International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge said yesterday the IOC did not strike a deal with Chinese authorities to censor Internet access during the Olympic Games.
“The conditions you were working in on Tuesday were not good,” Rogge told reporters, referring to the day when Internet blocks were discovered.
However, Rogge stopped short of offering an apology.
“I am not going to make an apology for something that the IOC is not responsible for. We are not running the Internet in China,” Rogge said.
Meanwhile, IOC press official Kevan Gosper said yesterday the IOC and the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG) had set up a working group to examine which censored sites could be opened up to reporters.
Gosper described the process as a “work in progress.”
Earlier in the week, Gosper, an IOC member for more than 30 years, said that senior organizers had cut a deal with Chinese authorities to block some Web sites.
IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies yesterday brushed off criticism that the IOC had backtracked on requiring Beijing not to censor Web access for reporters.
One reporter quoted Rogge as saying “foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.”
Davies said that Rogge, who is Belgian, may have not been precise when he spoke because he was using English, which is not his native tongue.
“I think we are trying to hang on every single word often spoken by people whose mother tongue isn’t English. Let me be clear again: The IOC would like to see open access for the media to be able to do their job,” Davies said.
Numerous times over the last several years, Chinese officials and high-ranking IOC members said there would be no censorship on the Internet for accredited journalists covering the games.
Chinese authorities have repeatedly said reporting would be “free and unfettered.”
In 2001, when China won the right to host the games, BOCOG Executive Vice President Wang Wei (王偉) was widely quoted as saying: “We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China.”
Super Typhoon Kong-rey is the largest cyclone to impact Taiwan in 27 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. Kong-rey’s radius of maximum wind (RMW) — the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds — has expanded to 320km, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. The last time a typhoon of comparable strength with an RMW larger than 300km made landfall in Taiwan was Typhoon Herb in 1996, he said. Herb made landfall between Keelung and Suao (蘇澳) in Yilan County with an RMW of 350km, Chang said. The weather station in Alishan (阿里山) recorded 1.09m of
NO WORK, CLASS: President William Lai urged people in the eastern, southern and northern parts of the country to be on alert, with Typhoon Kong-rey approaching Typhoon Kong-rey is expected to make landfall on Taiwan’s east coast today, with work and classes canceled nationwide. Packing gusts of nearly 300kph, the storm yesterday intensified into a typhoon and was expected to gain even more strength before hitting Taitung County, the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. The storm is forecast to cross Taiwan’s south, enter the Taiwan Strait and head toward China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The CWA labeled the storm a “strong typhoon,” the most powerful on its scale. Up to 1.2m of rainfall was expected in mountainous areas of eastern Taiwan and destructive winds are likely
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday at 5:30pm issued a sea warning for Typhoon Kong-rey as the storm drew closer to the east coast. As of 8pm yesterday, the storm was 670km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) and traveling northwest at 12kph to 16kph. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 162kph and gusts of up to 198kph, the CWA said. A land warning might be issued this morning for the storm, which is expected to have the strongest impact on Taiwan from tonight to early Friday morning, the agency said. Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) and Green Island (綠島) canceled classes and work
KONG-REY: A woman was killed in a vehicle hit by a tree, while 205 people were injured as the storm moved across the nation and entered the Taiwan Strait Typhoon Kong-rey slammed into Taiwan yesterday as one of the biggest storms to hit the nation in decades, whipping up 10m waves, triggering floods and claiming at least one life. Kong-rey made landfall in Taitung County’s Chenggong Township (成功) at 1:40pm, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The typhoon — the first in Taiwan’s history to make landfall after mid-October — was moving north-northwest at 21kph when it hit land, CWA data showed. The fast-moving storm was packing maximum sustained winds of 184kph, with gusts of up to 227kph, CWA data showed. It was the same strength as Typhoon Gaemi, which was the most
RSS