No, not the egg-chasers World Cup.Not the Women's World Cup.Not the 'homeless' World Cup either.(Which is a total swizz, because of course all the people playing in it have a roof over their heads. It should be called the 'Formerly Homeless' World Cup. But if they called it that, then I could enter. After all, I spent a night in a skip once. But that's another story.)This is the World Cup for countries that FIFA refuse to recognise.Now, let's be honest here. FIFA's concept of what constitutes a sovereign nation is odd enough to begin with. According to FIFA, Northern Ireland is a nation. According to FIFA, Kazakhstan is a European country. According to FIFA, so is Israel, although they used to be an Australasian country.The 22 nations that take part in the Non-Fifa World Cup include...
The Chinese themselves are now rising up against the police state apparatus of the ruling Communist Party junta.In Gansu, some of those protesting may well be Tibetan or from some other ethnic minority.But in Sichuan, they are Han Chinese, albeit not of the type to kow-tow to the whims of Beijing. In my experience, the Sichuanese are as fiery as the chilis they dose their famous cuisine with.Hopefully, the solidarity they are showing with their Tibetan neighbours will be as potent and long-lasting.The Beijing Junta can no longer lie that the protests are in anyway being co-ordinated by what they pathetically call the 'Dalai Lama clique'. Now it is Chinese who are protesting for their freedoms too, taking a lead from the Tibetans.Hopefully this will now spread to the Eastern cities....
Earlier today, a member of the Chinese embassy in London lied in an interview with Sky News.He said that Chinese soldiers had killed none of the Tibetans protesting in Lhasa and throughout Tibet currently.This is not true. Here's the proof. Sorry if you find this disturbing, but state-sponsored genocide usually is:Those are the corpses of Tibetan protesters in Lhasa shot dead by Chinese soldiers. And below, you can see the nature of the military invasion currently underway in Tibet:Genocide is under way. Cultural genocide, but also actual genocide of the populace. Hundreds are dead already.The Chinese do not want the world to witness this atrocity, so they are expelling all foreigners from Tibet.Don't let them murder a nation. Boycott the genocide Olympics in Beijing. Visit the Free Tibet...
Lhasa is burning today. The town on the roof of the world, the inspiration for Shangri-La, the spiritual home of Tibetans is aflame.Tibetans are demanding their freedom, which was taken from them by a military invasion nearly fifty years ago by the Chinese communists.Tibet is NOT part of China. It NEVER WAS part of China historically. The Tibetans speak their own language, have their own venerable history, their own religion and their own rich culture. They aren't Chinese and never will be.So instead, China seeks to eradicate them. This is the world's quietest genocide, a murder of an entire culture by the slow process of murder, arrests, tortures but also mass immigration into their land from Han China, the Sinization of their towns like Lhasa.In an astonishing display of compromise, the...
Trocaire director Justin Kilcullen has called on the Irish Olympic Committee to consider a boycott of the Beijing games in protest at the Chinese authority's tacit refusal to put pressure on their fellow-travelling Military Junta in Burma.At the Burma Action protest in Dublin on Saturday, Mr Kilcullen stated that the Olympics had gone to China in the hope that holding such an open and global event would encourage the Chinese Communist Party to move faster on providing basic human rights to the citizens of China."However China hasn’t kept up its side of the contract," he said, and who can disagree?I've written before about how China has denied its people even access to information about themselves and the regime they suffer under, by firewalling the internet.Their pals in Burma have gone...
The Chinese government are telling their people to quit their bad habits in advance of next year's Olympics in Beijing.Reuters reports that citizens are being warned not to swear, spit or litter, and to learn how to queue in a line properly.Such a terrible pity that it's not the other way round. I've little doubt that the Chinese people would only love to tell the Government to quit their bad habits, which are a lot more serious that clearing your throat in public or failing to line up neatly.Invading sovereign nations like Tibet and subjugating them, for example. That's a very nasty habit of the Chinese Communist Party.Or stifling all dissent by murdering or incarcerating anyone who dares protest against any aspect of the regime. That's a very nasty habit dating back to the time of that...
I've been looking for an excuse to blog again about China, and it looks like the ageing Junta in charge of the world's fastest growing economy have given me one.The editor of the Chengdu Evening News - a paper I've seen, but being unable to read Mandarin, I can't vouch for its quality one way or the other - has been sacked for publishing a one-line classified ad.What heinous statement could this advert have made, for it to have cost the job and career of a regional newspaper editor? What horrific sentiment could it have contained, for the state to have sent dozens of people out on the street to retrieve copies of the paper, or for a crack investigative team to have flown from Beijing to get to the bottom of the issue?Here's what the microscopic ad on page 14 of yesterday's paper said:...
We all know there's a 'downturn' under way in the Irish construction market. This has something to do with the fact that Irish houseprices are currently marginally more unbelievable than the toothfairy and the Yeti in a clinch.But it also has something to do with the revelation that a quarter of a million houses in the country are lying empty according to the last census.We have all the houses we already need. Why pay the silly prices being asked? Once that penny dropped for people, so did the asking prices.As we watch Irish house prices flutter downwards towards something vaguely and distantly resembling normality, let us consider the plight of the poor, downtrodden property developer.Yes, he will have smirked wryly to himself over a nice Scotch at the golf club this weekend as news...