June 16, 2008
The headline of today’s Beijing Times reports that the The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad has announced the Olympic Torch Relay will skip Tibet and Qinghai, where the torch was supposed to arrive this evening after traveling to Chongqing last weekend. Instead, it will travel through the Xinjiang Autonomous Region this week. It is still unclear whether the torch’s trip to Tibet will be rescheduled or canceled entirely.
The front page picture shows a group of people carrying a bride in a wedding dress to an ambulance. Yesterday, the bride held her wedding ceremony at a restaurant in Beijing’s Chaoyangmen district only to find that all the employees of the restaurant were on strike protesting a long delay in payment of their salaries. Dismayed by the chaos marring what should have been a perfect day, both the bride and her mother fainted.
Other headlines including:
- Some academics have written a report suggesting that the whole town of Wenchuan should be moved to a different location even though many buildings did not completely collapse collapse during the earthquake.
- Next month trains will arrive at stations on Beijing Subway Line 2 every two and a half minutes, down from the current three minute interval.