Boston will not, after all, be hosting the 2024 Olympics, after reports that the US Olympic Committee had “severed ties” with the city’s bid on Monday.

The Boston Globe writes:

Bid organizers and the US Olympic Committee jointly agreed to pull the bid after Mayor Martin J. Walsh declared at a hastily scheduled news conference that he was not yet ready to put city taxpayers on the hook for any costs related to the Games if local Olympic organizers ran out of money.

and the paper explains how “mistakes and missed opportunities” sank the city’s bid.

When the city was originally chosen, ESPN‘s Keith Olbermann explained why Boston’s citizens should probably be celebrating today.

(YouTube/Keith Olbermann)

And of course, many are…

The move could put Los Angeles back in the mix, and if chosen as the US city could face bids from Paris and Rome.

http://twitter.com/LA_Trends/status/625750913664225280

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* POLITICS * Fallout continues from controversial remarks by former Gov and lower-tier Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee over the Iran nuclear deal, as the need for attention among the glut of candidates – especially ahead of the first debate on Aug 6 – appears increasingly to be clouding their better judgment.

But perhaps the only possible words in response were no words at all.

Before even the new low of this incident, Ed Kilgore wrote in the most recent issue of Washington Monthly how Huckabee “became the new Sarah Palin.”

It will be interesting to see how much Palinism-without-Palin the 2016 presidential field ultimately produces. Aside from Huckabee and Jindal and Santorum, there’s Ted Cruz, whose father, Rafael, a conservative evangelical minister, warms up crowds for his son with culture-war bromides punctuated by comparisons of liberals with communists who share an “evil agenda” for “destroying what this country is all about.” The surgeon turned politician Ben Carson has become a huge crowd favorite via a stock speech that focuses on the supposed loss of fundamental liberties to the sinister power of elites imposing rules of political correctness to suppress dissent. Texas Governor Rick Perry has managed to turn economic development into a culture-war weapon via his constant “raids” on companies in liberal states, especially California, which has replaced New York and Massachusetts in the conservative imagination as the epitome of alien territory.

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* WORLD * With Nato to meet on Tuesday to discuss Turkey’s security situation, details emerged of a US-Turkish plan to create an ISIS-free “buffer zone” on the country’s border with Syria.

After news yesterday that Britain is to fast-track a referendum on EU membership for next year, it was reported on Monday that another referendum on Scottish independence would not be held “before 2020.”

In a significant policy shift, the Boy Scouts of America ended its blanket ban on gay adult leaders. 

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* BUSINESS * Vice President Joe Biden once described New York’s LaGuardia airport as like “something out of a third world country”. On Monday he stood beside New York Gov Andrew Cuomo and announced that it would be basically torn down and completely rebuilt in a $4billion revitalization plan over the next five years.

The New York Times writes:

La Guardia is not just one of the most delay-plagued airports in the country, but one of the busiest of its size in the world. It was built when air travel was a luxury and still a bit of a novelty. Its outmoded setup, combined with the density of the airspace in the New York metropolitan area, leave it at the bottom of the rankings for on-time performance year after year.

So far this year, La Guardia ranked last among the 29 largest American airports in on-time departures, with slightly more than 70 percent of its flights counted as on time, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

China’s stocks were hit hard again on Monday – Reuters called the session “the biggest rout in eight years” – with a knock-on effect for the rest of the global markets. 

Worth revisiting this from few weeks back, from my very smart former colleague John Authers:

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* SPORTS * A “new” team representing Parma in the Italian football league has been cleared to join Serie D. The original club, former winners of the Uefa Cup, went out of business under a mountain of debt earlier this year.

 

* Apologies for a somewhat shortened Note tonight – I’m traveling.