Three US citizens and a Tibetan-American were detained on Mount Everest yesterday as they called for independence for Tibet and protested against the Beijing Olympics, an activist group said.
The protest was organized by Students for a Free Tibet, which said three people were taken away after holding up a banner at a base camp on the Tibetan side of the mountain that said "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008."
The fourth person detained by Chinese authorities was a cameraperson, said the group's executive director Lhadon Tethong. "One World, One Dream" is the slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
PHOTO: AFP
The International Olympic Committee will announce the route for the 2008 Olympic torch relay in Beijing today. Chinese officials have said they want to take it to the top of the world's tallest mountain.
"The Chinese government hopes to use the 2008 Olympic Games to conceal the brutality of its occupation of Tibet," Tethong said from Kathmandu, Nepal.
A woman at the Tibet government office in Lhasa who gave her surname as Li said she was unclear about the protest. People who answered the telephone at the Tibet and Lhasa police offices also said they were not clear about the protest.
Tethong said three of detained people were Americans and one was Tibetan-American. They also held up a symbolic torch.
She said more than 70 Chinese climbers were in the base camp preparing for a trial climb to see if it is possible to take a torch to the top of 8,848m Mount Everest.
"One of the key points for the Chinese in their Olympic propaganda is to show happy Tibetans. They are very much using the Olympics, so we are also using it to call for an independent Tibet," Tethong said.
Meanwhile, a joint report released yesterday by Human Rights in China and Minority Rights Group International said China's ethnic minorities suffer from widespread discrimination and abuse, with laws supposed to protect them either lacking or simply not enforced, sowing the seeds of domestic unrest.
Minorities found it harder to get jobs, were increasingly denied the chance to educate their children in their mother tongue and benefited far less from the country's rapid economic growth, the report added.
"While many laws, regulations, policies and statements address the importance of equality among Chinese ethnic groups, the PRC [People's Republic of China] is not meeting its international obligations on minority rights for Mongols, Tibetans or Uighurs," the report said.
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to start construction of its 1.4-nanometer chip manufacturing facilities at the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP, 中部科學園區) as early as October, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday, citing the park administration. TSMC acquired land for the second phase of the park’s expansion in Taichung in June. Large cement, construction and facility engineering companies in central Taiwan have reportedly been receiving bids for TSMC-related projects, the report said. Supply-chain firms estimated that the business opportunities for engineering, equipment and materials supply, and back-end packaging and testing could reach as high as
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
Democratic nations should refrain from attending China’s upcoming large-scale military parade, which Beijing could use to sow discord among democracies, Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) said. China is scheduled to stage the parade on Wednesday next week to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. The event is expected to mobilize tens of thousands of participants and prominently showcase China’s military hardware. Speaking at a symposium in Taichung on Thursday, Shen said that Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) recently met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a visit to New Delhi.
RSS