Beijing - A South Korean cameraman has managed to provide the first glimpse of what people can expect to see at the Olympic Opening Ceremony on August 8 in Beijing.

The man smuggled a camera past the tight security controls at the National Stadium before filming a costume rehearsal.

The footage shows the unrolling of a huge script, hundreds of dancers, drums, Kung Fu and traditional Chinese figures floating through the air.

Images of swimming whales were projected on to the stadium roof while a representation of the Earth was positioned in the centre of the arena.

Chinese Olympic organizers expressed disappointment Thursday that that the Seoul Broadcasting System had decided to broadcast the footage.

Beijing - Chinese Olympic officials have promised the 2008 Games will be "clean" with a radical new procedure being used to prevent doping, Wu Moutian, deputy director of the Chinese Anti-doping Agency, said on Thursday.

The largest Olympic doping testing station ever will be set up in the Olympic Village with the central laboratory able to test for 200 internationally forbidden substances.

"Every one positive will be announced," said Wu.

Each case detected will be penalised, promised Chen Zhiyu, doping official for the Beijing Organising Committee.

Beijing - China plans to take more vehicles off the roads and suspend operations in more than 200 factories if air quality does not improve, the government announced Thursday, as polluted air and grey skies continued to plague Beijing one week before the start of the 2008 Olympic Games.

If the air quality forecast is "extremely unfavourable" 48 hours in advance, authorities are to consider requesting Beijing, the neighboring Tianjin municipality as well as Hebei province to carry out emergency measures, the website of the Ministry of Environmental Protection said.

It was unclear whether monitoring would begin right away or 48 hours before the games are scheduled to begin on August 8.

Beijing - Parts of south-eastern China were expecting more than 200 millimetres of rain Tuesday after Typhoon Fung Wong hit land in Fujian province.

The eye of the typhoon landed late Monday near Donghan town, packing winds of up to 119 kilometres per hour, provincial meteorologists said.

The typhoon, which had earlier caused deaths in the Philippines and Taiwan, was forecast to weaken into a tropical storm as it moves inland Tuesday and Wednesday in China, but several provinces have been put on alert for possible flash floods and landslides.

Fujian and neighbouring Zhejiang province evacuated more than 500,000 people from vulnerable areas Monday and called back to port about 80,000 fishing boats.

Beijing - An international human rights group on Monday condemned China's detention of a housing activist who was due to be released over the weekend, saying it was the latest attempt by Beijing to assert control during the Olympics.

Ye Guozhu, 53, was supposed to be released on Saturday after completing his four-year prison sentence for protesting against the Beijing government's forced eviction of his family in 2003 to make way for Olympic-related construction.

Ye's family was informed by Beijing's Chaobai Prison on Thursday to not bother going to the prison to pick him up as he had been taken away by the Xuanwu branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau.