Olympians make climate plea to IOC presidential candidates
SYDNEY –
More than 400 Olympians from nearly 90 countries around the world have joined in a call for the winner of next week's International Olympic Committee presidential election to make climate their top priority.
The signatories to an open letter calling for IOC action on climate change range from Australia's most decorated Olympian, swimmer Emma McKeon, to Cyrille Tchatchet II, a weightlifter who represented the refugee team at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
"To the incoming President, we ask that over the coming years and the course of your presidency one issue be above all others: the care of our planet," the letter read.
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Yomiuri Shimbun
5 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
The U.S. Granted These Journalists Asylum. Then It Fired Them.
Aristide Economopoulos/For The Washington Post Leonid Martynyuk is a Russian journalist who was working for Voice of America but was recently fired in the Trump administration's cuts at the government-funded news operation. Martynyuk came to the United States in 2014 and was later granted asylum. When Leonid Martynyuk got off the train from Sochi to Krasnodar in southern Russia in the summer of 2014, a strange man bumped into him. The man started yelling, refusing to leave, egging on a fight. He claimed Martynyuk pushed him – not the other way around. Martynyuk's soon-to-be-wife, Ekaterina, motioned to police officers, pleading to intervene and defuse the hostile situation. But when the police arrived, they were only interested in interrogating Martynyuk – not the other man, who was released without questioning. 'This was when I was sure that the entire thing was an orchestrated set up to have me arrested,' Martynyuk later wrote in his application for political asylum in the United States. Martynyuk spent 10 days in prison on charges of hooliganism. His real offense, he maintains, was criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin. His crime was journalism. Martynyuk, then in his mid-30s, spent years writing critical reports about Putin alongside his mentor, the well-known political opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who previously served as deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s. In one report, Nemtsov and Martynyuk detailed Putin's extensive wealth and opulence; in another, they detailed extensive corruption around the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. Martynyuk also ran a popular YouTube channel. When he was released from prison, Martynyuk's lawyer suggested that he and Ekaterina relocate to the United States for a short time, so the pair left for the New York area in October 2014. Four months later, two gunmen assassinated Nemtsov while he was walking home from dinner along a Moscow bridge. 'After that, I decided it would be dangerous to return,' Martynyuk recently told The Washington Post. He applied for political asylum, which the U.S. government granted two years later. But now Martynyuk, who became a full citizen in 2024, is once again feeling the ire of a powerful government – this time, it's the United States. On May 30, Martynyuk was one of more than 500 Voice of America staffers terminated by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the agency that oversees the government-funded news service. Kari Lake, senior adviser to the USAGM, which oversees Voice of America and funds nonprofit news outlets with similar goals, says the agency represents government waste. The contractors fired could soon be joined by hundreds of full-time staffers, who are expected to be fired. After Putin came to power in 1999, he gradually clamped down on independent media in the country. Martynyuk read, listened to and watched Voice of America's work as a young man in the early 2000s, and he learned English through a program at the time titled Special English. His history with the network goes back much further: His grandfather was a colonel in the Soviet Army, stationed in Lviv in the 1970s. At night, he would listen to VOA on the radio – in secret. Martynyuk applied to work for VOA's fact-checking team, Polygraph. At the time of his firing, Polygraph employed one editor and three reporters, all of whom either received or had applied for political asylum. Stacy Caplow, a Brooklyn Law School professor, who – along with students in her clinic – helped Martynyuk apply for asylum, told The Post that he was the quintessential asylum seeker. 'This was the kind of case where if they didn't grant asylum, there would be something wrong with the system,' she said. 'It's clear-cut. Asylum is designed for people like him.' For foreign-born journalists who have found refuge not just in the U.S. but at Voice of America, losing their jobs feels like an existential threat – one that could stop them from working every day to speak truth to power, for the first time in their careers. Nik Yarst, a video producer on the fact-checking team, also lost his job on May 30. Yarst was a Sochi-based correspondent for the Public Television of Russia, also known as OTR, and reported extensively on corruption in Russia during the Olympics. He and a cameraman were driving to an interview with a Russian official when he was stopped by Russian police, who found narcotics in his car. Yarst, who later tested negative for a drug test, said the police slid the drugs into his car to arrest him. He served a year on house arrest, while his legal battle continued, and faced a 10-year prison sentence if convicted. 'After the Olympic Games were done, I decided to escape from the Russia,' Yarst told The Post. 'I asked for the political asylum here in the United States because I truly believed here the independent media exists. Here is freedom of speech. And I have to escape from Russia because I was facing prison or death.' Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, said Russia was a different country back then – 'still quite authoritarian,' but there were still independent journalists, news organizations and human rights organizations. 'This was a time you could still operate in Russia, but Krasnodar region was one of the toughest to operate and had a very, very harsh governor who really went after journalists,' said Denber, who has known Yarst for many years and documented his story. 'Nik, sadly, was no exception.' Yarst worked on an investigative story involving the kidnapping of a 6-year-old girl who had received a large inheritance, including land in the zone designated for construction of the Sochi Olympics. 'Her mother was murdered – before that, she had been threatened – and the girl was taken to Abkhazia,' Yarst told The Post. 'Her grandmother fought in court, trying to restore justice. We were helping her. That case was a boiling point.' The story, which involved allegations of corruption and improper land seizure by the government, made him a target. In the U.S., Yarst – now based in Miami – first flew to New York and stayed at a hostel for a month, choosing to start his life over in a new country. Human rights organizations heard about his case and contacted him, connecting him with a lawyer and to resources from the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations. He received asylum in 2017, and he found employment at Voice of America. 'VOA was the one service who could hire people like me,' he said. He feels not betrayed but disappointed by the government. President Donald Trump, 'during his campaign, he talked a lot about the swamp, about corrupt people,' Yarst said. 'But these are not corrupt people who are out on the street.' When Fatima Tlis arrived in America, she resettled in Erie, Pennsylvania, through the work of the International Institute of Erie, now the Erie field office of the nonprofit U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. It helped her learn English, get a Social Security card and establish credit. She couldn't get a car, so she and her two children would ride bicycles through the rural roads of northeast Pennsylvania to Walmart for groceries, which they loaded into backpacks. 'Of course, in Pennsylvania, nobody cares that you're some kind of a famous journalist,' she told The Post. When she found out her fellowship application to Harvard University's Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights had been accepted, she broke down sobbing. Before that, in Russia, Tlis reported for both independent Russian media and the U.S.-based Associated Press, particularly about issues in the Caucasus. She said Russian security forces harassed her, detained her, tortured her and once put her in a hidden room in a police station that she called a 'cage.' It was 12 feet long, but only four feet wide, and had a door with thick iron bars, through which she could see a portrait of Putin on the wall. After that, a former classmate who worked for the Russian security forces, stopped her on the street one day and warned her that her name was on a list and urged her to flee the country. 'What list?' Tlis replied. 'You remember your friend Anna Politkovskaya?' she recalls him asking. 'She was on the same list – and those lists never expire.' Politkovskaya, a journalist and human rights activist critical of Putin, was assassinated in 2006. Tlis joined Voice of America in 2010 after two years of fellowships at Harvard, including the prestigious Nieman Fellowship. At the time of Trump's executive order in March dismantling the USAGM, she was the supervisory editor in charge of Polygraph and the team's only full-time employee. The others worked full time but were designated as personal services contractors, who are easier to hire and fire. As of now, she still has a job. Lake sent her plans for a reduction in force at the USAGM to Congress on June 3, a move that would eliminate all but 80 staffers at the agency and fewer than 20 at Voice of America. About 1,300 people worked at VOA before the March executive order. Tlis said that – beyond Polygraph – she personally knows of more than a dozen asylum holders or seekers at Voice of America. Lake did not respond to a request for comment about the asylum holders that have or could be fired. 'The people who were working on my team, journalists who, because of their job, endured the impossible just to be able to support the truth in their countries,' Tlis said. 'Still, after all of that they remained true to their profession, to their mission, and wanted to continue fighting lies and falsehoods and unmasking disinformation. Those people are getting fired right now.'
Japan Today
14 hours ago
- Japan Today
IOC leaders praise Los Angeles amid unrest in 2028 Olympics host city
California National Guard are positioned at the Federal Building on Tuesday, June 10, 2025, in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer) By GRAHAM DUNBAR Olympic officials meeting Wednesday in Switzerland took a calm, longer view of the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles after days of images of deployed military and burning cars on the host city's streets. IOC president Thomas Bach praised the strength of the city's community and the umbrella group of 36 sports that Los Angeles will host in just over three years' time also expressed faith in a shared wish of all levels of government to unite for the Olympic project. 'With regard to LA, we have the full support of the president of the United States and the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles for the success of these Olympic Games,' Bach told The Associated Press on Wednesday. That despite President Donald Trump suggesting this week he would support the arrest of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has pushed back hard on federal government officials in the wake of an immigration crackdown that ignited tensions in the city. The U.S. government has deployed National Guard and Marines in the city where police have used rubber bullets and tear gas — a repeat of June 2013 scenes that flared in Rio de Janeiro three years before the Brazilian city hosted the Olympics. London also saw turmoil on the streets exactly one year before it hosted the 2012 Summer Games, provoked by a police shooting in a neighborhood close to some Olympic venues. 'These are the ups and downs' for Olympics organizers, said Sebastian Coe who led the London organizing team from its bid through to hosting successful Summer Games and Paralympics. 'You just have to roll with it' 'I spend a lot of time there," Coe, who owns a home in Los Angeles, told the AP on Wednesday. 'The problem is with 24-hour circulating news you see the same car burning every 20 minutes. It tends to make people think your whole city is up (in flames). And it's not.' Bach and Coe, the president of track and field's World Athletics, spoke on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the Summer Games sports bodies group, known by the acronym ASOIF. It got an update from a two-person delegation from Los Angeles. The 'ultimate priority right now' for the LA organizing team is finalizing the daily schedule of competition events in 2028, Nico Campriani, its vice president of sports told delegates. Leaders of the 36 Olympic sports had no follow-up questions on current events in the city. 'The IOC cannot comment on domestic political controversies,' Bach told the AP, citing the Olympic body's policy of neutrality. 'It's a strong city,' said the IOC leader whose presidency ends in 12 days' time. 'You saw this in the reaction after the wildfires where then the Olympic Games were also considered by the community as a catalyst for the rebuilding.' Bach will be formally succeeded June 23 in Lausanne by Kirsty Coventry, the Olympic gold medalist swimmer and now-former sports minister of Zimbabwe, who won an election in March to be president through 2033. A priority for the first female and African president in the IOC's 131-year history will be planning a meeting with President Trump. Federal government guarantees on funding security and processing visas for the July 14-July 30 games in 2028, and subsequent Paralympics, were needed to be awarded the Olympics in 2017 during the first Trump administration. Putting faith in LA 2028 and IOC leaders, ASOIF president Ingmar de Vos insisted they would 'do the necessary' work in ongoing relationships with all levels of government. 'I am also believing very strongly in the state and the city and the people of Los Angeles,' De Vos said. 'They want these games.' © Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Japan Times
2 days ago
- Japan Times
Canadian teenager McIntosh smashes 200m medley world record
Summer McIntosh smashed the decade-old world record in the women's 200m individual medley on Monday, touching the wall in 2:05.70 for her second record at the Canadian swimming trials. The 18-year-old eclipsed Hungarian Katinka Hosszu's mark of 2:06.12 set at the 2015 World Championships to become the first woman to duck under 2:06. It was triple Olympic gold medallist McIntosh's second world record of the meet following her 400m freestyle world record on Saturday. The gifted Canadian teenager had also impressed during Sunday's victory in the 800m freestyle, clocking the third-fastest time in history in an event not typically regarded as her strongest. Yet McIntosh showed no signs of fatigue with another dazzling performance to delight the crowd in British Columbia on Monday. "Overall really happy with that time and always just trying to keep pushing forward," McIntosh said after her record-breaking display. "It's awesome. 200 (individual medley) is my main race out of my top five or six races where I really have to execute perfectly. "There's no room for mistakes and it's kind of a sprint event for me, so I'm really happy with that. It gives me a lot of confidence heading into Singapore," added McIntosh, referring to next month's World Championships. Asked how she had prepared herself for Monday's effort after a gruelling weekend, she added: "Just recovering, sleeping as much as possible and eating a lot. "And also mentally calming myself down and taking it one race at a time. "I've had a lot of practice at that these past few years." McIntosh laid the foundations for her assault on the record with flawless opening sections in the butterfly and backstroke before an improved breaststroke — her weakest discipline — left her on world record pace. From there she turned on the afterburners in the closing freestyle to obliterate Hosszu's record. Mary-Sophie Harvey trailed in second at 2:08.78 with Ashley McMillan third at 2:12.08.
