BEIJING, June 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Beijing Organising Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games (BOCOG) said on Thursday that the slogan for the Games have been almost finalized and will be made public late this month.

    "The slogan will be unveiled when this year's Olympic cultural festival opens on June 23," said BOCOG executive vice president Jiang Xiaoyu at a press conference here.

    The announcement of the slogan will be followed by the unveiling of the mascot for the Beijing Games later this year, Jiang added.

    "The mascot will be unveiled in August or October,"Jiang said.

    BOCOG started to enlist the Olympic slogan on January 1, 2005 and have since recieved great responses from home and abroad.

    "We recieved 210,000 slogans from all directions within a monthsince the call for slogans started, "said Jiang.

    "Through several rounds of selection, the slogans had been reduced from 800 to 100 before only one was left."

    The slogan Beijing used during its bid for the Games was "New Beijing, Great Olympics", which suggested that Beijing, a city with a history of more than 3,000 years, is also one of the world's fastest modernizing cities.

    BOCOG have said that the focus of the new slogan will shift from the city itself to the three basic concepts of Beijing Games,namely Green Olympics, High-tech Olympic and People's Olympics, and to the universal values of the Olympic Movement, such as peace, unity, friendship, participation, inspiration, joy and fairplay. Enditem