keeping that tv off: more reasons to boycott beijing

A little reminder of why I'm not watching the Beijing Olympics.

Two elderly Chinese women who applied to hold a protest during the Olympics were ordered to spend a year in a labor camp, a relative said Wednesday. Police later squelched a pro-Tibet demonstration.

The women were still at home three days after being officially notified they would have to serve a yearlong term of reeducation through labor, but were under surveillance by a government-backed neighborhood group, said Li Xuehui, the son of one of the women.

Li said no cause was given for the order to imprison his 79-year-old mother, Wu Dianyuan, and her neighbor Wang Xiuying, 77.

"Wang Xiuying is almost blind and disabled. What sort of re-education through labor can she serve?" Li said in a telephone interview. "But they can also be taken away at any time."

Meanwhile, swarms of plainclothes police set upon four foreign activists early Thursday as they tried to stage a protest against Chinese rule over Tibet — the latest in a series of unsanctioned demonstrations to occur during the Olympics.

Beijing announced last month that it would allow protests in three parks far from the Olympic venues during the games but they had to be approved in advance. Of the some 77 applications lodged so far, none have been approved, and rights groups have called the zones a charade.

The four unfurled a Tibetan flag and shouted "Free Tibet" south of the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium, the New York-based Students for a Free Tibet said. It put the number of police at 50; a spokeswoman for the Beijing Public Security Bureau declined comment.

"The fact that there were so many undercover police following them it just made them go with the action urgently," said Kate Woznow, the group's campaigns director.

Two Associated Press photographers were roughed up by plainclothes security officers, forced into cars and taken to a nearby building where they were questioned before being released. Memory cards from their cameras were confiscated.

The four activists — whose whereabouts were not known — were identified by Students for a Free Tibet as Tibetan-German Florien Norbu Gyanatshang, 30; Mandie McKeown, 41, of Britain; and Americans Jeremy Wells, 38 and John Watterberg, 30.[More here.]