Sebastian Coe's response to an appeal from the Vietnam Women's Union that he and his colleagues in the IOC reconsider their decision to accept sponsorship from Dow Chemical exemplifies the London Olympics’ razor-wired, public relations and money-fuelled totalitarian state within a state. By John Pilger.

Political systems promising security and social justice have been replaced by piracy, 'austerity' and 'perpetual war'; an extremism dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. By John Pilger.

Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20thcentury. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as best they could.

The Leveson inquiry is a club matter, in which a member has caused such extraordinary public embarrassment he must be black-balled, so that nothing changes. By John Pilger.

Other writers have been quiet, complicit or twittering in the face of modern imperialism. Only Harold Pinter has spoken out – and written – against it consistently. John Pilger celebrates the Nobel Prize-winner