With little more than a month to go until the Games, a different challenge is cropping up: A forest of blue-green algae is choking the coastal waters, suffocating beaches and lying in thick layers along sailing routes.

Tibet reopened to tourists Wednesday, three months after the Chinese government banned visits by foreigners after violent anti-government riots and protests. Officials from the Tibetan Tourism Bureau say the first group of foreign tourists, from Sweden, arrived at the Lhasa airport on Wednesday morning. China threw a curtain around Tibet and areas in nearby provinces with sizable Tibetan populations after the March violence, citing the safety of foreign tourists and journalists.

A copy of "Beijing Daily" that's already been read can produce four pencils, one ton of waste newspapers can produce 20,000 pencils. A privately owned science and technology company in Daxing District is successfully using waste newspapers to make pencils, producing altogether 33,000,000 paper-made pencils last year, saving the equivalent of 1500 cubic metres of wood.

Reporter-blogger ProState in Flames writes today of Deputy Director General of China's National Copyright Administration Xu Chao's recent statement that the filming of Olympic events for the purpose of blogging has been banned and will be considered copyright violation.

Asks the second commenter on the post: “May I know to whom it is that copyright for the Olympics belongs?”

Taidong district in Qingdao has gotten an Olympic-size makeover, with drab old buildings being overhauled Crayola-style.