For all its flaws, for all the bribes and the drugs and the fatuousness of the leaders, this is, in fact, the Olympics, the best of the best.
Pell has vehemently denied all allegations and said the bribe accusation was the result of a misunderstanding with the victim.
In interviews across Cairo, the rebellion of youth stood as an uprising of the dispossessed, if dispossessed is the word that captures all the petty humiliations, bribes and abbreviated lives once captured in an anthemic song by the Cairene band, Downtown.
One newspaper referred to the "accused Hosni Mubarak," and for Aboul-Ela Ahmed, someone important was finally being held to account for all the petty humiliations, the bribes, the indignities and the hardships that his state had brought.
All the buying, bribing and hoarding forces China to print a lot of paper money.
It takes 218 days to get a building permit to put up a warehouse, with all the attending bribes.
You hear of illicit night-time boat trips out into the bay, people wrapped in dark blankets, like a dirty smuggler's cargo, jumping from one boat to another, all the while bribing the petrified boat man to make the trip.
Since it is unlikely that a patient or his relatives can afford to bribe all the health workers involved in their treatment during an illness episode, they would have to select whom to corrupt; this was a source of rivalry and discontent.
The bribe for avoiding all this would be $50,000.
All those bribes and kickbacks radicalized the local population, turning it against the Afghan government and, at least some of the time, toward the Taliban.
