The Olympic torch’s trip through Tibet next month will be shortened, Beijing Games organizers said yesterday, in a move that could minimize any outcry over the controversial relay leg.
The torch’s passage through Tibet will be cut from three days to just one as part of route changes made because of China’s earthquake, an official with the Beijing Games organizers said.
“The change is due to the Sichuan earthquake’s impact on the rest of the relay. Because of this, the sacred flame will only pass through [the Tibetan capital] Lhasa for one day,” said Li Lizhi, an information officer with the Beijing Olympics.
“It will probably be in Lhasa on June 18 but we are waiting to confirm that,” she said.
The Olympic torch had been scheduled to transit a district south of Lhasa on June 19 before spending the following two days in the Tibetan capital, where fierce rioting against Chinese rule erupted in March.
The protests in March revealed deep anger against China’s control of the devoutly Buddhist region, and overseas pro-Tibet activists have denounced the Tibet leg — which was planned well before the unrest — as a further snub to Tibetans and world opinion.
The change is the latest made after tens of thousands of people were killed in the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province.
China called three days of national mourning last week, during which the torch relay was halted, and has made various adjustments to make up for those lost days.
The torch’s relay is the longest and most ambitious in Olympic history. Following a one-month world tour last month, it is now on a three-month domestic circuit that has included taking a torch to the summit of Mount Everest.
However, since the flame was first lit in Greece on March 24, the relay has been repeatedly disrupted by groups trying to highlight grievances against China’s communist rulers, especially their rule of Tibet.
Matt Whitticase, spokesman for the London-based Free Tibet Campaign, said earlier this month that the Tibet leg was an attempt by China to “underscore its baseless claims to sovereignty over Tibet.”
During the Tibet unrest, protesters denounced Chinese rule and called for the return of the exiled Dalai Lama. Speaking on Wednesday during a trip to London, the Dalai Lama urged Tibetans not to disrupt the torch relay.
“I appeal, particularly inside Tibet, [people] should not disrupt the Olympic torch when they visit. We must respect, we must protect that,” he told reporters.
Olympic organizers had already pushed back the torch’s leg through quake-devastated Sichuan Province to Aug. 3 to Aug. 5, making it the last stop before coming to Beijing for the Aug. 8 to Aug. 24 Games.
The torch was in the eastern province of Jiangsu yesterday.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS