Beijing Olympics organizers have shifted into hyperdrive. Games-related press conferences and other media events are being laid on thick and fast by BOCOG (the acronym for the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games).

Wednesday they corralled an array of experts to field media questions about the latest Olympics-related weather news. Ho-hum, you might say. And in any other country this might not be exactly a headline-grabber. But in pollution-plagued Beijing, authorities are scrambling to perfect ways to change the weather – yup,  the press is hot on the heels of a unit with the Orwellian title of the Weather Modification Office. Its scientists acknowledged they have techniques to “stop the rain” – or “rain mitigation”, as they call it -- for special events like, say, the Summer Olympics opening ceremony on Aug. 8, 2008. (Beijing’s notoriously muggy rainy season begins in July.)

Access to Beijing’s cloud-seeding bases are so much in demand that the capital’s weather czars decided to discourage such press trips. Turns out Beijing’s weather modifiers are too busy giving interviews when they should be perfecting their wild and wonderful methods for taming Mother Nature in time for the Olympics. (I must say, years ago I enjoyed interviewing a weather-modification cadre at a cloud-seeding base in the Western Hills; she confessed she might have lost her job if rain hadn’t subsided on the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic; that day in 1999 the rain stopped about an hour before the big National Day parade.)

On Monday the story of the day was the number of casualties suffered by laborers working on Olympic venues. Earlier the Sunday Times had alleged Beijing was covering up at least ten deaths by laborers killed in construction accidents while working on the National Stadium.

BOCOG shot down the story, claimed an excellent safety record at all its venues, and repeatedly stressed there had been no major accidents during their construction. But with two press events on Monday – the morning’s formal opening of the “water cube” aquatics center, and a BOCOG press conference in the afternoon – the question was sure to come up.