China Blocking Information About Tibet.

It was not difficult to predict that China will try to block the coverage of Tibet and its protests. No one likes a reporter there when you’re trying to violently suppress an uprising, a protest, or just a good old-fashioned march.  David Barboza of New York Times reports:

The Chinese government is restricting foreign journalists from entering Tibet and neighboring areas, and blocking some news, video and Internet reports about the protests there from appearing inside China, according to journalists working here.

For the past few days, CNN, the BBC, Google News, Yahoo and YouTube have been blocked or have faced temporary blackouts or service disruptions in some parts of China. Some foreign journalists also say their e-mail service has been disrupted.

Such measures are not unusual here. China strictly censors news that appears in the Chinese media and occasionally disrupts the activities of international news organizations and foreign Web sites operating in China, particularly if the content they are distributing is deemed politically offensive to the government. The rest of the article.

The official version of the events looks sort of like this:

“We must give them tit for tat and firmly counterattack,” said an editorial in the Communist Party’s official newspaper in Lhasa, the Tibet Daily, in an indication of the government’s determination to crack down hard.

“Ensuring the social stability of the Tibet Autonomous Region is the number one political mission,” the paper said. “It is the priority. We have to take decisive and powerful measures to firmly beat down the enemy’s arrogance and never withdraw our troops without victory . . . We have to severely punish the criminals who are still beating, robbing and burning, arresting them rapidly and with absolutely no mercy.” Read the rest.

Maybe Chinese authorities need to consider the successful model of the US and embed some selected and trusted reporters with the riot police? This way we will know exactly what is taking place in Tibet, because reporters would not lie about the situation on the ground, right? But then again we might as well just take the Chinese information about the numbers of dead - 16 people at the moment - and go with it:

China raised the death toll from the violent anti-Chinese protests in Tibet last week to 16 on Monday, but said security forces had avoided using lethal force, countering Tibetan exile groups that said at least 80 had been killed.

Scattered protests by ethnic Tibetans continued in the neighboring Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan, as well as in Gansu.

As paramilitary police and troops were deployed to quash those protests, international pressure mounted on China to show restraint in dealing with dissent ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing in August. Read the rest.

What exactly is this international pressure? Maybe it’s Olympic Committee’s acute observation that the air quality in Beijing is far from excellent:

The International Olympic Committee acknowledged for the first time today that air pollution could be harmful for athletes at this summer’s Olympics in Beijing and said it will monitor air quality daily during the Games to see whether events should be moved or postponed.

In a statement, the committee predicted that most competitors would not be affected by poor air quality in the Chinese capital, one of the most polluted cities in the world. But in “a few sports” — notably distance and other endurance events — officials said there was “a possible risk.” Read the rest.

That would be an awkward reason to cancel the Olympics: “We don’t mind that you are killing your own citizens in a violent suppression of a protest, but due to the poor quality of air and a general smelliness of your capital, the Olympic games will be moved to a cleaner, less totalitarian place.”

In other news: Cheney makes a “surprising” visit to Iraq, admires the “remarkable turnaround” - really? Who would have guessed that on the anniversary of the War (5 years!) a member of Bush administration would not say something like that? Enough of the “surprising visits” already! How “surprising” is it, really? Cheney/Bush went there so many times, I’d be more interested in reading an article such as: George W. Bush Makes A Surprising Visit To The Local Library, Proposes to Recatalog Books By Color.