Why so many fakes at The Opening of Beijing 2008 Olympics?

And so, all the nasty little secrets from the Beijing 2008 Olympics starts surfacing.

First at the Beijing Olympics Opening, there were the fake CGI fireworks of the Bird’s Nest.

Then they had a fake little girl lip-synching a national song in one of the performances. I pity the little girl who was doing the real singing, being told she had a beautiful voice, but she doesn’t have the looks.

Fine, it was a terrific show, who cares if it is a fake even Luciano Pavarotti faked his singing at Turin Winter Olympics 2006. But still it was his own voice!

Me the viewer was being misled that it was a live show with real people doing real stuff!
Didn’t the career of one pop band in the 1980s sank when they lip-synched. I felt short-changed!

I am shocked even more so of the reply from the guy who admitted about it at a television interview. The poor chap can kiss goodbye his music career in China and probably banished forever back to France.

“The reason why little Yang (real girl singing) was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image, we were thinking about what was best for the nation,” Chen said in an interview that appeared briefly on the news website Sina.com before it was apparently wiped from the Internet in China.
- Chen Qigang, the general music designer of the ceremony

Tsk tsk Beijing, what else is there you are not telling us?

Here’s the news from AP

Olympic child singing star revealed as fake

AFP – Wednesday, August 13

BEIJING (AFP) – - The little girl who starred at the Olympic opening ceremony was miming and only put on stage because the real singer was not considered attractive enough, the show’s musical director has revealed.

Pigtailed Lin Miaoke was selected to appear because of her cute appearance and did not sing a note, Chen Qigang, the general music designer of the ceremony, said in an interview with a state broadcaster aired Tuesday.

Photographs of Lin in a bright red party dress were published in newspapers and websites all over the world and the official China Daily hailed her as a rising star on Tuesday.

But Chen said the girl whose voice was actually heard by the 91,000 capacity crowd at the Olympic stadium during the spectacular ceremony was in fact seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, who has a chubby face and uneven teeth.

“The reason why little Yang was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image, we were thinking about what was best for the nation,” Chen said in an interview that appeared briefly on the news website Sina.com before it was apparently wiped from the Internet in China.

Lin was seen to perform the patriotic song “Ode to the Motherland” as China’s national flag was carried into the stadium, a key moment in the three hour ceremony.

“The reason was for the national interest. The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feelings, and expression,” said Chen, a renowned contemporary composer and French citizen.

“Lin Miaoke is excellent in those aspects. But in terms of voice, Yang Peiyi is perfect, each member of our team agreed,” he said.

He said the final decision to stage the event with Lin lip-synching to another girl’s voice was taken after a senior member of China’s ruling Communist Party politburo attended a rehearsal.

“He told us there was a problem that we needed to fix it, so we did,” he said, without disclosing further details of the order.

The Beijing Olympic organising committee confirmed the episode with spokesman Sun Weide saying the decision was taken in the interests of providing the best possible show.

“A number of girls were on the short list for the show and Lin was the best actress while Yang had the best voice,” he said. “So at the end of the day they decided to have both.”

The ceremony directed by China’s Oscar-nominated filmmaker Zhang Yimou and featuring more than 15,000 performers won high praise in China and overseas for its breadth, scope and flawless execution.

However criticism began to build after it emerged that another part of the opening ceremony had been faked.

Supposedly live pictures of fireworks depicting footprints moving from central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to the Olympic stadium in the north of the capital were actually partly computer-generated or pre-recorded for TV, organisers have admitted.

Wang Wei, vice president of the organising committee, Tuesday insisted the fireworks had actually exploded on the night and that most of the television images used were genuine.

“However, because of the poor visibility of the night some previously recorded foots may have been used,” he said.

Xiao Qiang, the director of the China Internet project at the University of California at Berkeley and former dissident, said the two incidents illustrated the political nature of the Games for China.

“I do not think the Chinese state realises how unethical this is, they don’t understand what kind of values they are reflecting,” he said.

Earlier this year Olympic organisers preoccupied with the right image for the country were criticised for insisting that only tall, slim, young and attractive women could serve as medal award ceremony hostesses.

Copyright AFP.com 2008
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From Telegraph Uk
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 8:29PM BST 12 Aug 2008

Beijing Olympics: Faking scandal over girl who ’sang’ in opening ceremony

Chinese officials have admitted deceiving the public over another highlight of the Olympic opening ceremony: the picture-perfect schoolgirl who sang as the Chinese flag entered the stadium was performing to another girl’s voice.

The girl in the red dress with the pigtails, called Lin Miaoke, 9, and from a Beijing primary school, has become a national sensation since Friday night, giving interviews to all the most popular newspapers.

But the show’s musical designer felt forced to set the record straight. He gave an interview to Beijing radio saying the real singer was a seven-year-old girl who had won a gruelling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called “Hymn to the Motherland”.

At the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching a rehearsal pronounced that the winner, a girl called Yang Peiyi, might have a perfect voice but was unsuited to the lead role because of her buck teeth.

So, on the night, while a pre-recording of Yang Peiyi singing was played, Lin Miaoke, who has already featured in television advertisements, was seen but not heard.

“This was a last-minute question, a choice we had to make,” the ceremony’s musical designer, Chen Qigang, said. “Our rehearsals had already been vetted several times – they were all very strict. When we had the dress rehearsals, there were spectators from various divisions, including above all a member of the politburo who gave us his verdict: we had to make the swap.”

Mr Chen’s interview gave an extraordinary insight into the control exercised over the ceremony by the Games’ political overseers, all to ensure the country was seen at its best.

Officials have already admitted that the pictures of giant firework footprints which marched across Beijing towards the stadium on Friday night were prerecorded, digitally enhanced and inserted into footage beamed across the world.

Mr Chen said the initial hopefuls to sing the anthem had been reduced to ten, and one, a ten-year-old, had originally been chosen for the quality of her voice. But she, too, had fallen by the wayside because she was not “cute” enough.

“We used her to sing in all the rehearsals,” Mr Chen said. “But in the end the director thought her image was not the most appropriate, because she was a little too old. Regrettably, we had to let her go.”

At that point Yang Peiyi stepped up to the plate.

“The main consideration was the national interest,” he said. “The child on the screen should be flawless in image, in her internal feelings, and in her expression. In the matter of her voice, Yang Peiyi was flawless, in the unanimous opinion of all the members of the team.”

That was until attention turned to Yang Peiyi’s teeth. Nevertheless, Mr Chen thought the end result a perfect compromise.

“We have a responsibility to face the audience of the whole country, and to be open with this explanation,” he said. “We should all understand it like this: it is a question of the national interest. It is a question of the image of our national music, our national culture.

“Especially at the entrance of our national flag, this is an extremely important, an extremely serious matter.

“So we made the choice. I think it is fair to both Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi – after all, we have a perfect voice, a perfect image and a perfect show, in our team’s view, all together.”

One question remains: why was Lin Miaoke allowed to give interviews in which she lapped up the praise for her singing. Mr Chen said she might not have known that the words she was singing could not be heard. She had, in fact, only known she was going to perform at all 15 minutes beforehand.

Yang Peiyi is said to have reacted well to the disappointment. “I am proud to have been chosen to sing at all,” she is reported to have said.

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2008

National Geographic Magazine Indonesia Sidoarjo Mud Disaster

I found this article after visiting East Java, Indonesia in May 2008. Had visited the area and saw the disaster area, still devastated and in ruins even after 2 years. Took some photos of the area which you can view here.

Published: National Geographic Magazine January 2008 The Unstoppable Mud : Drowning in Mud
An unnatural disaster erupts with no end in sight.
By Andrew Marshall

By dawn, the trickle that began to seep into the neighborhood during the night had become a scalding torrent. Mud surged into the modest house belonging to Sumitro, who manages a store in the Porong District of East Java. As it smothered furniture and filled rooms, Sumitro and Indayani, his wife, grabbed the kids and fled. “I knew the mud couldn’t be stopped,” he says. “My house was doomed.”

Months later, a plume of steam drifting above a landscape of submerged houses marks the source of his woes: a mud volcano—its cause a source of some controversy. Many blame a company drilling for gas; others claim an earthquake was the trigger. Lusi, as Indonesians call the mudflow, is one of the more bizarre expressions of Indonesia’s geologic turmoil. Since May 2006, it has spewed millions of barrels of heated sludge, blanketing an area twice the size of New York City’s Central Park. Villages have disappeared under the mud, 60 feet (18 meters) deep in places, and 10,000 families have been forced from their homes. So far, according to an IMF estimate, the catastrophe has cost Indonesia 3.7 billion dollars—nearly one percent of its GDP—and triggered spasms of blame and denial. This being Indonesia, it has also prompted appeals to the supernatural.

Lusi—a nickname derived by combining the Indonesian word for mud (lumpur) with Sidoarjo, the name of the nearby town—could go on erupting for decades. Meanwhile, trucks and backhoes work relentlessly to contain the damage, fortifying dikes against the 600,000 barrels of mud that continue to surge out each day. Pipes disgorge the sludge into the Porong River; theoretically, rain will wash it to sea—if it doesn’t choke the river and flood nearby Surabaya, a city of 2.5 million.

With the mud came the mystics—Sumatran witch doctors, Balinese Hindu priests, and a celebrity soothsayer, Mama Lauren—claiming they could stop the deluge. Believers tossed goats, geese, and monkeys into the mud to appease the dragon supposedly disturbed by drilling. A wealthy local offered a house to anyone who could halt the mud. First, however, applicants had to prove their powers could stop a tap from dripping. It didn’t happen.

Wary of mystics, weary of mud, Sumitro is short on optimism. “Nothing can stop it,” he says. “Not technology, not the supernatural.”

A dike protected Sumitro’s neighborhood until November 2006, when the mud caused a gas pipeline to explode, killing 13 people. “I thought the end of the world had come,” he recalls.

In a way, it had. The explosion weakened the dike, exposing his neighborhood to the flow. Now, footprints of fleeing residents are baked into the mud of empty streets. Scavengers have stripped homes of roof tiles and wiring. The stink of sulfur hangs in the air. “Nothing left now,” Sumitro says. “Only memories.” The politics surrounding the disaster are as muddy as the landscape. PT Lapindo Brantas, the company that operated the ill-fated well, is partly owned by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, Indonesia’s chief welfare minister. Bakrie, a billionaire, says the well had nothing to do with the catastrophe; he blames it on a powerful earthquake that struck Yogyakarta, 170 miles (270 kilometers) away, two days before the mud flood. He has yet to visit Lusi’s victims. Just as well. Anger pervades a market where thousands of displaced villagers encamp. “If Bakrie comes here,” one man says, slowly drawing his finger across his throat. Still, Bakrie enjoys the backing of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who may run again in 2009 and apparently opts not to alienate a fat-cat cabinet member by demanding his resignation.

The Indonesian government ordered Lapindo to pay more than 400 million dollars in compensation. But the money has been slow in coming; Sumitro, chief negotiator for 800 families, believes the company is stalling.

Not so, says a spokesperson for Lapindo. She explains compensation is delayed because claimants cannot provide adequate proof of home or land ownership, and maintains the company has already spent millions to house and feed victims. Claims will be fully paid within two years, she promises, adding that Lapindo has no legal obligation because the disaster’s cause remains unproven. “We don’t know yet whether this is our fault,” she says.

One study by an international team that included a Lapindo employee supported Bakrie’s claim that the earthquake caused the mess. But Richard Davies of Durham University in England is dismissive. “One, the earthquake wasn’t big enough and was too far away,” he says. “Two, we have pretty good evidence for how drilling would have caused this incident.”

Davies’ own studies concluded the eruption was triggered by the drilling and the attempt to control a huge influx of water and gas that fractured sections of the borehole.

An attempt to plug the hole with thousands of concrete balls failed last year. Now Soenarso, chief of the Sidoarjo Mudflow Mitigation Agency, is out of ideas for halting the flow. “I can only say it is in the hands of God Almighty,” he told the Jakarta Post.

But Lusi isn’t finished. Torrential rains could erode dikes, releasing more mud, displacing more people. Whatever happens, one fact remains: for Lusi’s victims, Lapindo’s name is mud.

© 2008 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.