tagged w/ boycott Bejing olympics
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The pyrotechnics and fake pomp and circumstance of the Beijing Olympics will bring the competition to an end, but the genocide in Darfur that so many seem to have put out of their consciousness goes on.
"The Beijing Olympics have left the world's human rights groups frustrated and angry - convinced that China has been let off the hook for serious abuses, and adamant that future hosts like Russia must be held to a higher standard.
Western activists also are disappointed that among the thousands of athletes at the games, few have made even low-key efforts to speak out about political repression or China's economic ties to Sudan, where violence has raged in Darfur.
"Even if there was an athlete that wanted to speak out on issues of human rights, he might be silenced by whatever IOC official is mediating that press event," Darfur activist and former U.S. Olympian Joey Cheek said in an e-mail Wednesday to The Associated Press.
Cheek, co-founder of a group of athletes known as Team Darfur, had his visa revoked by Chinese authorities hours before he was to embark for Beijing. Team Darfur athletes who are in Beijing have acceded to International Olympic Committee curbs on political comment, resulting in what Cheek called "massive suppression of any voice that the government doesn't want heard."
Prominent human-rights groups have castigated the IOC and the games' major corporate sponsors for their reluctance to place any public pressure on China on such issues as political dissent and press freedom.
"The Chinese government's own voluntary pledges to improve human rights, allow public protests and guarantee 'complete freedom to report' made meeting these self-set human rights benchmarks one of the tests for a successful Olympics," Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch said in an e-mail from New York. "That is a test that both Beijing and the IOC have failed."
She said the Beijing games, rather than bequeathing a positive legacy, "may leave in place permanent technological surveillance and monitoring networks that make doing human rights work even more dangerous and difficult for Chinese citizens."
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are calling on the IOC to establish a more rigorous process for assessing the human-rights records of countries which bid for and host future Olympics."
The IOC has met with Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies indicated their proposals would likely be rebuffed.
"We're a sports organization. ... we stay clearly within our role, which is to bring sport to host countries," she said Wednesday. "We're not an organization that is best placed or has the capacity to deal with human rights issues"."
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With all due respect to Giselle Davies regarding this remark:
"We're a sports organization. ... we stay clearly within our role, which is to bring sport to host countries," she said Wednesday. "We're not an organization that is best placed or has the capacity to deal with human rights issues."
It is OBVIOUS you are not in an organization that has the capacity to deal with nor to care about human rights. And that is damned sad as I always thought the true spirit of sports was brotherhood. It is obvious however, it is now nothing more than a money making machine for selfish people who only care about winning at any cost. Shame on her for that remark.
*To whoever is going into this post and changing it. Please stop it. Thank you.The pyrotechnics and fake pomp and circumstance of the Beijing Olympics will bring the... more
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Most Olympic corporate sponsors have been silent about China's financing of the Darfur genocide, even as they enhance Beijing's image by spending billions of dollars on the Olympics. Take action: change the channel when sponsors' commercials air during the Games. Join those who will watch Mia Farrow reporting from a Darfurian refugee camp during the Olympics.
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There are videos at this link for every day since the opening ceremony dealing with another aspect of this genocide in Darfur. We must not forget what is happening while the Chinese government hopes to use the Olympic Games to escape culpability for their supplying arms to Sudan that is contributing to the atrocities and rape of its people.
Thank you, Mia Farrow.
Most Olympic corporate sponsors have been silent about China's financing of the... more
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Hotels in Beijing are slashing room rates for next month's Olympics after tighter security — among other measures — dashed an expected windfall of visitors, hotels and travel industry executives said Tuesday.
Fan Runjun, an employee of the press department of popular travel Web site Ctrip.com, said many two- to four-star hotels have reduced prices by 10 percent to 20 percent compared to May and June. Some have slashed rates by as much as 30 percent, said Fan, whose site lists about 500 hotels in its English-language section.
The usual pre-Olympic festive atmosphere host cities experience has not hit Beijing yet, with some hotels feeling empty and listless. In June, the number of visitors to Beijing, including overseas and domestic, declined by 19.9 percent from a year earlier, according to the Beijing Tourism Authority.
The government has said the games are a target of terrorism, and has reported breaking up plots to attack the games by Islamic radicals in the western province of Xinjiang. In a show of force, China's military has stationed a ground-to-air missile battery just 300 yards from one Beijing Olympic venue.Hotels in Beijing are slashing room rates for next month's Olympics after tighter... more
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Three years ago, local government officials told farmers in this village of 7,000 residents to stop using water from a reservoir near their wheat and corn fields. If they needed water, the farmers were told, they would have to dig a well.
"They said there wasn't enough water," Jia Jianguo, 60, recalled.
At their own expense, the farmers dug a 90-foot well. But even though the new irrigation system worked fine, the locals have been forced to pool their meager resources each year that the water recedes to keep their crops alive. The well is now 135 feet deep, and the groundwater is seeping away as fast as the province's increasingly scarce water supplies are being channeled some 100 miles southwest to the thirsty capital of 15 million inhabitants, Beijing.
The Changgucheng farmers were never told that their reservoir is one of four in the province tapped to meet the capital's demand for water leading up to and during the Olympic Games, which begin in August. The Games are expected to increase Beijing's water consumption by at least 5 percent, or 162,000 acre-feet, according to a recent report by Probe International, a Canadian environmental group. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons.
From south to north
The channel is needed not only to make more water available for Beijing, but to clean Olympic venues and to flush out the city's polluted canals and lakes.
It is part of a mammoth $25 billion diversion scheme to bring water from southern rivers to the arid north to bolster Beijing's water supply.
Ecologists say this is just another example of how the push to showcase a green Olympics is creating environmental problems in provinces outside Beijing. Major polluting factories have been shut down or moved out of the capital for the Olympics. Diverting Hebei's water is just one of many potentially problematic actions, experts say.
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Diverting scarce water from farmers just to put on a show for the world is sickening.
Another reason to boycott their sham along with their human rights abuses and their part in genocide.Three years ago, local government officials told farmers in this village of 7,000... more
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Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, responded to criminal charges against Sudan president Omar al-Bashir introduced today by International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Al-Bashir has been charged with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity for overseeing the Darfur genocide which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives through violence, disease and malnutrition.
"Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo's charges against al-Bashir underscore the need for the U.N. Security Council to finally act decisively with a comprehensive strategy for Sudan. The world at-large, primarily the Security Council, has allowed al-Bashir to continue his reign of destruction, recalcitrance and violence with utter impunity. These charges must now sober al-Bashir's international apologists who continue to shield and protect the Khartoum regime from meaningful measures with meaningful consequences.
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And that includes China, the US, and others that continue to turn a blind eye to the genocide in Darfur for OIL money. They say "never again." Now is the chance to prove those words are sincere.
Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, responded to criminal charges... more
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Plans to divert water to Beijing for the Olympic Games are shortsighted and will not ease the city's severe water crisis, a Canadian-based development policy group said in a study released recently.
Channeling water from neighboring provinces for an event billed as the “Green Olympics” is not a “fundamental solution,” Probe International said in its report, compiled by a team of experts in Beijing who requested anonymity. Such diversions are expensive and damage the environment, the report said.
“Whether diverting surface water or digging ever-deeper for groundwater, the underlying solution proposed is like trying to quench thirst by drinking poison,” the report said.
It didn't say why the compilers had requested anonymity, although the Olympics are a highly sensitive issue and authorities have responded harshly at times to perceived critics of the games.
Explosive growth combined with a persistent drought for over two decades have drawn down Beijing's water table, meaning the city of 17 million people is fast running out of water.
Beijing has drained surrounding regions in recent years to supply its growing water needs, depriving poor farmers of water and encouraging wasteful consumption, the report said.
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Nearly all Olympic venues and the Olympic Village will use treated wastewater for heating systems and toilets. Recycled wastewater also will irrigate the Olympic Park, which will include a wooded area and an artificial lake. But the rowing venue, built on the dried-out Chaobai river bed in Beijing's Shunyi district, will use precious reservoir water. An eight-mile underground tunnel will divert water from the Wenyu River to keep the landscape green.
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Again, Bejing has one of the world's lowest per person available water resources, at one-thirtieth of the world average. And yet, they continue to divert water from poor farmers and others who need it to make artificial lakes and landscaping for the Olympics which they are hoping will bring them a lot of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$. I am already boycotting the Bejing Olympics because of China's involvement with Sudan regarding drilling oil wells on land cleared in the Darfur genocide. These selfish moves regarding water diversion make another reason why a boycott is necessary.
This is simply wasteful at a time when water conservation is crucial to the people of China, especially considering 90% of their rivers are already polluted. The water they will provide in the toilets in Bejing to put on their "green" show will probably be cleaner than what their people have to drink now that is giving them cancer. Such is the power of the dollar bill, or yen.Plans to divert water to Beijing for the Olympic Games are shortsighted and will not... more
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Make no mistake as to why Bush refuses to boycott the Bejing olympics. OIL is the key factor in this decision as it is in every decision by these oil and blood soaked criminals. The genocide in Darfur began as an environmental disaster (that continues) that has now evolved into a fight for its oil. Just like in Iraq and other places around the world, Darfur will now be a central point in a power struggle for the oil that lies below Sudan and Chad, coincidentally (?) where the genocide has taken place. Lots of land were cleared off in the burning of the towns and everything was lost by the inhabitiants there to clear the land for Chinese oil companies to come in and drill. Women have been raped, villagers terrorized and murdered, children starving, all for the sake of Chinese and American oil speculation.
If there was ever a reason to have a global climate treaty that gets this world OFF OIL it is this. To think of the inhumanities spawned by the greed of these people and that Bush will now use these Bejing olympics to make business deals rather than stand up for the human rights of millions around the world who have suffered and are suffering atrocities due to the insatiable greed for oil is unconscienable.
I am BOYCOTTING the Bejing olympics. I will not watch it, and I will no longer purchase any products from any sponsors of it if I do now. The human species will drown itself in its greed for oil as our planet balances itself precariously on the climate edge. How any world leaders can sit in Bejing and smile knowing what has transpired by the government of China and their own even against their own people shows they are no better. I as an American who believes in Human Rights and freedom denounce the Bejing olympics for what it really is to those in the Chinese government: propaganda to cover the tracks of monsters. Make no mistake as to why Bush refuses to boycott the Bejing olympics. OIL is the key... more
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