CHINA:WITH A week to go until the Olympic flame is lit in Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium, China has lifted restrictions on internet access, as President Hu Jintao says the Olympics will be a stepping stone to more reform.
As skies cleared above the Chinese capital, at least temporarily banishing fears of a "Smog Olympics", China's Communist leadership has been dealing with a lot of pressure in the closing stages of its preparation for the games over what is seen as its failure to meet its pledges to improve its rights record and lift internet censorship for the Olympics.
There has also been criticism of the country's policies in Darfur and Tibet.
Mr Hu said his country would stand by pledges made when it was awarded the Olympics in July 2001. The Chinese government and the Chinese people have been working in real earnest to honour the commitments made to the international community, he said.
It's been a back-and-forth week on internet access.
International Olympic Committee (IOC) press chief Kevan Gosper said earlier this week that some IOC officials had made a deal to let China block sensitive websites to the media, even though free access to the internet had been guaranteed.
Angry journalists complained that they had slower bandwidth than in Sydney in 2000.
Then, yesterday, the Beijing organisers appeared to backtrack, saying access would be unrestricted. It's not quite unrestricted, and the lifting of the ban only applies in Beijing, it seems.
By yesterday evening the Amnesty International website could be accessed, as could Human Rights Watch, Radio Free Asia, Reporters Without Borders and the Mandarin service of the BBC, but the search term "Falun Gong" was blocked, as were sites linked to Chinese dissidents, the Tibetan government-in-exile and sites with information on the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
China's Foreign Correspondents' Club welcomed the partial lifting of restrictions on several previously blocked websites in Olympic media areas, but said it remained concerned that access was inconsistent and many internet sites remained off limits.
Amnesty International's Irish section repeated its call on the Government to raise its voice publicly for human rights in China and in support of individual Chinese human rights activists.
Mr Hu urged the international media not to politicise an Olympics that many hadve hoped would lead the country of 1.3 billion people on a path toward greater political reform to match years of growth that hasve made it the world's fourth-largest economy.
"I don't think that politicising the Olympic Games will do anything good to addressing any of the issues," Mr Hu said.