Millionaire tax ruling for corruption in Ibagué National Games

RPTV NEWS AGENCY team:

Journalist: Edgar Ramirez

Camera and Edition: Oscar Cavadia

BOGOTA COLOMBIA). Tuesday, February 22, 2022 (RPTV NEWS AGENCY). For unfinished works for the scenarios of the 2015 National Games, the Comptroller General of the Republic issued a ruling with fiscal responsibility for $33,758 million against the former director of Coldeportes, Andrés Botero Phillipsbourne; the former mayor of Ibagué, Luis Hernando Rodríguez.

According to the control entity, the property damage was caused by the execution of the construction contract No. 119 of 2015, signed with the Temporary Union Parque Deportivo Ibagué 2015 by the Municipal Mayor’s Office of Ibagué, through the Municipal Institute for Sport and Recreation of Ibagué -IMDRI, in which payments for unfinished works, amounts of work paid and not executed, constructive and quality deficiencies of the Sports Park scenarios were recognized.

Lastly, the Comptroller’s Office indicated that those under investigation against whom this ruling with fiscal responsibility was issued have the opportunity to file the respective reversal and appeal resources, once the notification process is completed.

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2021

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Snowfall Blankets Games, Delays Gu's Freeski Run

ZHANGJIAKOU, CHINA — 

Heavy snowfall brought a wintry atmosphere to the Beijing Olympics on Sunday, as well as disruptions, forcing the postponement of home team favorite Eileen Gu’s qualifying run in the freeski slopestyle to Monday.

At the National Cross-Country Center in Zhangjiakou, volunteers used leaf-blowers to clear the tracks used for classic-style skiing ahead of Sunday’s 4×10-kilometer men’s relay.

Swirling winds blew the powdery snow, limiting visibility for racers and fans alike and causing drifting on the course.

With temperatures of minus 11 degrees Celsius at the venue 200 kilometers northwest of Beijing, adverse weather slowed the pace considerably, and the race took almost half an hour longer than its equivalent in Pyeongchang four years ago.

Earlier, the San Francisco-born Gu had been set to make her first competitive appearance since winning gold on Tuesday in Big Air for host China, but her legions of fans were forced to wait a day to see her qualifying run in freeski slopestyle.

In Yanqing, the men’s giant slalom Switzerland’s Odermatt clinches giant slalom gold went ahead despite reduced visibility due to driving snow, with start intervals for the first group of racers shortened to one minute, 45 seconds. A decision to delay the second run by 75 minutes paid off with better conditions.

A lack of natural precipitation had forced organizers to make vast quantities of artificial snow to stage the Games, but snow that had been falling in Zhangjiakou since Saturday coated the surrounding brown hills white.

In the Chinese capital, which gets relatively little snow, U.S. snowboarder Hailey Langland said visibility was a challenge following a practice session at Shougang Big Air, the only Olympic snow sports venue in urban Beijing.

“It makes it really hard to differentiate where you’re going to land, or when,” she told Reuters.

At the men’s giant slalom in Yanqing won by Switzerland’s Marco Odermatt, skiers supported the decision to go ahead with the race.

“Definitely, the light is more than skiable, it just makes it difficult. I like it,” Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen said after his first run.

“The snow is a little uneven so it is quite aggressive in spots… a little slick… I think it was difficult for everyone.”

One beneficiary of Sunday’s snow was Paralympics mascot Shuey Rhon Rhon, who resembles a red Chinese lantern capped with snow and has been eclipsed by the immense popularity of Olympics mascot Bing Dwen Dwen, an icy-suited panda.

“It’s snowing. Shuey Rhon Rhon finally becomes the main character,” one user wrote on the Weibo social media platform.

China to Boost Supply of Winter Games Panda Mascot Souvenirs

BEIJING — 

China will increase the supply of merchandise featuring Bing Dwen Dwen, the panda mascot of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the organizing committee said Sunday.

The announcement came as Chinese media and internet users reported difficulty in buying souvenirs in the likeness of the chubby panda in a hard, transparent bodysuit. Many had queued for hours in cold weather outside a flagship store in Beijing but failed to get the soft toys and other decorations.

“We are paying close attention to this problem … we are coordinating (with factories) to increase supply of Bing Dwen Dwen,” Zhao Weidong, a spokesperson of the Beijing Olympics organizing committee, told a news conference.

Zhao said the tight supply of Bing Dwen Dwen was partly because the manufacturing plants were shut down for the weeklong Lunar New Year, which overlaps with the Olympics.

“This issue reflects the popularity of the Beijing Winter Olympics and also demonstrates the achievement of engaging 300 million Chinese in winter sports.”

Rarely have mascots sold out after the first few days of any Olympics let alone become household names so quickly. Some mascots remain almost in obscurity even during the Games, as was the case at the 2018 Rio de Janeiro Olympics with Vinicius or the 2002 Salt Lake City trio of Powder the hare, Copper the coyote and Coal the black bear.

Analysts from Shanxi Securities estimate the total revenue from selling Beijing Olympic licensed products could reach $394.80 million during the Games.

“One Dwen at each family” has become the No. 4 most trending topic on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, with 10.38 million viewers in the past 24 hours. Chinese internet users are calling for the organizers to meet the surging demand.

Many said on social media that possessing an Olympics souvenir would make them feel more a part of the Games, which has been devoid of most spectators as tickets to events were not sold to the public to curtail the spread of COVID-19.

“To show that I am actively participating in the Winter Olympics, I am making all efforts is get a ‘Bing Dwen Dwen’ home,” wrote a Weibo user named “famous European.”

Chinese Dissident Ai Voices Criticism as Winter Games Open

GENEVA — 

The dissident Chinese architect behind the Beijing stadium hosting Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Games has scoffed at the head of the U.N. health agency, saying China should award him “a gold medal” for not asking hard questions about its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ai Weiwei, possibly China’s best-known dissident, aired criticism of Beijing’s human rights record and response to the pandemic, in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday, in which he also took aim at World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Ai also accused governments of showing too much deference to China for business or political interests.

He chuckled derisively after hearing that Tedros had posted a photo on Twitter showing himself in a red-and-white “Beijing 2022” winter track suit and matching wool cap as he carried the Olympic flame during the torch relay in China.

“My God. He should get a gold medal from China because he never asked the right question,” Ai said in a video conversation. “Where is his conscience, this guy? You know, all those people who are supposed to defend the human health and give the right information, but never ask the right question and (are) always on the side of the propaganda.”

“They’re so ridiculous.”

Under Tedros, the WHO came in for severe criticism from then U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration in 2020 for its alleged missteps and excessive deference to, and praise for, China when the COVID-19 pandemic first appeared in the city of Wuhan some two years ago.

Lights shine during a rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics at the National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, China, Jan. 30, 2022.

Tedros, in his tweet on Friday, wrote that he was “humbled” to participate in the torch relay.

“The Olympic Games are about hope & I wish for this flame to bring hope to people around the world that we can end #COVID19 together,” he wrote, while thanking the IOC president for the invitation.

Above all, Ai highlighted the Chinese government’s poor human rights record, saying hopes that it might have improved since Beijing hosted the 2008 Summer Games have gone unfulfilled.

“I think it’s really, really unbelievable after 14 years of this — this game, same game — we turn to the same country, a country (that has) not developed an inch towards better human rights and the better freedom of speech conditions, but rather become very arrogant,” Ai said.

He said the Chinese Communist Party’s government has brainwashed fellow citizens of his homeland who “kind of show their patriotic support for the party,” and said any comments that stray from that on social media like China’s Weibo “will disappear.”

Ai also took aim at the International Olympic Committee, saying the Games means “big business for them.” He said the IOC “never protected” human rights and has shown itself to “always defend … whatever China is doing — which is a pity.”

Ai didn’t give a pass to other countries either — both those like Russia, which were represented at the highest official levels, and some Western countries which boycotted the Games or decided to stay away for reasons like COVID-19 concerns. He faulted them for a double standard.

“They very, like, softly say, ‘We are not officially attending.’ For me, that is like a joke,” Ai said. “So the West, the problem is, cannot find a better strategy, but to use that as like a smoke gun to say, ‘O.K., we’re defending those principles.’”

“But in the reality, they are not: They are business as normal,” he added. “Many countries are hypocritical.”

The opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games kicks off | sports

The opening ceremony of the JJ.OO. Beijing Winter Games 2022 began today at the National Stadium in the Chinese capital, which thus became the first city in history to host both these games and the Summer Games (2008).

The stadium, popularly known as “El Nido” and which was also the scene of the inauguration of the event in 2008, has extremely limited capacity due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has also caused the opening to last one hundred minutes, much shorter than usual.

Snow-Free Subtropical Taiwan Fielding Team for Winter Games

TAIPEI — 

In subtropical Taiwan, the closest pile of icy snow is a serving of bàobīng, a sweet fruity dessert.

Yet when the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games open Friday, four Taiwanese athletes will compete under a name — Chinese Taipei — that is rarely used and without displaying their red flag with a white sun on a blue rectangle in one corner.

Skiers Lee Wen-yi and Ho Ping-jui will compete in the women’s and men’s slalom, respectively. Lin Sin-rong will rocket downhill in the women’s single luge. And, like other speedskaters, Huang Yu-ting, 33, will participate certain of the Dutch team’s dominance.

“When I’m meeting people, I’ll tell them I’m from Taiwan, because if you tell people you’re from Chinese Taipei, nobody knows where you’re from, you can’t find it on Google,” Lee said of her homeland.

There are almost no real training facilities for winter sports on the self-governing island and the COVID-19 pandemic has kept Taiwan’s athletes from training abroad. They’ve kept in shape using alternative training methods as they prepare for the Olympics.

Luger Lin, 23, has powered along the nation’s mountain highways on in-line skates. She trains on one of Taiwan’s ice rinks to perfect the launch sequence needed to start the luge. With spiked gloves, she works the ice as recreational skaters glide by.

“On the ice rink, I will just practice starts by [paddling] the ice with my gloves over and over, it’s quite repetitive,” she told VOA Mandarin last week.

Alpine skier Ho, 24, has trained in snow-blessed Austria since his middle school days. For these Games, however, he’s been bicycling and hitting the gym to maintain the lung capacity and muscles his event demands.

“We almost escaped back to Taiwan during early 2020 before a lockdown in Europe, because at that time, people’s understanding was that the COVID-19 virus would severely damage your lungs,” Ho, who now lives in Taipei, told VOA Mandarin.

“For an athlete, an injury like that will end your career,” he said.

Lee, 19, faces a similar challenge. The product of a skiing family, Lee’s father, Lee Yong-de, was one of Taiwan’s few professional skiers who reigned in the 1980s. He now owns an indoor ski training center, where his daughter maintains her competitive form using two machines that simulate the alpine tracks of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Ho Ping-jui, a skier from Taiwan. (Courtesy: Ho Ping-jui)

“These machines helped me tremendously,” Lee said. “When I went to the U.S. for training in August 2021, it’s like I’ve never left the tracks after a year and a half living in Taiwan, where you see zero snow.”

Lee believes she’s benefitted from the machines. “I think the machines have low tolerance for error, so I actually have to perfect my movement to finish the simulated tracks on them.”

But she needed more to qualify for the Games, so Lee and her father crisscrossed Europe last autumn so she could compete in qualifying events in Lithuania, Bosnia and Cyprus until December.

“I did a total of 33 races in less than two months, one race per 1.4 days,” Lee told VOA Mandarin.

During their training trip, her father, who is also her coach, maintained close contact with the Chinese Taipei Ski Association, which is responsible for entering athletes for the Games.

“All the hard work didn’t go in vain, and now I have a spot in this year’s Olympic Games,” Lee added.

While Beijing operates sports-centered boarding schools that are partially state-funded to train China’s rising Olympians, Taiwanese athletes usually rely on family funding for training until they start to participate in international events. At that point, the Taiwan Sports Administration and commercial sponsorships begin to offset the cost of training.

But for athletes who are training for winter sports that do not bring in tourist dollars or other revenue to the subtropical island, money is as hard to find as snow.

Taiwan will not send any government officials to the Beijing Winter Olympics this year, and the Taiwan Sports Administration said Jan. 28 that its delegation would not take part in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics “due to tense epidemiological situation and other factors.”

Lin Sin-rong, a sled runner from Taiwan. (Courtesy: Lin Sin-rong)

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province, and a Taiwanese official told Reuters that self-governing Taiwan feared Beijing could use the events to assert its jurisdiction over the island by putting Taiwanese athletes beside those from Hong Kong, which is officially a special administrative region of China.

This year’s Winter Olympics is also clouded by a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott, as well as possible air pollution, according to the Taiwanese news outlet ANI.

The Taiwanese team members who spoke to VOA Mandarin said they would refrain from commenting on political topics.

“I asked my athletes to focus on the Games and stay out of politics,” said Lee Yong-de, who coaches his daughter Lee Wen-yi, because “separating the two makes everyone happy.”

Some material for this report came from The Associated Press.

Beijing 2022 Eases COVID Curbs for Games; China Warns on Pollution

BEIJING — 

Organizers of next month’s Beijing Winter Olympics slightly eased the strict COVID-19 requirements for participants, a move that means fewer athletes are likely to be tripped up by positive tests, although authorities also warned about seasonal air pollution.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced the changes on Monday, which included easing the threshold for being designated positive for COVID-19 from PCR tests and reducing to seven days from 14 days the period for which a person is deemed a close contact.

The changes, which take effect immediately and apply retrospectively, “have been developed in order to further adapt to the reality of the current environment and support the Games participants”, the IOC said in a statement.

The slight relaxing of rules for Games participants comes despite China’s scramble to contain local flare-ups of COVID-19, including in Beijing, with four more Chinese provinces finding infections linked to the Beijing cluster amid the Lunar New Year travel season.

Organizers also began reporting data on positive COVID-19 tests among Games-related personnel, with 177 confirmed cases found among 3,115 international arrivals from Jan. 4 to Jan. 23, just one of which was among an athlete or support staffer, according to Beijing 2022 data released Sunday and Monday.

China’s strict COVID-19 protocols have led some team officials to express fear of athletes, including those who have recovered from coronavirus, being blocked from participating.

The changes mean that now only participants whose PCR results show a Cycle Threshold (CT) of less than 35 will be considered positive. Previously, the more sensitive CT of 40 was the threshold for designating those positive, the Games’ medical chief, Brian McCloskey, said on Sunday.

The Games are set to take place from Feb. 4 to Feb. 20 inside a “closed loop” bubble separating all personnel from the public amid what is effectively a zero-tolerance COVID-19 policy in China that has led it to all but shut its border to international arrivals.

Final preparations are taking place amid the global surge in the highly infectious Omicron coronavirus variant. Organizers said last week that tickets would not be sold to the public.

Smog warning

Meanwhile, the Chinese capital’s notorious smog, which has drastically improved in recent years, emerged as a potential Games irritant on Monday when China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment warned that winter weather was “very unfavorable” for efforts to keep the air clean.

Beijing has been enveloped for days in thick smog, with concentrations of hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 at 205 micrograms per cubic meter on Monday morning. The World Health Organization recommends levels of no more than 5.

Since China won the bid for the Winter Olympics in 2015, authorities have raised vehicle fuel standards, shut polluting firms and cut coal consumption in a bid to make the Games “green.”

Authorities will take action against polluters in Beijing and neighboring Hebei province if there are warnings of heavy pollution during the Olympics to ensure that they will be held in a “good environment”, environment ministry spokesman Liu Youbin said on Monday.

In addition to COVID-19 and pollution, preparations for the Games have been clouded by a diplomatic boycott by countries including the United States over China’s human rights record. China says that betrays Olympic principles and denies rights abuses.

Batalla entre Apple y Epic Games, empresa creadora de Fortnite, entra en un nuevo capítulo - Deutsche Welle

El gigante tecnológico Apple fue acusado de prácticas monopolistas por la empresa Epic Games, creadora del popular Fortnite. El juicio comienza este lunes.

Deutsche Welle

03.05.2021

Los abogados del creador de «Fortnite» Epic Games y Apple Inc presentarán argumentos de apertura el lunes en un juicio antimonopolio cuyo resultado final podría afectar el rápido crecimiento del negocio de la App Store de Apple.

La demanda, que Epic presentó el año pasado en el Tribunal de Distrito de EE. UU. Para el Distrito Norte de California, se centra en dos de las prácticas de Apple que se han convertido en piedras angulares de su negocio: el requisito de Apple de que prácticamente todo el software de terceros para los mil millones de iPhones del mundo sea distribuido a través de su App Store, y el requisito de que los desarrolladores utilicen el sistema de compra dentro de la aplicación de Apple, que cobra comisiones de hasta el 30 por ciento.

Represalia de Apple

Epic rompió las reglas de Apple el año pasado cuando introdujo su propio sistema de pago en la aplicación en «Fornite» para circunnavegar las comisiones de Apple. En respuesta, Apple expulsó a Epic de su App Store.

Epic demandó a Apple, alegando que el fabricante de iPhone está abusando de su poder de desarrolladores de aplicaciones con las reglas de revisión de la App Store y los requisitos de pago que perjudican a la competencia en el mercado de software. Epic también lanzó una agresiva campaña de relaciones públicas para llamar la atención sobre sus acusaciones justo cuando las prácticas de Apple han sido objeto de escrutinio por parte de legisladores y reguladores en los Estados Unidos y en otros lugares.

No hay viaje gratis

Apple ha contrarrestado las acusaciones de Epic argumentando que las reglas de la App Store han hecho que los consumidores se sientan seguros al abrir sus billeteras a desarrolladores desconocidos, ayudando a crear un mercado masivo del que todos los desarrolladores se han beneficiado. Apple argumenta que Epic rompió intencionalmente sus contratos con Apple porque el fabricante del juego quería un viaje gratis en la plataforma del fabricante del iPhone.

Epic no está pidiendo daños monetarios, pero está pidiendo al tribunal que dicte órdenes que pondrían fin a muchas de las prácticas de Apple.

La jueza Yvonne González Rogers presidirá el juicio de tres semanas en una sala de audiencias en Oakland, California. Se espera que el presidente ejecutivo de Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, y el jefe de la App Store de Apple, Phil Schiller, asistan al juicio en su totalidad, y los procedimientos también contarán con el testimonio en persona del presidente ejecutivo de Apple, Tim Cook, y otros altos ejecutivos de ambas firmas.

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