Taiwan aborigines to perform at Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony

Taiwan aborigines to perform at Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony

Just curious, is Chen Sui Bien or Lee Teng Hui qualify as members of the aborignal dancers?

Guess this means no Peking pekinese...
:p
Olympics: China bans dog meat
11 Jul 2008, Image conscious China has banned the serving of dog meat in designated restaurants that will cater to athletes, spectators and tourists during the Olympic Games.

]
But it has spared restaurants from serving other kinds of meat like donkey meat that are equally popular among a section of people in Beijing. This has been done to avoid hurting the sensibilities of some of the visitors as well as ensure that animal rights activists do not get an opportunity to hold demonstrations, sources said.

The order banning dog meat was sent by the Beijing Food Safety Office to hotels and restaurants approved for the Olympic guests. The order also said that if dog meat is used in traditional medicated diets, which is often the case, it must be clearly labelled. Restaurants in Beijing that sell food from Yunnan and Guizhou provinces often serve dog meat. It is popular among some sections of Chinese but its use is much less widespread as compared to the two Koreas.

This is not the first time that dog meat dishes are being banned during Olympics. It was done during the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, where dog meat is a regular diet of the people. The official directive said Beijing restaurants should “respect the dining customs of different countries” by stopping the sale of dog meat dishes.

[url=http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Olympics_China_bans_dog_meat_/articleshow/3224162.cms:
Source[/url]

See also:

Terror threat to Games: China shuts mosques
11 Jul 2008, Chinese authorities have replaced top police and security officials in the Muslim dominated Xinjiang province, which is the hotbed of separatism and political violence. They have also closed down 41 “illegal” places of worship.

]
These places of worship were used as training ground for conducting a “holy war”, Chen Zhuangwei Chen, the police chief of Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province, said. Xinjiang, which borders central Asia and Pakistan, has been the scene of a pro-independence movement by a section of the eight million Uighurs living there for a long time.

The authorities also announced they have detained 82 “suspected terrorists” in the past six months in view of fears that they might disrupt the Olympic Games. They belong to five groups that “allegedly plotted sabotage against the Beijing Olympics”, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the police chief in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, as saying.

The government has annouced the replacement of army and security officials in the ranks of three deputy core commanders, political commissars and the head of the Communist Party organisation department in the army. The replacement suggests that the central government has been unhappy about the inability of local officials to put down the surging separatist movement in the province.

The new head of the organisation department is Liu Xiang Song, the government announced. One of the three new core commanders is Hanabati Sabukhaya, an officer from the Kazak race. Xinjiang borders Kazakisthan and several other countries including Pakistan and Russia. “From now, all police officers must act urgently, get involved once more in Olympic security, to make sure large and small incidents alike do not happen," Chen was quoted by official media as saying.

[url=http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Terror_threat_to_Games_China_shuts_mosques/articleshow/3220173.cms:
Source[/url]