Andrew Jacobs

China is facing a storm of protest at home and abroad over new regulations requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include software that can filter out pornography and other "vulgar" content from the Internet.

China's government censors have begun to block access to the Internet services Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Microsoft's live.com, broadening an already extraordinary effort to shield its citizens from any hint of Thursday's 20th anniversary of the military crackdown that ended the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

Um, sorry -- our bad. China's national television network on Tuesday blamed an illegal fireworks display by its employees for igniting a blaze that destroyed a futuristic luxury hotel and theater.

It was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek alternative to the stultifying variety show beamed into hundreds of millions of living rooms on the eve of each Lunar New Year holiday.

The Chinese authorities appear to have lifted some of the restrictions that blocked Web sites for journalists working at the Olympic Village although other politically sensitive sites, including those on Tibet, remained inaccessible on Friday morning.