But here are some words, anyway:
With less than six weeks before it plays host to the Olympic sailing regatta, the city of Qingdao has mobilized thousands of people and an armada of small boats to clean up an algae bloom that is choking large stretches of the coastline and threatening to impede the Olympic competition.
… Photographs in the Chinese media showed rickety wooden boats overflowing with green mounds of algae collected from the sea. One photo showed a young boy crouched on a beach beside piles of the leafy glop as a dump truck carried off a large load of algae. State media reported that 100,000 tons of the algae had already been taken out of the water. Much of it was being transported to farms as feed for pigs and other animals, according to news reports.
The Chinese state media, doing what state media do, is trying to blame this on anything but the obvious suspect, i.e. the ginormous amount of agricultural pollution that washes into the waters around China. They’re also trying to blame global warming. They’ll blame the Dalai Lama or Falun Gong before long. The Beijing Olympics already are shaping up to be a fiasco, and if things go much worse, you can bet that the Chi-Comms are going to win a post-Olympic gold medal in the marathon political purge competition.