NYT: George Carlin, Irreverent Comedian, Dies at 71

The Beijing city government has banned fireworks for three months around the time of the Summer Olympics for safety reasons, according to a post on a government Web site. From July 1 until Oct. 8, fireworks dealers will have to suspend sales and lock existing stocks in special warehouses. The ban is among a host of restrictions that the Chinese government has imposed for the Olympics, which begin on Aug. 8.

While no explanation has been given for the ban, it is clear that the government doesn’t just simply want its citizens to sleep past 7am for the first time ever. It’s pretty clear, Beijing can’t afford to have loud and sudden bangs going off during the Olympics.

Around 20 were in Sichuan but all are safe and unhurt, according to the state Xinhua news agency. Some athletes lost homes and loved-ones, Sichuan sports director Zhu Ling was quoted as saying, but it was unclear if any of them were Olympic team members.
 
For those athletes training for the Games, the disaster has not been allowed to interfere with Olympic preparations. If anything, their focus on the Beijing Olympics seems to have been reinforced.
 
Liu Xiang, the 110m world record holder and reigning Olympic champion, caught the mood in comments two days after the disaster when he said athletes were determined to train even harder.
 
“We will redouble our efforts and try to use our achievements on the field to encourage the people of the disaster areas to rebuild their lives,” Liu was quoted as saying.
 
China’s government ordered three days of mourning from Monday to allow the public to pay their respects to disaster victims. The nation’s athletes have taken time out for fund-raising and observed three minutes’ silence on Monday, one week after the disaster.
 
But they have scarcely missed a beat in training and preparing for the Games.

Shouldn’t they miss a beat? I even missed a beat. The torch relay, which has instantly gone from an international disaster tour to a triumphant victory lap around China, even missed a beat. Everyone missed a beat. In the coming days, China will begin to only accentuate the positive and begin to hope people slowly forget about the 41,000 people that just died. For it only serves to remind the world that 2008, supposedly the lucky year of the Summer Games, has been one of the unluckiest years yet in China. More importantly, it serves to remind us that as much as one blindly submits to and reveres his or her government, Mother Nature couldn’t care less.

Photo: Time

It’s important to start in Seoul, where on Sunday a North Korean defector tried to disrupt the torch run by, well, setting himself on fire. While the Tibet freedom movement has inspired torch run opponents in Paris, London and France, in Seoul the Tibet issue took a back seat to protest over the plight of North Korean refugees in China. Signs and banners lining the torch relay in Seoul depicted the horrific treatment of North Korean defectors in China, who are routinely hunted down, arrested and returned to North Korea by Chinese authorities. According to an Associated Press story Monday, Son Jong Hoon, the North Korean who attempted to immolate himself, had spearheaded a failed public campaign to save his brother, one of the North Korean defectors, from execution when he was found and returned to North Korea.

Distinct from those perpetrating violence on the other legs of the torch relay, in Seoul, it was pro-China, pro-Olympics protesters who triggered the majority of the demonstrations. According to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, over 6,500 Chinese residents in Seoul, mostly students, swarmed Seoul’s Olympic park determined to drown out the anti-China sentiment that has marred the torch run thus far. Chinese loyalists wrapped in China’s flag threw objects at anti-Olympics demonstrators, inadvertently striking a journalist in the head with a rock. And interestingly, the pro-China soldiers in Seoul were armed by none other than the Chinese government. From a Chosun report Monday:

Chinese students studying here seemed well organized in their efforts to guard the Olympic torch. Messages calling for concerted action began to appear in an online club of Chinese students in Korea two weeks ago. A 22-year-old Chinese student who said he studies at Korea University of Technology and Education said 30,000 Beijing Olympic T-shirts and 30,000 Chinese flags were sent to the demonstrators from China the day before the relay. Kim Seong-yong, 71, from Seoul, who witnessed the event, said he had “never seen so many Chinese flags waving in central Seoul, not even during the Korean War.”

It seems China is now not merely keeping its torch runners safe, it’s now actively supporting pro-China mobs during the relay.

For those visual learners, this is what the torch relay looked like in Seoul this weekend:

And here is what it looked liked in Pyongyang, North Korea. The only word that comes to mind is “swell.”

When the Chinese government was dreaming up the 2008 torch relay, it was Monday’s stop in North Korea they saw in their mind’s eye: Beautiful women in traditional hanboks, waving flags, smiling, singing, extolling China, North Korea and their Communist camaraderie. Olympic organizers were saying on Monday, “Why couldn’t the Parisians, Londoners and San Franciscans be more like the North Koreans?”

A headline on a story praising the torch festivities in Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, read “‘Lucky Cloud’ floats over Pyongyang.” The only “lucky cloud” floating over Pyongyang would be one carrying a wireless Internet signal.

China’s ambassador to North Korea exclaimed Monday, “It’s a bright and colorful day for everybody in the city. The flame brings friendship, best wishes and passion to Pyongyang.” Anything can bring friendship, best wishes and passion to Pyongyang if Kim Jong Il says it does.

The polar experiences of the torch relay in Seoul and Pyongyang symbolize the utter disparity between North and South Korea and how they each relate to China. The South remains torn between the democracy, freedoms and value system of the West and its geography, nestled between North Korea and Communist China. Meanwhile, North Korea is as beholden as ever to China, it’s Communist big brother, a nation to whom it looks for economic, political and moral leadership.

While the Pyongyang leg of the torch relay may represent a visual paradigm for the Chinese, for the rest of the world, it should serve to remind us of the oppression that still prevails in North Korea.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., dispatched a three-vehicle convoy to San Francisco on Wednesday carrying messages such as “China’s Disgrace, playing games in Darfur.”

The cross-country convoy, which will stop at college campuses and Ben & Jerry’s stores, is due to arrive in San Francisco by April 9, in time to greet the Olympic torch, which makes its only United States stop there en route to Beijing for the Summer Olympics in August.

One of the drivers is a former Sudanese “lost boy” now living in San Francisco, another is a Dutch physician who has worked for years in Sudanese refugee camps.

Mamer Ajak, 26, the Sudan native, says the procession will help draw attention to mass killings in Darfur. He spent 13 years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S. seven years ago.

The April 9th torch relay stop in San Francisco is the only stop in the United States.