CHINA:After weeks of international criticism sparked by the decision of Steven Spielberg to quit as artistic director, Beijing Olympic organisers returned their focus to ensuring a "safe and harmonious security environment" for the games.
Authorities have launched a 39-day campaign to keep unregistered migrant workers off the streets. Thousands of police from the Public Security Bureau will check ID cards and addresses of migrant workers in the Chinese capital, according to the Beijing News.
A quarter of Beijing's 16 million people are migrant workers, many of them working as builders on the Olympic venues or infrastructure projects.
There are occasional reports circulating that city officials planned to kick out a million migrant workers before the games in August, which the organisers have denied, although efforts to remove beggars from the streets have been cranked up and there are certainly fewer DVD sellers and unregistered taxi drivers around the city.
In a bid to deal with the pollution that threatens some of the endurance events at the games and which is providing the biggest organisational threat, authorities have ordered Beijing and five surrounding provinces to cut industrial pollution for two months from late July to ensure clean air for the Olympics.
The ruling will affect the capital, neighbouring municipality Tianjin and Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Shandong provinces, an official of the environmental agency said.
Beijing's worst polluter, Capital Steel, will move its plant out of the city by 2010 and has already committed to cutting back its activities for the games.
Security officials have introduced new measures to stop terror attacks at Beijing's airport, including special X-ray equipment and "anti-riot robots".
A senior security expert warned this week that Uighur separatists in the western region of Xinjiang were plotting attacks on the games. There are eight million, mostly Muslim, Uighurs in Xinjiang, and Beijing says an extremist separatist element has been involved in attacks on Chinese targets in the province.
Meanwhile, there was some harmony in the air as Ching Cheong, the Hong Kong reporter recently freed after 2½ years in a Chinese jail on spying charges, restated his innocence and called for an Olympics amnesty to foster "social harmony".