This from Beijing: The Village Voice's Runnin' Scared blog is reporting via Boing Boing that Chinese authorities have detained a Brooklyn artist, James Powderly, along with five other Americans. The report says that Mr. Powderly was part of a group that used LED lights to spell out "Free Tibet" near the Olympics site. According to Mr. Powderly's bio on the Web site for Robot Clothes, an art and commercial research and development partnership of which he is a member, he is "a maverick hobbyist dabbling at the fringes of robotics, chemistry, writing, pyrotechnics, graffiti and art," and apparently some of his work can be found on the surface of Mars.

UPDATE: Reuters has a full report. More from Runnin' Scared after the jump.

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Can you guess which ragingly hot chest belongs to which swimmer? It sounds like a game you might play on Queerty or something, but you can just do it on, you know, NBC's Olympics Web site.

Stare at the chest, think of the swimmer, click a button, and there's the face. It's like online shopping.

Apparently NBC isn't above link-baiting.

"Visitors to the Olympics," Charles McGrath writes in today's New York Times, "...can be forgiven for thinking that China is a land of unnatural youthfulness where nobody is older than 30.....Older Chinese, and there are plenty in Beijing, are mostly out of sight."

Are they? As of today, the old people seemed to be exactly where they've been all month: sitting in twos or threes every 50 yards or so along every roadside, all over the city, wearing white Yanjing Beer polo shirts and red armbands. Or manning the sidewalk volunteer information booths in the neighborhoods.

But all McGrath sees is an army of college students, smiling at him in their Olympic-volunteer polo shirts.  read more »

Live From Beijing: The Media Games!

Charles McGrath and the Mystery of the Missing Elderly

It's the most fashionable Olympics ever! The fashion industry--usually more well known for lack of nutrition than for athleticism--is now angling for a piece of the Beijing Games. Ralph Lauren outfitted the entire U.S. team for both the opening and closing ceremonies; Lucy Liu posed for an "Olympics"-themed spread in Harper's Bazaar in which she boxed, shot arrows, and weight-lifted handbags in evening gowns; on this week's episode of Project Runway, contestants designed outfits for the American team to wear during the opening ceremonies. And today, WWD reported that Armani will "dress" the blond South African swimmer and Charlize Theron dopplegänger Charlene Wittstock, main squeeze of Prince Albert of Monaco, for various Olympic-related events (not including her, you know, actual Olympic events).  read more »

Joe Kahn, the Times’ deputy foreign editor, is the paper’s go-to China-expert.

He’s won a Pulitzer for his work in China, and has been described as the paper’s most invaluable resource for explaining Beijing and China to the paper’s sports desk.

He’ll be on the Charlie Rose show tomorrow night to explain China to Channel 13 viewers, but before you tune into that, here’s what he had to say to us while he spoke to him for our cover story this week:

China’s surprisingly rough year:

“I think many of us who have spent time in China tended to discount predictions made with whether or not China could handle these games successfully…The international media already has a pretty big presence, and even with an increase in quantity, there wouldn’t be a lack of sophistication with understanding China—it’s not like they’re letting in press for the first time as they were with Nixon’s visit to China.

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Welcome to the Olympics! If you're one of the 20,000+ journalists covering the games, you've probably arrived. But boy, it hasn't been easy getting there. Over the past week, The Observer spoke to reporters and editors about their headaches getting credentials in Beijing.

"One day, they’ll e-mail us and ask for certain information and the next day, after we raised a question as to why, then it changes," said Tom Jolly, The New York Times sports editor. "This is mostly silly stuff—like requests for photos for credentials because there was a blue background instead of a white background. That literally happened."

"I think the biggest problem is set from the language barrier," said Fran Turkowitz, the assistant to the Times' sports department who's in charge of credentialing.  read more »

At lunchtime on July 29, the New York Times masthead invited a group of reporters and editors up to a conference room in the paper’s executive hall on the 16th floor to eat roast beef and turkey sandwiches and talk about the paper’s massive investment in the Olympic Games.

How, they wanted to know, could The Times best use the 32 credentialed reporters and editors that would cover the Olympics in China?

George Vecsey, the paper’s longtime sports columnist, answered by not talking about sports at all.

He told the group the real story in Beijing over the coming three weeks was not about athletes, but about China, its geopolitical aspirations and how they were staked on the games.  read more »

BEIJING—The last night of the old, normal life, July 19, was mild and beautiful. The air was clear, even though the Olympic rules would not take effect till the next day: the driving ban on half the city’s three million private cars, alternating daily between odd- and even-numbered license plates; the halt to construction digging and cement pouring. Tomorrow, by plan, the Olympic city would be in place.

I had spent the morning and early afternoon 80-some miles away in Tianjin—the Newark to Beijing’s New York. I had in mind that I would return on the brand-new bullet train, but the bullet train isn’t open to customers yet.  read more »

BEIJING -- When an employee of Rupert Murdoch begins badgering someone about cozying up to the Chinese regime, it's clear that the People's Republic is having a public-relations crisis.

"Spielberg said, 'No, I'm not going to go,'" a reporter said, thrusting a Fox News microphone at British filmmaker Daryl Goodrich on Feb. 23.

Eleven days earlier, Steven Spielberg had publicly announced he was quitting as an artistic consultant to the Beijing Olympics. So why, the Fox man demanded, had Goodrich said yes?  read more »