Beijing

BEIJING - Filthy air. Undrinkable water. Natives hacking wads of phlegm on the sidewalks. Roads crammed with incessantly honking cabbies who can't speak English and refuse to run their air conditioners on blistering summer days. Sure sounds like a place to hold an Olympics. For a moment, set aside the human rights problems in the world's most populated nation. Forget about the Tibetan Buddhists and Chinese Catholics, both of whom have seen the Communist regime take over their religions and install leaders of their own. Ignore the fact that 150 million people live on the streets because, having been born in the countryside and being thus prohibited from ever living in the cities, they've flocked there anyway, undocumented, to find work.

BEIJING - A top Taiwanese politician arrived in China yesterday for a six-day visit amid hope for warmer relations between the longtime foes. The head of the island's ruling party will meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao during a groundbreaking visit that follows the May 20 inauguration of a new Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, who is eager to fulfill a campaign pledge of improving ties. For China, the visit provides an opportunity ahead of the Olympic Games in August to project itself as a superpower committed to world peace.

BEIJING -- Not too long ago, China's Communist rulers would have sponsored a meeting on world socialism. Now it's world Confucianism that has received their blessing.More than 300 Confucianists, including 100 from outside China, gathered in Beijing yesterday to establish the International Confucian Association. Their goal: to make the world appreciate the current value of the Chinese philosopher and statesman, born 2,545 years ago.Fittingly, the association designated Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, as honorary chairman.

BEIJING -- China's leaders argue interminably over how best to provide their people with a "comparatively well-off" life, the nation's official goal for the end of this decade.But most Beijingers already know that real contentment, at least during the summer months, amounts to large slices of the sweet, wet flesh of that overgrown cucumber known as the watermelon.On average, every man, woman and child in Beijing annually eats about 110 pounds of watermelon -- the vast majority of which is devoured from May to September.

BEIJING -- In another sign of China's deteriorating law and order, a soldier opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle on a crowded Beijing street this morning, killing a diplomat and his son, and wounding five others.The soldier, who witnesses say was driving a jeep toward Tiananmen Square, was cut off by police on the city's second ring road near the diplomatic district about 8:30 a.m. Beijing time. He jumped out of his car and started shooting indiscriminately, witnesses said.A spokesman from the Iranian Embassy said Yousef Mohammadi Pishknari, a political attache, and his son, Ahmad, were killed in the hail of bullets.

BEIJING -- This capital city of more than 11 million inhabitants is running short of water. It releases most of its household and industrial wastewater untreated. In the winter, concentrations of hazardous chemicals and particles in its air are at times among the highest in the world.Then, in the spring, comes the yellow dragon -- suffocating, wind-borne clouds of fine yellow dust from the Gobi desert more than 200 miles away.Because of a decade-long campaign to plant trees in Beijing -- part of a massive effort to build a 4,000-mile-long "green great wall" of trees across all North China -- the number of days that the capital is positively choked by dust has been fewer in recent years, down from about 30 such days annually in the 1970s to only about 12 a year now.But each spring, when northwest winds take aloft the newly thawed topsoil of the Mongolian plateau, the resultant clouds of sand can still enshroud the city completely.

It started out as a trickle six months ago when an organization called Human Rights Watch gasped at how ludicrous it was that Beijing, China, was even being considered by the International Olympic Committee to host the Summer Games in the year 2000.Beijing, good grief! That's the place where they're still torturing people, thumb screws and shackle boards, stuff right out of a Vincent Price movie.Of all the cities in the world, why this monument to oppression, suppression and those shocking pictures of slaughter at Tiananmen Square just a few years back?

BEIJING -- Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten leaves here today the same as he arrived three days ago: at loggerheads with Chinese officials over his proposals for expanding democracy in the British colony prior to its 1997 takeover by China.After almost 12 hours of meetings with Chinese officials, Mr. Patten last night reported no progress in selling them on his plans to increase the number of elected members of Hong Kong's legislature in the colony's 1995 elections, its last before Chinese rule.

BEIJING -- China, in a move perceived as an attempt to influence renewal of its favorable trade status with the United States, has released from prison the founder of its first independent trade union in four decades, the international human rights group Asia Watch said yesterday.Han Dongfang, 27, a railway worker who founded the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation during the 1989 pro-democracy protests, was released Sunday after 22 months in jail without a trial, the New York-based human rights organization reported.

The Sun's Olympic correspondents, Rick Maese and Kevin Van Valkenburg, are blogging to each other at baltimoresun.com/olympicsblog . An excerpt: Where's Phelps' dad? To Kevin, et al. Subject: Watching from afar Fair or not, nosy or simply curious, I think people back in the United States are watching Michael Phelps nightly on NBC and making note of the many shots they see of Debbie Phelps cheering from the stands. The omission is probably striking to some: We see Michael's mom, but what about dad?