More details here including what you can do to show your outrage and try to stop these executions from being carried out.

Yet another example of the kind of dispicable and disgraceful behaviour that demonstrates why China should be excluded from international forums until it learns to behave like a civilised nation.

Tibetans are being forced to celebrate this day against their will and with the massive military presence that has been in place since earlier this year, the Tibetan people will be forced into submission. Tibet remains closed to foreign tourists and the international media, and the heavy media blackout means that there is little chance of monitoring the situation. Suffice to say, we have grave concerns for the well-being of Tibetans within Tibet during this sensitive time.

Of course, the media blackout is incredibly ironic given the recent reports about China’s attempts to subvert the Australian media within Australia.

Australia, we really need to start waking up and taking action against these pricks. This is an atrocious regime that kills more of it’s own citizens every year than any other country and so far we’ve let them host the olympics, buy up our natural resources and tell us who is allowed into the public gallery of our parliament house. Now we want to invite them to join the IMF and buy significant interests in our largest corporations. Forget about Iraq and Afghanistan – this is the ultimate rogue state.

China needs to learn that it must behave like a civilised society before we will respect it.

“What a lovely river we live on – let’s dump tonnes of toxic crap into the environment to celebrate it!”

Bizarre – Carbon offset or not.

Basically, they suck.  Enough said – here’s the ad.

The ad will be shown simultaneously on all of the pro-free speech TV stations in this great land of ours (well at least those stations with ads – i.e. Nine, Ten and SBS).

Thankfully the only good shows that 7 have (and that’s not a lot) are also available via download elsewhere…  I’ve survived without watching any Channel 7 since the 8th of the 8th, and now that I know they are basically a puppet of the Chinese propaganda bureau I’ll be steering clear for good.

If you too want to ditch 7 but are worried about missing out on Lost or whatever other crap you are addicted to, check out the Australian iTunes Store that now offers TV shows and movies.

In one sense it is quite ironic that they pulled our original ad.  It must be about the only ad they haven’t shown during the coverage (which from all accounts had been riddled with a seemingly endless barrage of commercials).

If you missed the ad, here it is again for your viewing pleasure…

I love Media Watch.  Nice work Mr Holmes.

By the way, you can view the ad via the ATC website here.

Regardless of whether Seven took this decision under its own direction or were pressured into this by someone else (such as the IOC, as has been postulated elsewhere), this raises huge questions about media freedom – not just in China, but right here in Australia.

Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders (amongst many other organisations including ATC) have been trying to highlight the lack of media freedom within China during the lead-up to the Olympics.  Of course, incidents like this one with Channel 7 in Australia are even more disturbing as they highlight the reach of China’s media censorship beyond its own national borders.

I spoke at a public rally last weekend relating to the actions by European Satellite TV company, Eutelsat, in pulling the broadcast into China by the New York based, independent Chinese-language news network NTDTV.  Reporters Without Borders have further details on their site regarding Eutelsat’s disgraceful actions, including a lenghty transcript of a discussion between a Eutelsat employee and someone posing as a Chinese Propoganda Department representative.  Of course, this would be bad enough if it was a Chinese-based company, but Eutelsat is headquarted in France.

This is a worrying trend, but not a new one.  You can find out more by running the incredibly ironic Google search – ‘Google, China and internet censorship’.

Just not in China.

And maybe not for too much longer here either.

In 1996, the Chinese government admitted to the UN to having taken the boy for his own protection, but they have refused any attempts to verify the well-being and safety of him, his family and attendents (all of whom disappeared).

You can follow this link to add your name to the petition to have Gedun Choekyi Nyima released.

From the reports I’ve heard from friends that were there it sounds like it was quite a scary place to be for anyone in a Free Tibet shirt or carrying a flag – regardless of whether you were ethnically Tibetan or not. Friends of mine were spat on, cursed, jostled and had their flags torn out of their hands – as well as intervening constantly to try and defuse potentially violent altercations. One story from a friend of mine involved a group of Chinese youths vigorously harrasing a small, elderly Tibetan women. After the youths were shooed away, she apparently swore at them with some fairly strong language, which apparently brought some much-needed comic relief to those within earshot.

The ATC chief minister and the AFP all think the day was a great success – due to their planning, of course. I think it was a success too – probably for different reasons. Our plans never involved attempting to interfere with the torch – so it’s not as if we were curtailed by the security presence. We simply wanted the torch’s tour through Canberra to be inseparable from the Tibetan issue in the mind of the public and the media – and all of the reporting (both here and abroad) that I’ve seen met this objective.

My biggest concern over the past few days was trying to get an objective gauge on public opinion on this issue. For a while there it was looking dicey. Media beat-ups about the extent of so-called ‘violence’ in the torch relay legs in London and Paris, were starting to give the impression that the protesters were the bad guys. But I think three things ended up swinging the balance of public opinion back in our favour by the end of the Canberra leg on Thursday. Firstly, the ridiculously over the top Chinese nationalism that bussed a 15,000 strong pro-China rent-a-crowd into Canberra in an attempt to defend both the torch and more importantly, Chinese pride. Second, the confusion (read arrogant defiance) of the ‘blue trackie crew’ in jostling with the AFP for torch defending honours despite being told unequivocally that they were not to be involved at all. And lastly, the violent thuggery and intimidation used by the pro-China camp against a much smaller Tibetan group who had come to Canberra to exercise their democratic right to express their views through peaceful protest.

I really believe (hope) that a lot of people who know nothing about these issues saw something today that might give them food for thought. This is the power of China. Through years of systematic nationalistic brainwashing, you can get 15,000 people who live in a foreign country to do what you want without asking them to do anything. I really get the sense that, in the eyes of the ‘average aussie’, the strategy of the Australian Chinese community backfired yesterday – they came out looking a little ‘extreme’ and the Tibetans came out looking relatively moderate.

The trick now, of course, is harnessing all of this public awareness and momentum to create some actual change