The Tibetan activist that unfurled a banner near China's parliament supporting a review of the ruling Communist Party's policy on Tibet has escaped to Hong Kong.
"I hope this kind of action shows the Chinese leaders that empty promises cannot stop our pursuit and fight for liberty and the right to determine our future," said Wangpo Tethong, an ethnic Tibetan Swiss national, yesterday after arriving in Hong Kong.
Tethong, 43, on Wednesday unfurled a banner saying, "[Chinese President] Hu Jintao (
During his brief protest he stood close to a clock counting down the time left until the 2008 games in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, near where the National People's Congress is meeting in an annual session.
He disappeared without being noticed by hundreds of plainclothes, uniformed and paramilitary police patrolling the square.
Tethong is a member of the steering committee of the International Tibet Support Network and has led its campaign on the 2008 games, citing Beijing's "cynicism" in hosting the Olympics while the same regime "annually executes thousands of people and imprisons and tortures others for their political convictions."
He also urged China to release all Tibetan political prisoners and the young Panchen Lama chosen by followers of the Dalai Lama.
The Panchen Lama is traditionally the second-highest leader of Tibetan Buddhism.
China appointed its own Panchen Lama, and the now 15-year-old boy chosen by followers of the Dalai Lama has reportedly been kept under house arrest in Beijing since 1995.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
Two US Navy pilots were shot down yesterday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of US targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one sustaining minor injuries. However, the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area. The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the
MILITANTS TARGETED: The US said its forces had killed an IS leader in Deir Ezzor, as it increased its activities in the region following al-Assad’s overthrow Washington is scrapping a long-standing reward for the arrest of Syria’s new leader, a senior US diplomat said on Friday following “positive messages” from a first meeting that included a promise to fight terrorism. Barbara Leaf, Washington’s top diplomat for the Middle East, made the comments after her meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus — the first formal mission to Syria’s capital by US diplomats since the early days of Syria’s civil war. The lightning offensive that toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 was led by the Muslim Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in al-Qaeda’s
RSS