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.

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.”

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.

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.

The Rio you won’t see at the Olympics.

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.

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...

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.

In a move that could be interpreted as indulgent or prescient — or both — the U.S. men's basketball team at the Rio Olympics will stay aboard a luxury cruise ship rather than the spartan facilities at the athletes village. It appears the U.S. women will also be living aboard the Silver Cloud, according to media reports. The men's basketball team, made up of 12 highly compensated NBA stars, has a tradition of opting for upscale digs ever since professionals were allowed to play in the Olympics in 1992. And the men's team even stayed on a cruise liner once before, at the 2004 Games in Athens.

Rio 2016 organisers will launch a new project to give away more than 200,000 tickets to schoolchildren to help to fill the gaps in stands, the Guardian can reveal. Officials also told those coming to the Games to “fasten their seatbelts” for a bumpy ride following a cost cutting programme that has reduced the number of volunteers and reduced bills in a host of non-essential areas. Organisers said that because they had hit their 1bn Reais revenue target, they were in a position where they could give tickets away – despite having earlier promised not to do so.

Forget about the floating tires. You can spot those in the water even in clean cities around the world. What gobsmacks you as you approach a canal near the Rio international airport, a body of water that flows into the city’s Guanabara Bay – home of the 2016 Olympics sailing venue — is the smell. It’s a gaseous stench: inhale it at your stomach’s own risk.

The sand traps will be the least of the golfers' worries. The Golf Channel recently explored the Olympic golf course in the Barra da Tijuca neighborhood of Rio, an upscale region nestled on the lakefront. While that makes for a picturesque setting, it also means the grassy slopes are a veritable Noah's Ark of Brazilian wildlife. Spotted so far on the links are: sloths, caimans, boa constrictors, mico monkeys, burrowing owls and 40 capybaras, the largest rodents in the world.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) today voted unanimously to include skateboarding in the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. The vote, which took place during the 129th IOC Session in Rio de Janeiro, the site of this year's Summer Games, was the culmination of a lengthy campaign to bring skateboarding to the Olympics. The Fédération Internationale Roller Sports (FIRS) was behind skateboarding's bid, though the World Skateboarding Federation (WSF) and International Skateboarding Federation (ISF) have both argued that they should oversee skating in the Games.

On a cool December night in Paris, at an awards ceremony in the city’s 3rd arrondissement, Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, took the stage to thunderous applause from an audience full of his fellow mayors from around the world. Paes’ voiced boomed as he stressed the importance of cities leading the fight against climate change — as chair of the C40 network, a group representing 80 world cities working together to combat the devastating effects of climate change, Paes is a prominent evangelist of the local leader’s power to champion sustainability at home.

The opening ceremony hasn’t even kicked off yet, and olympic photographers are already having a hard time in Rio. Case in point: News Corp photographer Brett Costello recently had $40,000 worth of camera gear stolen… in broad daylight… in a crowded cafe… in 10 seconds flat.

The 2016 Summer Olympics are scheduled to begin today, but for some it has already began with a bang. Upon their arrival in Rio, a bus full of Chinese basketball reporters was caught in a roadside gunfight. Six locals were killed in the exchange, but no Chinese casualties have been reported. Initially, the Chinese-language Basketball Magazine posted on Weibo that Chinese national basketball team players had been caught near the flurry of bullets, where they would have presumably suffered from flashbacks to their two exhibition matches against Team USA last month.

Spectators leaving the opening ceremony of the Olympics were confronted by the body of a man shot dead near Maracana Stadium. Eyewitnesses said early Saturday that blood poured from the body onto the road as medics tended to the man next to an ambulance. Loud multiple gun shots were heard earlier by photographers from The Associated Press, forcing games volunteers and others leaving Friday night' ceremony to duck for cover behind cars. A shooter was seen running from the scene and fleeing in a car close to a university parking lot.

The International Paralympic Committee is set to do what its Olympic counterpart did not and ban Russia outright from its Games later this month, the Observer has learned. In the wake of the publication of Professor Richard McLaren’s report that revealed jaw-dropping details of systemic doping in Russia, the IPC provisionally suspended Russia from the Paralympics.

Rio police say a man was shot dead near Maracana Stadium after Friday's opening ceremony.