African track runner Oscar Pistorius, though not a double amputee -- he was born without lower legs -- has enjoyed great success competing in that class wearing state-of-the-art carbon-fiber prosthetics. After setting world records in the 100, 200, and 400 meters, he sought to move up in weight class, if you will.

Initially, he was prohibited from competing against able-bodied runners on the grounds that, because they were a little too state-of-the-art, his prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage. (Of course, he was still allowed to crush other double-amputees.) Ultimately, though, he was cleared to compete against all runners. But the unfair-advantage issue is not a closed book.

Travis Lupik | Vancouver | July 28

Georgia Strait - What are Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s plans for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games? And—perhaps the more pressing question—what are they up to in Vancouver right now in relation to the Games?

I think this qualifies as *OUCH*....

Tania Branigan | Beijing | August 12

The Guardian - When nine-year-old Lin Miaoke launched into Ode to the Motherland at the Olympic opening ceremony, she became an instant star.

"Tiny singer wins heart of nation," China Daily sighed; "Little girl sings, impresses the world," gushed another headline, perhaps in reference to Lin's appearance on the front of the New York Times. Countless articles lauded the girl in the red dress who "lent her voice" to the occasion.

But now it emerges that Lin lent someone else's voice, following high-level discussions - which included a member of the Politburo - on the relative photogenicity of small children.

The Olympics start in a few hours. I won't be watching, in case you were wondering. I'm going to watch "Shawshank Redemption" on my iPod and also finish watching the final season of Deadwood. It's Friday and I'm still not quite up to going out and carrying on, so I'll just hang out in my flat tonight. I'm sure someone will SMS me if something important is happening. Yawn.

Jack Chang | August 7

McClatchy - While China has billed the 2008 Summer Games starting Friday as the coming-out party of a new world power, the United States enters the 18-day competition struggling to stay on top both in athletics and on the world stage. Many observers are predicting a second-place U.S. finish in the total medals count, a result that would be seen by many as symbolic of a shift in the global balance of power.

That quadrennial nationalistic orgy known as the Olympics is once again upon us. Exactly what the Olympics are about has always been a touch unclear. This year’s extravaganza – if that is a good enough word for something that costs $17 billion – has the snappy motto “One World One Dream.” Maybe this means something in Chinese. In English it might as easily translate to “One World – One Can Only Dream.”

Of course, the Olympics are supposed to be about amateur athletes competing on the world stage. Ha ha ha. The host country has been snatching promising children away from their parents for at least a decade, locking them up in training facilities where they work out seven days a week, and letting them know that only gold medals are acceptable performance. That well known amateur basketball player Yao Ming will be leading the Chinese team, and the U.S. will again be recruiting their basketball players from the NBA.

This is just dumb. First, it's a slap in the face of the Chinese and the pride they as a nation are justifiably taking in hosting the games.

Two, as the Times notes:

The Chinese and the International Olympic Committee, including Arne Ljungqvist, chair of the I.O.C. medical commission, have repeatedly said that athletes were not at risk because of the air quality here.

During a previously scheduled news conference Tuesday night, Ljungqvist dismissed the athletes’ actions as unnecessary.

“I don’t see the need for it, honestly,” Ljungqvist said of the masks, although he noted that some athletes with respiratory conditions may need to wear them.

So, unless all the American cyclists have respiratory conditions then there just isn't any need. Don't American athletes have any sense of political propriety, or rather just good manners?

This is really saddening. It really breaks my heart to hear of this, and to know this is happening in a city I have very strong feelings for. From the article:

On Monday morning, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported what appeared to be the deadliest assault against Chinese security forces in recent memory: 16 policemen were killed and 16 others injured when attackers threw two grenades into a police station in the desert oasis town of Kashgar, in the far west, after driving a truck into the station at 8 a.m. Two men were arrested.

I can't say, however, that I am surprised. This would be the best chance the Uighur's would ever have to draw any serious news coverage to their plight--and a valid plight it is, what with the Chinese boot firmly lodged at their throats for so long and so hard. But what pains me the most is that this attention getting is being done the worst possible way at the worst possible time. They won't elicit any sympathy from anyone, no matter how deserved. The killing of innocents never does. Even if they are policemen, and in some sense legitimate targets. I still don't understand why people don't just lay down in the middle of the road sometimes. What power a protest like that would portray? Don't we all remember the lone man stopping a column of tanks in Beijing in 1989?

Stephen McGinty | Aug 2

Scotsman - THE Little Red Book, the sayings of Chairman Mao, has been replaced by a little red booklet that instructs Beijing's residents how to act and dress ahead of next week's Olympics.

** Don't mix more than three colours

** Do shake hands for three seconds only

** Don't wear your pyjamas in public

Like a totalitarian version of Trinny and Susannah, Zheng Mojie, deputy director of the Office of Capital Spiritual Civilisation Construction Commission, has penned a booklet posted to four million Beijing households stating acceptable standards of dress and behaviour.

July 30

dpa - The chairman of the International Olympic Committee's press commission, Kevan Gosper, has said he was 'disappointed' that the Chinese authorities were blocking websites deemed sensitive, but that the IOC cannot tell China what to do, according to a report in the South China Morning Post Wednesday.

Gosper's statements to the newspaper indicate the IOC apparently knew in advance that the websites would be blocked, despite having told the international media that the estimated 25,000 journalists who are in Beijing already or will arrive in coming days to report about the 2008 Olympic Games would be granted unfettered access.

'I have also been advised that some of the IOC officials had negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked,' the Hong Kong-based newspaper quoted Gosper saying.

'I would like it all to be open. I am not here to defend the Chinese decisions. I am here to ensure journalists can report on the Games. I am disappointed the access is not wider. But I can't tell the Chinese what to do,' Gosper said.

Funny, the old hutong neighborhoods have been disappearing for the last thirty years. But leave it to the New York Times to put it on the front page and explain to us it's all the fault of the Olympics. Anything to sell the games, fraud that they are.

Let me add, before anyone gets into a tizzy: the games are a fraud not because they are in Beijing. They are a fraud because they lost the true Olympic spirit a long time ago, when VISA and MacDonalds and all the other commercial outlets weren't the 'Official insert name here" crap began. It's all a bunch of commercial garbage now.

Geoffrey York | Lhasa | June 23

Globe & Mail - Severe restrictions, including checkpoints and surveillance, imposed since wave of anti-government protests in March, exiles say.

The pilgrims returned to the Potala Palace yesterday, spinning their prayer wheels and prostrating themselves in front of the Dalai Lama's ancient palace on a mountaintop in Lhasa.

For two days, the Buddhist pilgrims had been pushed to the sidelines to make room for the Olympic torch relay in Lhasa. The traditional pilgrimage route at the Potala Palace was unceremoniously shut down, in one of many security measures by Chinese authorities, even though a month-long Buddhist festival has drawn thousands of pilgrims to the Tibetan capital.

Clifford Coonan | Beijing | June 23

Independent - China paraded the Olympic torch through the streets of Lhasa at the weekend in a blaze of red flags, eager to present a picture of national unity and domestic harmony just three months after the Tibetan provincial capital was rocked by anti-Chinese riots.

With the Olympic Games to begin in Beijing on 8 August, senior Chinese Communist Party officials in charge of the restive province used the opportunity of the torch relay to denounce the Dalai Lama and underline China's tight grip on the Himalayan region. "Tibet's sky will never change and the red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above it," said Zhang Qingli, the hardliner who heads Tibet's Communist Party. "It is certain we will be able to totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama's clique."

Subject: FreeTibet2008.org: SFT Launches New Olympics Website /Video

With the start of the Beijing Olympics only 49 days away, SFT HQ is stepping up our Olympic campaign efforts. To ensure that you are kept up to date with news, analysis, and ways to participate in creative, strategic and effective actions for Tibet leading up to and during the Games, we are excited to launch SFT's Olympics website: http://www.FreeTibet2008.org.

Visit http://www.FreeTibet2008.org now and watch our new SFT Olympics Campaign video, a moving account of what is at stake inside Tibet and the power we have – as Tibetans, supporters, and people of conscience – to make history for Tibet at this crucial time.

Ben Blanchard | Kashgar, China | June 17

Reuters - The Olympic torch was paraded on Wednesday through the sensitive former Silk Road city of Kashgar, home to ethnic-minority Muslim Uighurs, under the scrutiny of Chinese soldiers and choreographed cheering crowds.

China has accused Uighur separatists in oil-rich Xinjiang of plotting attacks with al Qaeda's support to help achieve their goal of establishing an independent country called East Turkestan.

The government banned all but carefully chosen members of the public, including Islamic leaders in head dresses and children in traditional attire, from the relay route and ordered everyone else to stay at home and watch on television.

YaleGlobal
Sunday, June 01, 2008 15:47

China’s hard-line policy towards Tibet creates more problems than it solves. Beijing’s recent crackdown on Tibetan protesters has attracted condemnation from around the world, but did nothing to address the underlying problems in Tibet itself. If Beijing is serious about securing Tibet’s long-term future as part of China, it needs to put aside its past enmity towards the Dalai Lama – and Michael Davis, law professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, offers a strategy for China to pursue. Only by acknowledging that the human-rights issue cannot be separated from the country’s unity and negotiating with the Dalai Lama will Beijing achieve the goal that both Beijing and the Dalai Lama claim to share: an autonomous Tibet that remains part of China while retaining its own Tibetan identity. - YaleGlobal