2008 Beijing Summer Olympics

Everybody wants to make a good impression for important guests, but it’s almost like an episode of “Extreme Makeover” here these days.

With a price tag of $43 billion, the Summer Games that will open Aug. 8 in Beijing are the most expensive in Olympic history. The transformation, however, goes far beyond the eye-popping architecture. The Chinese government also has been trying to create a new, improved population to go along with its spiffed-up capital city.

Migrant workers, beggars and many masseuses and fortune tellers have been sent packing for the Olympic season along with others deemed undesirable by the government.

Since May, restaurants have been required to have no-smoking sections, and this month Beijing’s food safety administration ordered restaurants to remove dog meat from their menus lest it offend Western sensibilities.

DVD shops have pulled their stocks of pirated Hollywood films. Western-style toilets have replaced squat models in many locations. And a group calling itself the Capital Committee to Promote Culture and Ideological Progress recently distributed 50,000 packages of tissues along with a warning that those caught spitting in public were subject to a $7 fine.

Almost all Olympics have been a springboard for host cities to reinvent themselves. Barcelona, Spain, redeveloped its waterfront for the 1992 Games. Athens, site of the most recent Summer Games, built a new airport, highway and mass-transit system. Like Beijing, Seoul used the 1988 Olympics as a coming-out party and took the same types of steps toward Westernizing.

But everything taking place in Beijing is, like China itself, outsized.

Beijing ordered up 40 million pots of flowers. Some varieties were specially bred for the Olympics. To improve air quality, officials created a forest twice the size of New York’s Central Park next to the Olympic stadiums. Factories hundreds of miles away have been closed.

Bulgarian Olympic Committee (BOC) has decided to pull out Bulgaria’s national weightlifting team from the upcoming summer Olympics in Beijing on August 8-24.

The news came after an ad hoc session of BOC, held on June 30 2008, BOC’s head Stefka Kostadinova (no relation) said in a statement on BOC’s webiste.

The entire team of eleven top Bulgarian weightlifters, three females and eight males, tested positive on June 8-9 during a training session of Bulgaria’s national weightlifting team in Assenovgrad, southern Bulgaria.

The results from the second samples of the athletes will be announced on July 22-23, but “in my professional career as an athlete I have never heard of a case when the second sample result differ from the first one,” Kostadinova said.

Although both the athletes and their coaches expressed their astonishment at the positive test, if the second sample result proves positive, BOC might impose a two-year ban on the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation, end its funding and impose sanctions on coaches and officials, Kostadinova said.

The federation has received about five million leva in funding over the last four years, Kostadinova said.

Although initially Kostadinova said that she hoped that Bulgaria could sent replacements to the Olympics, BOC decided on July 1 not to field a weightlifting team in Beijing.

An ancient Japanese Buddhist temple, which cancelled its role in the protest-marred Olympic torch relay, has been vandalised with white spray paint, police said Sunday.

The Zenkoji Temple in Nagano, the host city of the 1998 Winter Olympics, on Friday withdrew from plans to be the start point for the Japanese leg of the relay on April 26 because of China’s crackdown in Tibet.

The global tour of the torch for August’s Beijing Olympics has been dogged by protests since it was lit in Greece last month.

Six white spray paint graffiti patterns were found on pillars and sliding doors at the main sanctuary of the 1,400-year-old temple early Sunday, a spokesman for the Nagano prefectural police said.

“We have yet to ascertain if the act was related to the torch relay. It could possibly be a malicious practical joke,” he told AFP by telephone.

The wooden sanctuary, designated as a national treasure by the government, is the main feature of the temple.

Police were investigating on suspicion of vandalism and violation of a law for protection of cultural assets, the police spokesman said.

“We really deplore what has happened. We are angry at the damage done to the cultural asset,” Shinsho Wakaomi, the temple’s director of general affairs, told the public broadcaster NHK.

“We will step up our guard in the run-up to the torch relay.”