Not only is London overspending for this coming summer's Olympics—the Guardian now estimates that the initial budget of £2.37 billion may be ten times that—but also the city will be turned into a locked-down police state! Sort of permanently, in fact. Neat! During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city [...]

The Chilean student demonstrations are really amazing—at least 527 or possibly 552 or could be 800 people all told were arrested yesterday (often, let's say, not nicely), and students occupied state TV offices to get the message out in a traditional fashion. The higher education system is now predominately a group of for-profit businesses, and the students are organizing on the principle that going permanently into debt for education is not a way a country's education system should be run. How about that. Today, student organizers are turning down a vague proposal from the government that increases some public funding. Good!

"Now maybe the Liberals know how the Conservatives felt last year when the Democrat Congress rammed Obamacare through (without even reading it)."

That comment, by "JamVee" on a Reuters story about last Saturday's near-100,000-strong protest crowd in Madison, perfectly sums up what has become the predominant arguing position of pro-Walker conservatives. This "shoe on the other foot" defense of Governor Scott Walker's budget bill stinks of revenge, not reason. But while there are many more solid reasons that the two bills are different, there really are ways in which the two pieces of legislation are the same—and, in one sense, they're exactly the same.

Gay-disliking, anti-union, immigrant-suspicious libel suit defendant and former DUI arrestee Rob Ford is now the mayor-elect of Toronto! Goodbye, wasteful government employees and bike lanes—oh yes, he really hates urban bicyclists. He's going to change the face of the city and do it… by spending… less money, in that magical way, and he beat out the crazily fun but hostile former drug addict gay dad George Smitherman to win the day. This will actually be a great experiment! Maybe he can privatize garbage collection and cut the city's debt by $1.58 billion over four years and also spend $4 billion on new subway lines and hire more [...]

"The letter on my desk was from a family, a husband and wife. They had written to me after reading a short news article I’d done about a 26-year-old convicted child molester who had been arrested that week and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. The girl was their daughter. She had been raped by the man two months earlier but had been locked away in juvenile detention for more than a month—longer than her attacker had been in custody." —Here's what is probably the most upsetting story you'll ever hear.

"Executive Outcomes was hired by several African governments during the 1990s to put down rebellions and protect oil and diamond reserves; it did not stage coup attempts." —Ah, it's one of those annoying days on the New York Times correction page, when the paper can only report what you have down cold, which it'll never get, and so they have to face up to complaints from global mercenary outfits. Shells within shells! Executive Outcomes (such a good name!) became a child of Strategic Resource Corporation, and contracted for Sandline International, both of which helped run the Sierra Leone "civil war," and which is a sibling to Aegis Defence [...]

"Just two months after being sworn into office, Ohio Gov. John Kasich will lay out his plan for Ohio’s budget reduction on Tuesday at noon…. Ohio Representative Matt Lundy told NewsChannel5 that he learned of plans to sell the Grafton Correctional Institution and the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility as a package to a private prison operator are part of Tuesday’s budget announcement. Right now, the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility is privately operated, while Grafton Correctional is operated by the state." You could make this stuff up but you wouldn't be creative enough. The Ohio budget gap is $8 billion.

Surprise! When you get rid of all the people who run your prisons, so that they can be run more "efficiently" by private corporations, you then have to pay out their unused sick time, vacation time and holiday time before you put them on the streets. Apparently no one included this in the cost-savings planning. (Also, they're calling these workers "displaced," which is… cute.) The $25-million bill looks like it'll bring Florida's Department of Corrections to its budgetary knees.

Camp Verde—well north of Phoenix, closer to Flagstaff—would like to make some money. So good news: according to the Camp Verde Journal, "Town Manager Russ Martin said he thinks he’s found a way that could help improve the town’s return on its investments." Whoo hoo!

Right now, they do a thing called the Local Government Investment Pool; there's a ton of these, state to state, and they do cautious, over-night, low-return investing for counties and towns. But really these GIPs are actually kind of hectic sometimes! Florida's GIP had a weird March: It opened the month with $7.3 billion, it had deposits of $690 million, withdrawals of $1.3 billion… [...]

Who says wealth doesn’t trickle down? As the nation’s redundant masses tremble, Oliver-Twist-style, before the spectacle of a Democratic-run Congress deciding whether merely to reward quarter-millionaires or the full-scale kind with lavish tax cuts, they might do well to consult the sobering tale of billionaire enclosure of central California’s water supply. It’s hard to see just how the nation’s owning classes will produce additional helpings of gruel (or at least low-wage service-sector jobs) if they’re so deeply averse to spreading around something as essential to agriculture, health and sanitation as water.

This saga, retailed in dogged and gruesome detail by Alternet’s John Gibler, concerns the enterprising private [...]