On July 6, 2005, at the 117th International Olympic Committee Session in Singapore, London made its final presentation for its bid to host the 2012 Summer Games. Mayor Ken Livingstone, who used to be the firebrand known as “Red Ken,” had previously shown little or no interest in sport in the capital. But he was now older and cuddlier, his sharp edges smoothed by the responsibilities of mayoral office. As he made his bid, he dubbed London 2012 “The Regeneration Games,” his enthusiastic support informed by his belief that they would deliver for East London much needed economic renewal.

When the presentations ended and London erupted in celebration after besting favorite Paris in the final round of balloting, the promise of how London and the country would benefit from the Olympics hardly seemed to merit a murmur of a challenge. But in fact substantial question marks can be placed against the promises made.

Read the full article in The Daily Beast

For two weeks every few years, the Olympics blot out all other sports coverage in the world to focus on one city. The host cities scramble to earn the right to hold the games, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to construct arenas, event complexes, and lodgings that rarely, if ever, eke out profits. But how did the Olympics become just like every other professional sporting event, covered in Visa and McDonald’s logos? Can they ever get back to simple, popular, spirited competition?

Sports journalist and university researcher Mark Perryman designed Why The Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, And How They Can Be as a vision of a radically different Olympics, the games’ Communist Manifesto, with an undeniably noble goal: ditch the corporate-controlled event and make it truly the People’s Games, with an emphasis on mass appeal, accessibility, and increased participation. Using the 2012 Summer Olympics in London as a backdrop, Perryman briefly covers the development of corporatized and commodified Olympic competition since 1984 in Los Angeles. As a possible response, he outlines how to bring the games back to their stated goals as global, unity-focused competition, while also acknowledging their inherent politicization.

Read the full review in The Onion

For several decades, Sue Coe has been drawing and painting the brutality of the meat industry. She snuck into slaughterhouses and, because she carried only a pad and pencil, not cameras, has been allowed access to chicken and other livestock factories and production facilities.

Brief essays accompany the shocking, sorrowful images. Many of the drawings have a Third Reich feel, black and bloody; tortured animals and human workers mutated by their own cauterized feelings. Coe writes of mother cows and pigs separated from their young; of the yearning of animals for family members. She refuses the truism that animals and fish have no feelings, that sheep feel nothing when they are sheared. Her environments, her backdrops are poisoned, toxic, apocalyptic. She writes with certainty that our cruelty will come back to haunt us.

Read the full article in the Los Angeles Review of Books

On October 7, 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all documents related to post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. The request was filed simultaneously with the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. By the following May, no response had been issued, so the ACLU filed a second request, and in June took the government to court in hopes of forcing it to comply. Three months later the ACLU prevailed, and by the end of 2004 the documents were beginning to flow. Since then, well over 130,000 pages have been released and posted to a searchable database on the ACLU website.

The database contains, of course, the now infamous “torture memos”: the arguments, crafted by George W. Bush’s closest legal advisers, that waterboarding and the like were neither torturous nor illegal—and that such considerations didn’t apply to US presidents (or indeed anyone else in government, so long as the infliction of pain was not provably his or her “specific intent”). But these were only a small handful of documents among thousands: interrogation and torture logs, prison administration memos, courtroom transcripts and minutes from policy meetings. Several such documents known to exist have still not been released: in regard to one, the government has argued that not only is its existence classified but so too is the font in which it may or may not be written. Other records have been destroyed, including at least ninety-two videos of CIA interrogations. Of the material that has been released, much has been significantly redacted.

Read the full review in The Nation

The organizers of the 2012 London Olympics have repeatedly asserted the value of the Games in the shape of wider involvement in sport, a lasting legacy of sporting facilities, and increased tourism. But experience from previous Games suggest differently.

Not one recent Olympic host nation can point to an increase in sport participation as a result of the Olympics. Many of the stadiums built for the Greek Games are now expensive-to-maintain wrecks. As for tourism, the Olympics generally leads to a decrease in visitor spending, not an increase, as the travel industry has pointed out.

Read the full coverage on CNN

A Palestinian in Jerusalem

Jerusalem — As a tourist visiting the Old City of Jerusalem, seeing Christians, Jews and Muslims walking side by side, hearing church bells ringing and Muslims being called to prayer, you might think the place is a model of tolerance.

As a resident of the Old City of Jerusalem, you think differently.

Last Sunday, I was taken on a tour by Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian, a Palestinian and a professor of criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has lived in the Old City for the past 30 years. Her home — a tastefully furnished second-floor apartment, where she and her husband raised three daughters — is in the Armenian quarter.

Read the full article in the International Herald Tribune

Listen to the interview on BBC1

Next week the Olympic flame will arrive in London for the start of the 2012 Games. With it will come a growing barrage of criticism from counter-event organizers and critical observers, skeptical of the vast secrecy, corporate pandering, great costs, security failings, and political controversy that hover around the events.

These issues, coupled with the problematic structure of today’s competitions, often obscure the true meaning and potential of the games. “There is something in the Olympics, indefinable, springing from the soul, that must be preserved,” said the journalist and London Marathon co-founder, Chris Brasher.

That preservation is the driving force behind a great new book by journalist Mark Perryman, Why the Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, and How They Can Be. Perryman’s work is not an attack on the Olympics, nor is it a snarky dismissal of the lofty sentiments often associated with the event. Unlike many criticisms of the games, he provides detailed suggestions on how they can be improved, laying out his bold and thoughtful modifications in the form of a five-step facelift that he dubs “The Five New Olympic Rings.”

Read the full interview in Mother Board.

One of Britain’s leading sporting activists has called on the International Olympic Committee to give ordinary fans the opportunity to see superstars such as Usain Bolt at affordable prices.

Mark Perryman, who helped transform the image and culture of the England Football Supporters Club, said British sports fans had missed out on seeing their sporting heroes live at the London Games because of “the ongoing IOC vanity project” and the organisers’ policy of high prices for blue riband events such as the 100m.

With less than two weeks to go until the Games begin, Locog, the organising committee, still has tickets available for some of the best athletics and cycling events such as the men’s 4x100m relay and the individual pursuits. However, with the cheapest seats priced at around £700 each and packages costing thousands, many remain unsold. Tickets to the opening ceremony are also available for up to £2,012 each.

Read the full article in The Observer.

What was troubling Julian Assange when he made a dash for friendly extra-territorial space? His detractors argue that it’s the usual story, to do with his propensity to see himself as the centre of the universe, and the target of an improbable plot to lock him up in the US and throw away the key. That last honour has already been bestowed on Bradley Manning. In the leaker, surely, the Americans have their man: why bother with his celebrity publisher? Outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in Hans Crescent, round the back of Harrods, a thin but emblematic presence is maintained by his supporters. While I was there earlier this month a French woman was squatting on the pavement, hunched over a placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week before through a tunnel under Harrods: the store’s security guards had just let her in on the secret. A third insisted there was only one way out of Hans Crescent for the man who’d already left by al-Fayed’s drains: first Rafael Correa’s government grants asylum, then Assange is set on a rapid path to Ecuadorian citizenship and finally awarded a minor consular position, which gets him from the steps of the embassy to a boarding gate at Heathrow under diplomatic immunity.

Read the full review in the London Review of Books

If the unemployment rate dips by a decimal or two in the upcoming employment report, it’ll be seen as an indicator that the economy is improving. But millions of Americans will remain without work.

Journalist and documentary maker DW Gibson set off from Orange County, California to New York City last summer on a sort of unemployment oral history project. He interviewed dozens of Americans who have found themselves out of work in the past five years.

They included a human resources director who was laid off herself after dismissing hundreds of her colleagues, a real estate agent who arrived at work one morning to find his office empty, and a college graduate who was fired one week into her first job. DW Gibson’s project has resulted in a book called “Not Working,” and an upcoming documentary of the same name.

Listen to the interview on The Takeaway

Mark Perryman loves sports. As a child he awaited the Olympic Games with eager anticipation, urging his parents to purchase Esso petrol so he could more speedily collect the firm’s collectible Olympics stickers. Now he laces up his running shoes for a daily run in the South Downs of East Sussex, sometimes racking up a ten-miler (in 75 minutes, no less). Perryman is no crotchety intellectual railing on about sports as a waste of time and money. This is someone who believes in the power of sport, and wishes to democratise and decentralise it so more people can experience it in a meaningful way. With Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How They Can Be, he has written an engaging, visionary book for fellow-traveller sports aficionados, and others open to criticism about the Olympics yet keen to figure out ways to improve the five-ring juggernaut.

In the first half of the book, Perryman lays out his “Why-the-Olympics-Aren’t-Good-for-Us” argument. In Chapter 1, he busily chisels his way through the façade that the Olympics are apolitical—a façade buffeted with dogged verve by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its allies. Along the way he points out that the Olympic torch relay was first invented by the Nazis to drum up support for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; that the Games were a handy proxy for Cold War realpolitik; and that the IOC has historically engaged in gender discrimination—for instance, women were boxed out of many events including the marathon, which the IOC finally allowed them to run in 1984. He writes convincingly that in the modern era, the Games have become a jamboree of gigantism riding on the rails of commercialism and professionalism.

Read the full review on OpenDemocracy

No sporting event is as immersed in mythology as the Olympics, which come to London in a few weeks’ time.

Long trumpeted as a panacea for society’s ills, the Games have been heralded for their ability to affect all manner of social and economic problems.

The creation of jobs, the regeneration of impoverished areas, increasing participation in sport, attracting more tourists to the host city – these are just some of the issues that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggests its Games can solve.

It is a line mimicked by politicians hoping to attract the competition to their country.

Read the full review in the Morning Star

Peace may be possible in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and American Jews may bring it about. Far-fetched? Not according to outspoken scholar Norman Finkelstein , who argues in his latest book that Israel’s excesses are irreconcilable with liberal Jewish values. He explains his thinking to Hazel Healy.

Read the full review in the New Internationalist

Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy by DW Gibson (Penguin, $17 paperback original, non-fiction, on sale July 3)

What it’s about: Gibson, a magazine writer who’s also worked on TV documentaries, drove across the country last summer and fall, interviewing a wide range of people who’ve lost their jobs.

The buzz: Inspired by Studs Terkel’s Working and James Agee and Walker Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it’s been praised by Ken Burns, the master documentarian, as “a powerful and heart-wrenching story.”

View the full list in USA Today