Just over two weeks after breaking her own world record in the pole vault, Russian Yelena Isinbayeva pushed the mark even higher with a 5.04m (16'6.5") leap at the same Monaco event. The bar shook a bit as she brushed past, but it did not fall.

FIELD HOCKEY: They may make the players look like cyborgs from the future, but the men's team from Great Britain will wear red-tinted contact lenses intended to combat the haze from Beijing's heavy smog.

---

With the help of mediators from China and Germany, the IOC and Iraq reached an accord to allow two Iraqi athletes to enter the Games when they start next week. The country's NOC had been banned for government interference since last week. The date of the agreement matched the roster deadline for track and field, but archery, rowing, judo and weightlifting deadlines have passed, stranding five Olympic hopefuls from the war-torn nation.

David Wallechinsky, vice-president of the International Society of Olympic Historians (of which I'm proud to be a lifetime member myself), puts forward an interesting argument in the Huffington Post that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, by not allowing women to compete for their nations, violate the Olympic charter and should be banned from the Games themselves.

And in China...

The Chinese delegation's red and yellow Opening Ceremony outfits (can you find Yao Ming in that picture?) are raising a decidedly mixed reaction from local bloggers. One finds the design too close to tomato scrambled egg.

If you can't wait for the Opening Ceremony and don't mind spoilers, a two-minute tape of a recent rehearsal was leaked to South Korean television. How a camera got past all the security, we'll never know.

As for films that BOCOG does want you to watch, the organizing committee's official promotional film, "Seats," was released recently. The name refers to the idea that all will be welcome to sit and watch the Games.

When foreign journalists began pouring into the new press center and tried surfing the web, they found that many sites that mention the Falun Gong, Tianamen Square crackdown and the Dalai Lama are unavailable. This, despite repeated promises that the Great Firewall of China would disappear for journalists during the Games.

It came to light that the IOC had cut a deal with the Chinese government to let it block sites that were not related to Olympic competition. Yesterday, the chairman of the IOC's press commission apologized by way of the South China Post.

"If you have been misled by what I have told you [over the months and years] about there being free internet access during the Games, then I apologise," [Kevan] Gosper said.

"I'm not backing off what I said. There will be full, open and free internet access during Games to allow journalists to report on the Olympics", he said before adding that he couldn't do anything about other blocked sites.

Is this just a matter of multiple definitions of "free," as in the difference between "unfettered" and "at no cost"? Internet censorship opens up a whole lot of other issues, too. How does this affect bloggers traveling to the Games; will they be able to access their own sites to post? And a University of Hong Kong professor dispensed tips on how journalists can best keep government interference at bay.

But it could be harder than that. A U.S. senator has accused the Chinese government of installing software in area hotels that keeps tabs on patrons' Internet use. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. showed reporters in Washington a document authored by the Public Security Bureau requiring hotels to snoop.

"If you were a human rights advocate, if you're a journalist, you're in room 1251 of a hotel, anything that you use, sending out over the Internet is monitored in real time by the Chinese Public Security bureau," Brownback said. "That's not right. It's not in the Olympic spirit."

(Photo © Icon SMI)