Security Fence: While in jail I couldn't help noticing the similar aesthitic of the prison and the Olympic enclosure which is surrounded by 17.5km of electric fence, on which there are 900 day and night vision cameras © Mike Wells

An Olympic Prison Diary

Prisoner Number A6379CN
HM Prison Thameside
Somewhere in South East London

Introduction
This diary was written by Mike Wells while incarcerated in Stoke Newington and Leyton police stations, and then in Thameside prison. Mike Wells was arrested after an incident which occurred on Leyton Marshes, site of a contentious Olympic construction project. He is currently free on bail. His bail conditions state that he should not go within a certain distance of a certain Olympic venue. His bail conditions last until his trial is over. The trial date has been set for the last day of the Olympics. He could be imprisoned for a breach of these bail conditions. He will answer a charge of common assault with a not guilty plea. He is a journalist, writer, photographer, and film maker.

Prison Diary
No way of knowing if it is day or night unless you ask and are told what time it be. Ten minutes or an hour, or three, time stands on its head...

by Murray Worthy, campaigner at War on Want

Adidas this week comes under pressure to tackle the sweatshop conditions in its supplier factories as War on Want launches a new campaign (www.notokanywhere.org) over the exploitation of its workers. Our campaign demands the official sportswear partner of London 2012 and Team GB takes responsibility for the abuse of workers’ rights in its supply chains and has launched a video (http://youtu.be/NPVofA6DcLE) highlighting the reality of life for workers making Adidas goods.

For the London Games there are 25 official corporate sponsors and another 28 official corporate suppliers across industries as diverse as food, cars, banking and electronics. However, the Olympics are of particular significance to the global sportswear industry

Press Release from Drop Dow Now

Monday the 21st May is 100 days to the Paralympic Games, a date marked with controversy due to Dow Chemical’s Paralympic sponsorship.

Campaigners have called for Dow’s sponsorship of the London Paralympic Games to be dropped due to Dow’s ownership of Union Carbide, the company responsible for the Bhopal gas disaster in 1984. The disaster killed over 20,000 and caused injury and illness to thousands more [1]. Hundreds of children continue to be born every year with birth defects [2].

An interview with Charlotte Cooper

The fat body has moved from relative invisibility to the object of a moral panic in the space of the last 15 years. To be fat is now to be regarded as socially deviant, branded with the stigma of poverty, a 'faulty consumer' within the paradigms of late capitalism. Images of fatness cluster with the refusal of work in policy scenarios. Schools are becoming sensitised to the body weight of their pupils, health educators articulate a normative crisis in national eating habits. And Olympic mythology interpellates the moral entrepreneur in mainstream media, government and public health industry. With London hosting the 2012 Games, 'the body' objectified has been placed centre stage.

No Photography. G4S Temple Mills Lane. May 2011

There is an ongoing stand-off between Olympic security guards and photographers with the Old Bill playing coy referee. There is a recent discussion about these issues on the British Journal of Photography blog

Andy Wilkes pitches in with his comment on 24 Apr 2012

Jonathan Stephens, the permanent secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), told a select committee that he would neither confirm nor deny his alleged role in allowing Adam Smith, Hunt's special adviser, to speak to James Murdoch's office. Later, the DCMS issued a statement saying Stephens was "content" with Smith's role.

This video arrives via Paul Norman's Olympic blog. On September 28 2011 he chaired a debate at the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation's annual meeting. He says:

On April 23rd 2012 - Shakespeare's birthday and the launch of the World Shakespeare Festival - a group of merry players known as the "Reclaim Shakespeare Company" took unexpectedly to the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon, just before a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of The Tempest. This piece of guerilla Shakespeare aimed to challenge the RSC over its decision to accept sponsorship from BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster and the oil company's decision to start extracting highly polluting and destructive tar sands in Canada.