Less than a week before the 2016 Rio Olympics are set to start, the Brazil Ministry of Justice terminated its contract with a private firm that was supposed to provide security for the games. It’s not hard to see why the Ministry of Justice reacted so harshly. With only a few days left until the first venues are set to open, Artel admitted that they have only hired 500 security personnel.

Its members call it, with an almost religious conviction, “the Olympic Movement,” or “the Movement” for short, always capitalized. At the very top of “the Movement” sits the International Olympic Committee, a nonprofit run by a “volunteer” president who gets an annual “allowance” of $251,000 and lives rent-free in a five-star hotel and spa in Switzerland. At the very bottom of “the Movement” — beneath the IOC members who travel first-class and get paid thousands of dollars just to attend the Olympics, beneath the executives who make hundreds of thousands to organize the Games...

Just days ahead of the Olympic Games the waterways of Rio de Janeiro are as filthy as ever, contaminated with raw human sewage teeming with dangerous viruses and bacteria, according to a 16-month-long study commissioned by the Associated Press. Not only are some 1,400 athletes at risk of getting violently ill in water competitions, but the AP's tests indicate that tourists also face potentially serious health risks on the golden beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana.

The Rio you won’t see at the Olympics.

Faster, Higher, Stronger — the motto of the Olympic Games. But don’t expect these words to resonate in the track-and-field stadium in Rio de Janeiro at the coming Olympic Games. Scientific studies suggest that for most events, athletes have for years been operating at or near a plateau of performance — which seems to represent fundamental limits imposed by human biology. And in some events — notably women’s sprints and throws — the legacy of widespread doping in the 1980s casts a long shadow over today’s performances, and means that some world records may never be broken.

Kidnapped New Zealand-born athlete Jason Lee and his partner are now safe in Toronto after a harrowing week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Two military police officers kidnapped Lee over the weekend, forcing him into an unmarked car and making him extract 2000 Reais ($812) from ATMs. Police from the same branch then visited his apartment in what he described as an attempt to intimidate him. Two officers have since been taken into custody. In their first interview since leaving Brazil, Lee and his partner, journalist Laura McQuillan, revealed what sent them packing so fast - a second visit to their home.

The Olympic torch relay was disrupted by striking teachers after it entered Rio de Janeiro. Video footage of the demonstration suggests the flame was extinguished while the runner carrying the torch had to be bussed to safety. The incident forced a temporary halt and prompted some runners to quit the relay. Protesters stoned cars and police responded with tear gas and pepper spray. To avoid further problems, a stretch of the relay was missed out.

But Olympic swimmers, sailors and windsurfers will have to look out for more than that, because the city’s waters have what health experts are calling a “petri dish of pathogens,” including bacterias that cause diarrhea, vomiting and even death to those with weakened immune systems. “Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap, and they risk getting sick from all those microorganisms,” Dr. Daniel Becker, a local pediatrician who works in poor neighborhoods, told the New York Times. “It’s sad but also worrisome.”

Nineteen more Russian rowers have been banned from competing at next month's Olympics, taking the number of Russian athletes suspended this week to 37. Earlier on Tuesday, eight athletes across canoeing, modern pentathlon and sailing were banned, as seven swimmers and three rowers were on Monday. Governing bodies are making the rulings following the damning World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report into state-sponsored doping in the country. The Rio Games begin on 5 August.

When journalists show up en masse in Rio de Janeiro to cover the Summer Olympics next month, many will stay in the Barra Media Villages, a self-described group of “over 1,500 spacious and modern apartments” complete with kitchens, 24/7 food access, along with a huge pool. But, write Daniel Gross and Jonathan Watts for The Guardian, that luxury comes at a price: Part of the village was constructed on top of a mass grave for slaves. Gross and Watts report that part of a Brazilian quilombo, a community of people whose ancestors were runaway slaves, was torn down to make the village.

The Australian team will not be moving into Olympic Village for the time being because of problems including "blocked toilets, leaking pipes and exposed wiring", delegation head Kitty Chiller has said, less than two weeks ahead of the Rio Games. Chiller, who said she would reassess the situation later, said she had raised concerns on a daily basis with the organisers and the International Olympic Committee, and was "pushing hard for a solution".

Doping in sport is widespread and shows little sign of abating. Athletes are dropping out of the Rio Olympics like flies. Maria Sharapova was banned for two years after testing positive for meldonium; a Romanian kayaking team failed their drug test, disqualifying them pending further investigations; and the International Olympic Committee announced that they could ban up to 31 athletes from competing because retests of their samples collected during the 2008 Beijing Olympics indicated the presence of banned substances.

Fifteen days before the Olympics opening ceremony, Brazilian police have arrested 10 alleged Islamic State sympathisers who are suspected of planning an act of terrorism during the games. Two others are still at large. The Brazilian justice minister, Alexandre Moraes, described the suspects – all of whom are Brazilian – as “absolutely amateur and unprepared”, but he said they had sworn allegiance to Islamic State, celebrated the recent attacks in Orlando and Nice, and some of them had tried to buy AK-47s.

Ask anyone in the United States what the biggest health risk is at the Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, and they’ll tell you it’s Zika. The mosquito-borne virus has hit Brazil the hardest, leaving more than 1,500 newborns with serious brain defects in its wake. Zika’s spread ignited a fiery funding battle in Congress, pushed cities to blindly craft local public health responses, and even convinced some Olympic athletes to skip this summer’s event.

The World Anti-Doping Agency has recommended that Russia's entire team is banned from this summer's Olympic Games. Its call follows a damning report which found Russia has systematically covered up doping in "all sporting disciplines" since 2011. The sports ministry and secret service "directed and oversaw" the manipulation of urine samples, resulting in at least 312 falsified results up until at least last year's world swimming championships, WADA claimed.

Antidoping officials are preparing to request a complete ban of the Russian delegation from the Summer Olympics if allegations of a state-run doping scandal at the 2014 Winter Games are verified.

“Super bacteria” has been found in Guanabara Bay, the site of 2016 Olympic sailing competition. With less than a month until the 2016 Olympics get underway in Rio de Janeiro, almost all mentions of the games are accompanied by tangible concerns. An upsurge in violence has swept through the Rio streets, and security seems unequipped to deal with it.

A new pollution problem has surfaced in Guanabara Bay, the venue for sailing in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Sailors complained Monday about an oil slick that turned white boats brown with crews in town practicing for the Olympics, which open in a month. "We've never seen anything like this. It was all over the place," said Finnish sailor Camilla Cedercreutz. "There was no way you could avoid it." It's yet another in a long list of problems confronting South America's first games: the Zika virus, rising crime and violence, budget cuts, and slow ticket sales.

The state says it fears a “total collapse” in public security, health, transport and more.

Athletes have already expressed concern about traveling to the heart of the Zika outbreak to compete in this summer’s Olympics. Now journalists are opting out entirely. Several NBC employees will not travel to Brazil to cover the games, including Today anchor Savannah Guthrie, who announced today that she’s pregnant. The CDC made a recommendation in February that women who are pregnant should not travel to Zika-affected countries, then later expanded the recommendation to include women who are considering getting pregnant.