Police in Beijing have been given English phrase books which teach them how to deal with troublesome foreigners in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, a news report said yesterday.
The 252-page Olympic Security English training manual has been issued to officers to prepare them for the city's hosting of the games and includes situations on how to deal with nosy overseas reporters and foreigners claiming their human rights are being violated.
One section headed "How to stop illegal news coverage" has a policeman confronting a wandering reporter who tells the officer he is working on a story about the Falun Gong, the outlawed meditation group, according to the South China Morning Post.
The policeman tells him: "Falun Gong has nothing to do with the games ... it's beyond your permit." He then criticizes the journalist for breaking Chinese law and takes him off to the Public Security Bureau to clear the matter up.
In another role play, a British woman from Hong Kong is stopped in the street and taken to the police station. When she protests: "You're violating my human rights. I protest" the policeman responds: "No tricks. Don't move."
In other sketches, an Afghan man is treated sympathetically but arrested when he is caught breaking into an American's hotel room in revenge for the American bombing of Afghanistan and a man from China's western Xinjiang province, which has a large Muslim population, is arrested over a bomb threat.
Two million foreigners are expected to visit Beijing for the Olympics and officials have launched a city-wide campaign to raise English standards ahead of the games.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver