About 10,000 people are scooping algae out of the sea at the eastern city of Qingdao, while officials in Inner Mongolia are preparing to fight off a plague of locusts that may arrive in the capital city during the Olympics.

So far this year, the world's most populous nation has faced the worst winter snowstorms in 50 years, riots in Lhasa, violent protests about government policies toward Tibet along the Olympic torch relay route in Europe and North America, an earthquake and flooding.

China is still recovering from the Sichuan earthquake that killed more than 69,000 people in May, tempering the run-up to an Olympics billed as the country's coming-out party.

The nation's focus on helping survivors and rebuilding dozens of towns and cities is taking its toll on Olympic- related businesses, said Devin Kao, whose company holds the license to market metal Olympic souvenirs.

`Bad Things'

Monthly sales of 400,000 Olympic pins or key chains before May have since slumped to 50,000 as companies canceled orders so they could make donations to relief efforts, he said.

``Quite a lot of bad things have happened in China,'' Kao said in a telephone interview from Shanghai. ``Sales aren't meeting our expectations; it shouldn't be like this.''

Advertising spending in China also fell 15 percent in May from April because of the quake, according to the executive director for China at rating agency Nielsen Co.

``This is mainly because there was a mourning period of three days in mainland China,'' she said in a televised interview yesterday. Even Olympics sponsors cut their ad spending, she said.

In Qingdao, host to the five-day sailing event, some 4,000 troops and 6,000 workers have collected 290,000 tons of string- like algae in the past week. The city government is aiming for a return to normal conditions along its coastline by July 15.

Meanwhile the northern province of Inner Mongolia has mobilised 33,000 people to repel swarms of locusts that have come within 430 kilometers (267 miles) of Beijing and infested an area of 1.3 million hectares (5,000 square miles).

Beijing organizers said they are in contact with Inner Mongolian officials to monitor the situation and discuss contingency plans. Cooler-than-usual weather means the hatching of locust eggs in the areas closest to Beijing has been delayed until late July or August.

 MEANWHILE:

The facsist Chinese regime on Friday barred Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator Leung Kwok-hung from a group making a goodwill visit to earthquake-stricken Sichuan Province because of suspicions he might use the opportunity for political protest. Mr Leung denied planning any protest and said the ban was “unpardonable”.

China has also recently introduced tougher identity checks for foreigners, an anti-narcotics crackdown in cities holding Olympic events and the installation of anti-aircraft missiles near Beijing venues.

Armed police with Segway personal transporters have also been deployed, although sceptics have suggested this particular form of transport, which requires riders to stand upright, could prove a tactical disadvantage in a terrorist incident.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base atGuantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The CIA is still authorized by President George W. Bush to use a number of secret "alternative" interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart's source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been "brainwashed," and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies' harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the CIA and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that "every American would be shocked" by the origin of the training document.

"What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions," Levin said. "People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don't need false intelligence."

A Defense Department spokesman, Lieutenant Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. "I can't speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current DOD policy on interrogations," Ryder said. "I can tell you that current DOD policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely."

Biderman's 1957 article described "one form of torture" used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand "for exceedingly long periods," sometimes in conditions of "extreme cold." Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and CIA interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including "Semi-Starvation," "Exploitation of Wounds," and "Filthy, Infested Surroundings," and with their effects: "Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator," "Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist," and "Reduces Prisoner to 'Animal Level' Concerns."

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators "the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training."

The sessions included "an in-depth class on Biderman's Principles," the message said, referring to the chart from Biderman's 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as "Biderman's Chart of Coercion," have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

"It saddens me," said Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called "thought reform" and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a "180-degree turn."

The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Qahtani's interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.