Winter Olympics 2018

Kim’s surprise visit to Beijing is being seen as preparation to a North Korean-US Summit [Image released by North Korea’s KCNA]
China’s national news agency Xinhua is reporting that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s trip to Beijing yesterday was focused on discussions with President Xi Jinping to find a way to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.
The three-day visit, which wasn’t reported until the third day, was the first such trip for Kim Jong Un and came at the invitation of Xi to de-escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Despite all the efforts of a paranoid and unpredictable US regime, the Koreans are making peace not war during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The US is furious and pulling out all the stops to tarnish the Games, and it is trying to put South Korea back on the US colonial leash. South Korea’s democratically elected peace-president Moon Jae-in is showing[Read More...]

Mike Pence was a man with a mission.  At stages through the opening parts of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, he looked like a man on a mission.  With diplomatic gestures flowering all around with weedy vigour in Pyeonchang, he was intent on fighting them.  The gardener of empire had his implements at the ready. The US Vice-President had[Read More...]

  It is the optimism of the young that is infectious, drowning out the cynicism of the old:  the smiling faces, their enthusiasm, their energy, their sheer delight in being there.  They are the spirit of the Olympics, drawing in the record audiences for the opening ceremonies and for the events. The Winter Olympics of 2018 opened today in South[Read More...]

  The holding of the Winter Olympics in South Korea from February 9 to 25, followed by the Paralympics on March 9-18, may be an opportunity to undertake negotiations in good faith to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula and to establish, or re-establish, forms of cooperation between the two Korean governments. Such negotiations in good faith would be in[Read More...]

Being a moralist in the Olympics doesn’t carry you very far. Turn one way, and there are enterprising drug cheats; turn another, there are wads of cash in envelopes finding their inexorable way to an official’s accounts. The challenge of the Olympics is, in a fundamental way, a challenge of institutional decay, ruination and sport as profit. Having the International[Read More...]