Games Monitor - Mega Events

2012 Legacy Housing Double Counting: ODA admits housing for Athletes' Village 'would have been built anyway'.

Julian Cheyne — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:08:26 +0100

The ODA has had to admit that housing for the Athletes' Village being built at Stratford City, now renamed Stratford 2011, would have been built anyway, making a nonsense of the claims of a Housing Legacy from the Village, see the attached FOI response. To justify its continued insistence that the Village does indeed have a Legacy value the ODA is resorting to the argument that the housing on the Stratford City site would not have been delivered until much later, if it had not been for the Olympics.

Let the Bejing Olympics of Global Re-branding and Marketing begin!

Martin Slavin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:50:31 +0100

Let the Bejing Olympics of Global Re-branding and Marketing begin!

The Olympic Dream: A Sci-Fi Short Story

Charles Batsworth — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:00:08 +0100

Please note some of the links in this article are to pages with Chinese text and some computers may not display them correctly

The following “Sci-Fi” short story has been (re)posted in many Chinese online forums and blogs, originally from SCI-FI Great Wall blog, translated by China Digital Times’s Linjun Fan.

Leaked IOC Beijing Media Kit

Charles Batsworth — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:59:01 +0100

German public service broadcaster Südwestrundfunk recently obtained this 48-page IOC media kit for Beijing 2008 (or 'One-Year-to-Go Countdown Resource'). Marked CONFIDENTIAL – FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY, it offers an intriguing insight into the way the IOC views itself and its relations with the media, governments and NGOs and protest groups.

Human Rights in China and the Beijing Olympics

Martin Slavin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:33:44 +0100

.: Li Changchun (C), member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Political Bureau, attends a evening party for the up-coming 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Beijing, capital of China, on July 29, 2008. (Xinhua Photo/Li Tao)

Olympic Industry Resistance

Martin Slavin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:09:22 +0100

'Secrets in the Blood' coming to the Beijing Olympics ?

Martin Slavin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:31:32 +0100

In the run up to the Beijing Olympics, Matt McGrath sets out to expose corruption, drug use and cover-ups at the highest levels in sport. BBC World Service Investigation

Locals in Sochi Fight Off Olympics

Martin Slavin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:48:33 +0100

Residents of Imeret lowland, which has been chosen to as a construction site for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, clashed with bailiffs and police yesterday, July 22, 2008. Armed with sticks and bottles of incendiary mixture, 200 locals defended their houses.

'One World, Whose Dream? Housing Rights Violations and the Beijing Olympic Games'

Martin Slavin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:26:06 +0100

The Beijing Olympics has displaced 1.5 million people since 2000, according to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). A new COHRE report, One World, Whose Dream? Housing Rights Violations and the Beijing Olympic Games, has found that the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to award the Games to Beijing has been a catalyst in increasing forced evictions and displacements in Beijing.

Big Brother goes global for the Beijing Olympics

Martin Slavin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:26:11 +0100

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)