China is trying to do everything for the Olympic Games in 2008. Recently they have been having problelms in Beijing with pollution.

The city does suffer the usual big Asian city problems of pollution, but the bigger problem is the sandstorms it suffers from the distant Gobi desert.

It seems like they are moving towards some fairly extreme methods for helping to clear the air:

The Beijing Weather Modification Office reported that it fired seven rocket shells containing a total of 163 cigarette-size pellets of silver iodide into the sky over Beijing on May 5. The result brought four-tenths of an inch of rain, helping to “alleviate drought, add soil moisture and remove dust from the air for better air quality,” said the state Xinhua news service.

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