Sports: Olympics 2008: Beijing claims complete bill of health for Games, leaves out mention of pollution

UPI via Earthtimes.com reports " 'Positive' review to Beijing Olympics" (Apr19,2k7).

BEIJING, April 19 Beijing Olympic officials received a positive review from an International Olympic Committee group checking preparations ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

The IOC Coordination Commission on Thursday wrapped up three days of meetings and site visits in Beijing to check on how Chinese officials are getting ready for the 2008 Summer Games. The commission has two other Beijing visits planned prior to the Aug. 8-24, 2008, games.

Commission members visited several sites, including the National Stadium and the Olympic Village. The overall impression was positive, the IOC said in a release.

"The venues that we have just seen will be truly magnificent for the athletes to compete and live in and for the media to live and work in at games time," said commission Chairman Hein Verbruggen. "Personally, I found the visit to the National Stadium a particularly emotional experience because I can now see that the opening ceremony is nearly upon us and also just how far we have come together over these past six years." Beijing Olympic officials have scheduled 26 test events this year to help fine-tune preparations, the IOC said. Copyright 2007 by UPI

Sports > Olympic Games, by Sportikos

The particularly roseate report above is not just propaganda, it is directly tied to advertizing for airfares and Beijing Olympics packages. It's propaganda that is at the same time misrepresenting an aesthetics-sports product to make money by deleting the fact that the Beijing Olympics 2008 is a hazard to your helath.

I suspect that Earthtimes.com is a front for the Chinese Communist Party's Olympics promotion, or that the UPI story has been clipped to remove the UPI writer's coverage of the IOC's distinct unease about pollution and gridlock, or that UPI has become part of the corruption of the news. Or, all three of the foregoing simultaneously. Because, just as particularly, the cited report makes no mention of the IOC's concerns about air traffic, street traffic congestion, and the dangerously polluted air of Beijing.

More info:

Sooty air and traffic congestion in Beijing concern IOC inspectors (Apr19,2k7). The foregoing is a Canada.com page; the same story is available on MSNBC; both versions derive from an Associated Press story by Steven Wade.

IOC Commission Concerned About Beijing 2008 Pollution (Apr19,2k7, GamesBids.com)

Boycott Olympics 2008. There's no uptodate material on the 2008 Olympics, but only critical material on the big subject of China's Communist repression of human r+ts, including freedom of religion. The Boycotters note the repression of Tibetans and other Buddhists, and of the Falun Gong. They do not mention the repression of China's largest religion, Christianity. I think the Boycotters are a Falun Gong front with themselves an anti-Christian bias. Sad thing, because carrying such a bias to the point where it itself becomes repressive of info about the repression of a wide religious freedom that also embraces all Christians in China, such a selectivity is a poor strategy, even a stupid one. It is stupid to carry such a bias into reporting human-r+ts news of repressions in China, because the best constituency for the boycott project hypothetically would be North American evangelical Christians who cheer on the unregistered Protestant house-church movement, and North American conservative Catholics who cheer on the underground Roman Catholic Church aligned in China with the Papacy in defiance of the Communist govt and its registered churches. I'm not joining a Boycott Olympics 2008 movement so unwise and so biased itself, to the point of erasure of other Chinese religions besides Falun Gong and Buddhism--tho these too have indeed experienced the same horrors as unregistered-church Christians. The Boycotters should get their own act together if they want to unite all people of conscience. Otherwise, let the Games begin!