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.

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.

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.”

Senator Hilary Clinton herself urged President George W. bush to boycott the event. In protest against the human rights violations in China and especially Tibet, Clinton publicly asked Bush not to attend the festivities.

Just as the police were preparing to deal with the protest that already begun at the Golden Gate Bridge, she had this to say:

“Clinton said Bush had been ‘wrong to downplay human rights in its policy towards China.”

“At this time, and in light of recent events, I believe President Bush should not plan on attending the opening ceremonies in Beijing, absent major changes by the Chinese government,’ she said in a statement released by her campaign. “

The flame was lit using the sun’s rays through a concave mirror and carried by the priestesses to the stadium where the Olympic Games were first born in 776 B.C.

The role of the high priestess was played by Greek actress Maria Nafpliotou.

A white dove was released during the ritual symbolizing peace and harmony.

Actress Maria Nafpliotou, handed an olive branch to the first Olympic relay torchbearer, Alexandros Nikolaidis, Greece’s Olympic silver medalist in taekwando.

Unfortunately, the flame-lighting ceremony was disrupted by Tibetan protesters. A demonstrator carrying a black flag with five interlocked handcuffs used to symbolize the five Olympics rings ran behind Liu Qi, the president of Beijing’s Olympics Organizing Committee just as he was speaking about the “hopes and dreams of the people of China”.

The Olympic flame is supposed to travel through the Himalayas and through the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, which will certainly lead to more similar protests in the future.

Waving Tibetan flags and banners reading “China out of Tibet Now!” and dragging a Chinese flag along the ground, marchers chanted anti-Chinese slogans accusing Beijing of genocide in the Himalayan region.

“We are here to commemorate the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan national uprising and also to ask people to boycott the Olympics,” said Tsering Palden, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, one of the groups at Monday’s march.

“China is using the Olympic Games to legitimize their illegal occupation of Tibet,” he added. The marchers later congregated at a square near UN headquarters, urging the world body to hear their demands for independence.

Organizers claimed a turnout of more than 1,000 people.

The protest came as marchers in India began a trek to Tibet and as the Tibetans’ spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, attacked China’s human rights record, accusing it of “unimaginable and gross violations” in his Himalayan homeland.

The Dalai Lama said August’s Beijing Olympics presented the international community with a golden opportunity to reprimand China — which has ruled Tibet since 1951 — over its treatment of Tibetans.

In the 30-second video, Chan urges audiences to visit Hong Kong to watch the event and introduces various local tourist sites, Mayee Tang, a spokeswoman for the Hong Kong Tourism Board, which is producing the video, said.

Chan recorded the dialogue in both English and Mandarin, and the video was to be aired in mainland China and foreign markets, Tang said.

Photos posted on Chan’s official Web site show the action star sitting on a horse, resplendent in a black helmet, black suit jacket, white tie and black boots.

Chan’s video highlights efforts to promote one of the Olympics’ more low-profile events. A rash of equine diseases and substandard quarantine procedures in China forced Beijing to hand the equestrian events to Hong Kong, which has a well-established racing circuit but few facilities for dressage and show-jumping events.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club, which controls horse racing in the former British colony, has spent about US$100mil on upgrading existing venues and building new ones for the Olympic equestrian competition, which will take place on Aug 9 and 20.

In other promotional efforts for the Beijing Olympics, Chan also recorded the event’s official one-year countdown song, “We Are Ready.”