By Rafe Mair - The Tyee.ca

There is a big plus for Autocrat Campbell and his toadies. All along the highway [to Whistler] there are new developments built by Liberal supporters. As Kevin Costner's character was told in Field of Dreams, "Build it and they will come"...This is all about "showcasing" (a dreadful word dreamt up by ad men) Vancouver and Whistler...I say, "dream on." Vancouver in February is not all that showcase-able and Whistler is already well enough known to wealthy offshore skiers.

Everyone's Downstream II: Stop Playing Games With Our Lives
To be held November 22nd, 23rd at

The Edmonton Native Friendship Centre
11205 101 Street NW

This event is co-presented by OilSandsTruth.org [OST] with the Indigenous Environmental Network [IEN]

And on Friday November 21, 2008 at the University of Alberta:

By Dave Zirin and Daniel Denvir - October 14, 2008

Philadelphia - You cannot make this up. Sarah Palin, the best-known hockey mom in the United States, gets booed Saturday at the Philadelphia Flyers hockey game. And the game is played, of all places, at the Wachovia Center. It's all over YouTube: failing candidate, failed bank as corporate sponsor, the kind of anger that cannot be scripted...The Philly welcome was what New York Times hockey blogger Lynn Zinser described as "resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd."

While it is still 18 months before athletes competing in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games start arriving on Canada’s West Coast, last week’s closing ceremonies to wrap up the Beijing Paralympic Games signalled that the eyes of the Olympic-watching world would now fully shift focus to Canada.

And just as China discovered in the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics, while the Games may bring a flood of corporate sponsorship, new athletic infrastructure and international media attention, they are also inextricably linked with the politics of the host country and rife with controversies about who benefits and who suffers as a result of preparations to host the sporting world.

By JOHN ROSS - August 9/10, 2008

The Chinese big producton Beijing Olympics is a coming-out party for cutthroat capitalism, a feather in the cap of what used to be called "the developing world" of which the Chinese Peoples' Republic considers itself a charter member...But the Beijing games are not the first Olympics to be staged in the developing world. In 1968, a fast-modernizing Mexico was awarded the 13th Olympic Games. For then-president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, whose anti-communist mindset bordered on the pathological, the Games would carve his name in history. They did but not the way Diaz Ordaz anticipated.

By Dave Zirin - July 22, 2008

In classified reports compiled by the Maryland State Police and the Department of Homeland Security, I am "Dave Z."...The Maryland State Police's Department of Homeland Security devoted nearly 300 hours and thousands of taxpayer dollars from 2005 and 2006 to harassing people whose only crime was dissenting on the question of the war in Iraq and Maryland's use of death row..."Homeland Security" picked on the wrong sports writer. They also picked on the wrong group of activists. We will not be silenced.

By Dave Zirin - June, 28 2008

[Don Imus] is the man run out of CBS radio and MSNBC last year for calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed hos." This is the man who said that respected African-American journalist Gwen Ifill looked like "the cleaning lady." This is the man whose sidekicks routinely indulge in aggressive anti-Arab racism that elicits chills instead of giggles.

Remember that bully in high school who used to slam your head into the lockers? You know, the one who was captain of the football team? You may soon be seeing him again wearing a Vancouver Police uniform.

Arranging [soccer] matches in Gaza is hard enough...There are few proper...pitches and Israeli forces bombed Gaza's main stadium last year.

...[I]n agreeing to come to box these young women are doing more than exorcising the ghosts of a dark period in Afghan history...The training is sponsored by a peace group who want to give women more self-respect, and reclaim boxing as a sport in a country scarred by conflict - making martial arts constructive and not destructive...They call it "fighting for peace".

An angry post-match confrontation between Chilean soccer players and Toronto police has escalated to become an international incident, with officials in Santiago laying the blame squarely on Canadian authorities...Chilean President Michelle Bachelet told local reporters she was dismayed with the use of "unjustified aggression" by Toronto police after a bloody brawl following a FIFA U-20 World Cup match late Thursday.

Like all other hopefuls, I gave up a great deal to make the Olympic team...I began to see that my sacrifices were going to be used by the Olympic Games and their sponsors for ends that conflicted with my fundamental values. My competitive performance would not just be a part of a world community gathering to compete in the spirit of fair play, good will and global unity, but rather it would be sold to the highest corporate bidder for their own commercial gain.

The fact is that so many of us are sick and tired of being sick and tired. We are sick of the casual racism. We are tired of the smirking, drive-by sexism. We are done with people who make their living by selling the idea that some people are less human than others...This past week, our voices were heard. It won't...end with Don Imus.

The Olympics always want their pound of flesh...BUT THERE are some residents who think that the people of [Chicago] have given quite enough skin, not to mention blood and tears. A group of activists calling themselves Black People Against Police Torture (BPAPT) wants to keep the Olympics out...The group argues, "A city which tortures its own residents does not deserve the Olympics"...[I]f Chicago were in fact "honored" with the Olympics, a resurgence of police repression would surely follow.

The history of the American legal system is scarred with instances of injustice...Add to this list the case of Gary Tyler, convicted of murder at the age of 16...[A]t the time of his 1975 conviction, he was the nation's youngest death-row inmate. The spotlight dimmed when his sentence was commuted to life without the possibility of parole in 1977...Tyler, now 48, is living out his days in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison.