The International Olympic Committee will prohibit transgender athletes from participating in women's sports, starting at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

The new policy, approved by the IOC's executive committee Thursday, requires all athletes to undergo a genetic test to compete in women's sporting events at the Olympics.

US preparations fall behind for FIFA World Cup 2026, leading to growing concerns about security risks at events.

The last two times the Olympics came to Los Angeles, the city launched major tree planting programs. L.A. planted tens of thousands of palm trees in the run up to 1932. An L.A. non-profit led the charge to plant one million trees ahead of the 1984 Games.

Planners are taking a different approach ahead of this Olympics, focusing on shade structures more broadly rather than specifically on planting trees... That means canopies, pop-up structures and infrastructure to create shade, with or without tree cover.

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But many of the specifics are still to come. That's also true of LA28, which has promised to create a "Heat Mitigation Plan." A spokesperson told LAist that it was expected to be finished by mid-2027.

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Still, L.A. has a long way to go. In L.A. County, urban areas have just 21% shade cover at noon on average, according to data from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation – less than the national average of 27%. And it's only getting hotter. By 2050, average temperatures in the county are expected to rise by almost four degrees.

Megaevents bring major upticks in labor trafficking across the construction, hospitality, and fashion industries — imagine the opportunities for exploitation along the entire supply chain for every piece of branded merch that's produced. The other types of events that see a major uptick in human trafficking? Natural disasters. Unfortunately, here in LA, we've been subjected to both, making the region doubly vulnerable. While alarms are being sounded about many potential human rights violations, there is growing concern around the absence of a cohesive human trafficking prevention strategy for LA's megaevent era.

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Unfortunately, breathless coverage of law enforcement raids, and namely sex trafficking sting operations, dominates megaevent headlines — despite the fact that labor trafficking is far, far more prevalent. As the report notes: "there is no empirical data demonstrating an increase in sex trafficking associated with major sporting events." Just look at this story from last month's Super Bowl about a "sex trafficking crackdown" executed by 67 coordinating law enforcement agencies which are planning to replicate this model in other World Cup host cities this summer. Yet a 2021 report by USC's International Human Rights Clinic found such law enforcement operations to be expensive and ineffective. "Anti-sex trafficking operations identify few victims or traffickers and instead result in the arrest, physical, verbal and sexual abuse of many victims and sex workers — a disproportionate number of whom are LGBTQ people, undocumented immigrants and people of color, particularly Black women and minors,” said IHRC's director Hannah Garry.

On Wednesday, the country's sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, told state television that the country's team would not participate in the tournament in the U.S. “considering this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader,” according to the New York Times.

The Olympic imperative that every Games has to be newer, bigger and better than the one before makes the claim that this is a “sustainable Games” an insult to everyone playing and watching.

The gaps are filled with overtime, which adds to personnel costs, he said. The Sheriff’s Department’s current budget is about $4.2 billion. Luna is asking for a boost of $556.6 million.

The International Olympic Committee, the body that oversees the Olympics, is hunting for more revenue. It may soon open the door to private equity, which has been increasingly reshaping sports to squeeze every last dollar out of athletes and fans.

... the realization of a genuine Olympic spirit is at direct odds with a global political order characterized by capitalist economic competition teetering on the edge of world war. For this reason, the games are used to promote the most filthy forms of nationalism, pitting nations against one another as bitter rivals rather than competing as equals in sport. The degeneration of the games has reached the point where the International Olympic Committee is little more than a direct tool of imperialism.

After numerous calls to resign from both his eponymous agency and his role as LA28 chair due to his association with charged and convicted child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Casey Wasserman finally announced he was making some changes. "I’m deeply sorry that my past personal mistakes have caused you so much discomfort," he wrote on Friday. "It’s not fair to you." So that's why he's going to step out of the public eye and donate his massive fortune to survivors of... oh, wait, no, sorry. He's going to sell off his company and cash out with the private equity firm that already holds a majority stake. And with all that spare time, he's going to devote his "full attention" to his volunteer role as the chair of the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, traveling the world representing the city of Los Angeles.

The Americans might do well in Italy… but there are serious societal trends we should be concerned with.

Sports can't be separated from politics, and athletes are well within their rights to criticize Trump on the world stage.

“Adam Edelman is an Israeli athlete and a Zionist to the core, as he describes himself,” Reina said in a video verified by Al Jazeera.

“He has posted several messages on social media supporting the genocide in Gaza,” the commentator added as the Israeli team’s bobsleigh continued its run.

“It should be noted that the term ‘genocide’ is the one used by the UN Commission of Inquiry. Edelman stated that the military intervention was ‘the most just and moral war in history’, according to him.”

Reina was critical of the athlete’s presence in Cortina during these Games, saying it “raises questions” as it pertains to the International Olympic Committee’s decision that “any athlete who has participated in activities supporting war, either militarily or through their social media accounts, is ineligible to participate.”

This decision had been specifically applied to Russian athletes after their country launched a war on Ukraine. He questioned why similar standards weren’t applied to Israel.

Still a cool guy for the olympics tho... jfc.

Every host city committee including Los Angeles is supposed to release a "human rights action plan" ahead of the games. Those plans should outline how the host city is planning to protect freedom of expression and handle security and workers' rights.

But those plans have not yet been finalized and made public, less than five month out. That has some critics ringing an alarm.

" It's a very poor report card on turning in your homework for Los Angeles and all other host cities," said Minky Worden with Human Rights Watch.

Six homeless people have died in the Italian city in recent weeks, highlighting the widening inequality as the Games unfold there.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/world/europe/olympics-homeless-milan.html

Wasserman has faced growing scrutiny in recent weeks after a trove of Justice Department documents included a series of flirty emails between him and Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, from 2003.

The emails prompted five Los Angeles City Council members, two county supervisors and the city controller to call for Wasserman to step aside. Then, celebrities started dropping Wasserman's talent agency, including Chappell Roan and soccer star Abby Wambach.

Raising taxes for this nationalist grift while the city is completely unaffordable, car dependent, gestapo overrun, wasserman and similar pedos, etc.

The olympics doesn't give a crap about real issues. They just want to leech LA dry.

I’ve been fascinated by the Olympics ever since I was a kid, but I had no idea how weird their business model is.

There’s billions of dollars flowing between the International Olympic Committee, the host cities, the local and federal governments, and the athletes.

But, 3 out of 5 athletes are broke and most cities end up bankrupt after hosting the Olympic Games. So, the question is, where does all the money actually go and does anyone make money off of the olympics?

I'm not really sure what else to add past this point. Outside of, again, there needs to be a change here. And broadly, across our government, across our society, there needs to be widespread accountability for all of this.

Also, I'm growing increasingly disgusted with much of the mainstream media, at least the parts of it that have been so incredibly silent on a lot of these files dropping. I understand maybe it's a lot of emails, it's a lot of things to cover, it's a lot of information. But again, the lack of accountability and coverage here is shocking.