Something a little Different for the Blog

The world's press Saturday gushed over the glittering and "utterly British" opening ceremony for the London Olympic Games.

After seven years of planning, the Games kicked off Friday in a gleaming new stadium in a once rundown area of the British capital with a colourful showcase devised by "Slumdog Millionaire" director Danny Boyle.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation described the extravaganza, watched by an estimated one billion TV viewers around the world, as a "whimsical, riotous and very British spectacle." Britain's often sceptical press all ran upbeat headlines about the four-hour show that played out in front of 80,000 spectators in the Olympic Stadium in east London.

"Brilliant, breathtaking, bonkers and utterly British," wrote the Daily Telegraph, while the hard-to-please Daily Mail went with "Blast-Off!", splashing a picture of five Olympic rings showering fireworks onto the stage below during the ceremony.

More than 80 world leaders and royals attended the show, which kept Boyle's promise to showcase British history while maintaining the nation's quirky sense of humour, tracing time from a bucolic past through the Industrial Revolution.

The show even included a tribute to Britain's state-run National Health Service, with children wearing pyjamas bouncing on 320 hospital beds.

French newspapers said they had fallen under the spell of a show permeated by a typically British sense of humour.

"The ceremony offered yesterday to the entire world by the British was unusually bold, poetic and funny," wrote the sports daily L'Equipe.

"History, magic and emotion," added the daily Le Parisien.

The Sydney Morning Herald said Boyle's showpiece "did not take itself too seriously, but was never trivial. It was irreverent, but never disrespectful. It was clever, but did not outsmart itself. It was at once subversive and sublime." Sydney hosted the Olympics 12 years ago, and The Australian newspaper said Boyle had sought to match the city for creativity and "deploy the wit and the self-awareness that the Chinese lacked" at the 2008 Beijing games.

"Celebrating everything from punk music to social media and the Internet, the ceremony deliberately revelled in the chaos of Britain's free society and popular culture in an obvious retort to the breath-taking order and intimidating precision and scale of Beijing's opening ceremony," The Australian said.

"The result was not quite as charming as Sydney's ceremony, on which it was modelled, nor as overwhelming and grandiose as Beijing's but it was vibrant, stimulating and eclectic, just like London itself." US papers joined in the chorus of praise, The New York Times describing the fete as "a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful".

"It was neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future," wrote Times correspondent Sarah Lyall. "Rather, it was a sometimes slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948." Noting the roles played by renowned British celebrities such as "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling, Beatle Paul McCartney, Kenneth Branagh and Rowan "Mr Bean" Atkinson, The Wall Street Journal said however that "no star was bigger than Queen Elizabeth II." Spectators were treated to footage of the queen, in her first acting role, meeting James Bond, played by Daniel Craig, in Buckingham Palace, after which stuntmen playing Bond and the queen parachuted into the stadium just as the actual monarch was making her appearance in the Royal Box.

"It could well have been the most astonishing moment in modern Olympic history," Australia's News Limited said.

London 2012

London 2012

IOC celebrates CFK not considering Olympics as 'political demonstration'

The head of the International Olympic Committee Jacques Rogge assured he was "glad" that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had called the Argentine athletes to avoid demonstrations over the Malvinas Islands sovereignty during the Olympic Games of London 2012.

"I'm happy to say that Argentina's Head of State said that the Olympics are not an occasion to make political demonstrations of any kind," said IOC's president during a press conference at the English Capital City, where the Games will begin on Friday.

In the year of the 30 anniversary of the Falklands War, the government unveiled a video a few months ago in which a player of the field hockey national's men team was training in the Islands.

"To compete in English soil, we train in Argentine soil," read the polemic ad which led to a protest of the Brisith government and a conflict at the IOC.

"We talked with the Argentine committee and with the government about this issue," Rogge assured, as he later stated that he did not have any contact with Fernández de Kirchner.

'Toothless UK Government' - TSA security agents to be deployed in UK airports for Olympics

The US Transport Security Administration has reportedly prepared its personnel to be deployed in UK airports for the Olympic Games. The US agents will apply their skills to help their UK colleagues bolster security during the event.

­TSA personnel are to arrive at UK air hubs a week before and stay a week after the London Olympics, according to a newly reached agreement between UK’s Department of Transport and the US Transportation Security Administration, Sky News reports.

"This is an added security layer that has been done to help boost and aid the American airlines in particular that fly in and out of the likes of Heathrow and other airports,” says Sky's correspondent.

The agents are not permitted beyond boarding gates or onto UK aircraft. The action is aimed at aiding the US carriers’ security and also that of UK airlines flying in and out of America.

UK’s Olympic security has been questioned on a number of occasions.

The latest on July 15th, the Observer newspaper reported that since the start of the month, Heathrow immigration staff have missed a number of people on a security watch list whose arrival must be reported to counter-terrorism police or Britain's domestic intelligence service.

Authorities in London are under extreme pressure to provide the necessary security staff after the failure of the private security contractor G4S to deliver personnel to protect Olympic venues. The security personnel provided have had insufficient training and failed to adequately conduct body searches or operate scanners, according to reports.

"I can see so many security loopholes for this event. Security staff are given a very short time for their training and there is a very slack approach," said a whistleblower, an expert in weapons and explosives detection.

Now the UK government has called in an extra 3,500 troops to guard the events in addition to the 7,500 troops already scheduled to provide security at some 100 sensitive sites.

Olympian Politics

So far this month British police have arrested 14 people on terrorism charges. Three have been charged with terrorism, mainly because the car they were caught in contained guns and bomb making materials. British police, intelligence, and counter-terrorism are particularly active right now because London is hosting the Olympic Games, which start on July 27th. Many Islamic terror organizations have threatened to carry out attacks during the Olympics and Britain has many residents who support that kind of violence.

The terrorism problems in Britain are worse than they appear. Until two years ago when the Labor party, which had ruled since 1997, lost power, the police were cautioned to be careful not to offend the sensibilities of Moslems in Britain while searching for terrorists. The Labor Party had been dependent on, and beholden to, the million strong Pakistani population in Britain. Labor had been reluctant to move too aggressively against pro-terrorist attitudes in the Pakistani community, although Labor did go after anyone identified as an Islamic terrorist (before or after carrying out an attack).

However, the counter-terrorism situation was more complicated than that. There have long been some disturbing attitudes among the Pakistani origin Britons when it came to Islamic terrorism. For example, two years after the 2005 Islamic terror attacks in London, an opinion survey revealed some 60 percent of British Moslems believed that Moslems were not responsible. Over 20 percent of British Moslems believed that the British government was behind those attacks, despite the positive identification of the attackers as three men of Pakistani descent and one a Jamaican who had converted to Islam.

Where did British Moslems get these ideas? Like most people everywhere, they get such information from mass media. But in the last two decades, cable TV news has become available for overseas audiences in many parts of the world. Thus migrants can move to the West, make lots more money, live better lives, and continue to get TV newscasts from the old country. As most web users now know, news media in different parts of the world report the same events very differently. In the Moslem world the news media likes to push the idea that all their economic and social problems are caused by the West, mainly the Christian West. The general idea is that there's this vast conspiracy by the West to keep the Moslems down and destroy Islam. Since most Moslem states are run by dictators or monarchs, there is often official support for this fantasy. It distracts the people from the real source of their problems. While many Moslems figure out that this myth is, well, a myth, they learn to keep quiet about it, lest they be condemned (and physically harmed) for being a "Western spy" or "unIslamic."

In the past migrants would change their attitudes as they were exposed to Western media (which has its own set of myths but is vastly more open to different ideas). No more. Moslem migrants get off the plane from the old country and within a short time, they are looking at the same newscasts they consumed back home. When they attempt to discuss world affairs with the locals, they quickly find a vast difference of opinions. Most Moslems recoil and retreat into an insular migrant mind set. This is why you have Moslems in places like Britain, or anywhere else in the West, clinging to old country myths, despite a lot of contradictory evidence confronting them daily.

Many Moslems do move away from these fantasies. Thus 40 percent of British Moslems acknowledged that Moslems were responsible for the July 7 attacks. But many of those respondents did not consider the Moslem world responsible. Moslems tend to migrate from parts of the world where civic responsibility is not taken as seriously as in the West. Islam, an Arabic word meaning "submission," has eroded the sense of personal responsibility over the centuries.

The children of immigrants have, historically, more rapidly adopted the attitudes prevalent where they live. But the satellite news stations make it easier for the kids to keep their heads back in the old country. And back there, visions of revenge against the West and support for Islamic terrorism, give many in the migrant communities murderous ideas or an inclination to support such violence.

The Labor government found that a policy of tolerance towards Islamic radicals within the Pakistani community kept most Pakistanis voting Labor. The new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government is not beholden to the Britons of Pakistani origin and was more aggressive in cooperating with India and the U.S. to coerce Pakistan into cracking down on Islamic terror groups. There is now less reluctance to go after Islamic radicals in the British Pakistani community or scrutinize the 60,000 Pakistani origin Britons who travel to Pakistan each year. Even the Labor government was forced to cope with the fact that many of these visitors were going to the old country to receive terrorist training.

Labor handled these Islamic radicals carefully, spending huge amounts of money to monitor the activities of thousands of terrorism suspects but only making arrests when there was a near-certainty that a terrorist act was about to be carried out. Calls from the United States to be more active in rounding up terrorism suspects are now being heeded. The United States still considers Britain the main source of Islamic radicalism in the West but at least they now have a ruling party in Britain that agrees with that assessment and is willing to move more aggressively to do something about it. With the Olympics coming to London, these new counter-terror efforts will be put to the test.

Russian Media - 'Lethal force' at the ready: No-fly zone over London Olympics

It’s official: starting Saturday, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) may use “lethal force” against any unauthorized craft, including passenger jets, caught violating London airspace during the Olympics.

The no-fly zone is the latest in security measures that have been criticized for putting Londoners at further risk from terrorist attacks rather than protecting them.

The RAF warned that rogue aircraft that stray into the no-fly zone above London could be shot down.

"As a last resort, we will have lethal force as an option," said Air Vice-Marshal Stuart Atha, the Olympics’ air security commander, at a briefing at the RAF Northolt base in West London. He added that such a situation would be a “worst case scenario” and the decision would be made at the “highest level of government.”

The new no-fly restrictions came into force at midnight on Friday and encompass the central London area, the Olympic Park in Stratford and a large part of the Southeast.

While commercial flights will not be affected by the measures, light aircraft, gliders and hot air balloons will be expected to adhere to flight regulations until August 15.

Teams of military personnel will be on constant watch for craft that stray into the restricted zone. If any suspicious planes are sighted, Typhoon fighter jets and helicopters will be deployed to escort them out of restricted air space. Any craft that does not respond to warnings by the RAF may be gunned down.

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The ‘militarization’ of the Games

UK authorities are leaving nothing to chance during the Olympics, deploying 17,000 military personnel throughout the capital for the duration of the Games, 11,800 of which are soldiers.

In spite of widespread protests, the government is also installing surface-to-air missiles flanking the Olympic Park in East London.

London residents reacted with uproar, claiming that they were not properly consulted over the defense plans. They appealed for a judicial review, arguing that their human rights had been violated and voicing concerns that the presence of missile installations could turn their homes into potential terrorist attack targets.

“If it's going to affect our children, our own safety, our security, then there's a potential for people who are evil-minded who may sabotage the situation. I’m a father of young children, so I have reservations about having missiles placed here,” said one tenant to ABC Radio.

However, their court appeal was overturned on the basis that the missiles pose no legitimate threat to residents.

The UK government has spent more than 1.5 billion pounds on safety measures at the Games in the country’s biggest peacetime security operation in history.

U.S. athletes to wear berets at opening ceremony | Olympics

The U.S. Olympic team unveiled uniforms designed by Ralph Lauren for the July 27 opening ceremony at the London Olympics. The uniforms include navy-blue berets. At the 2002 Winter Games, powder-blue berets like those worn by U.S. athletes quickly sold out at Salt Lake City stores.

Swimmer Ryan Lochte models the U.S. Olympic opening-ceremony uniform.

Berets are back for the U.S. Olympic team.

The team Tuesday unveiled buttoned-up, refined uniforms designed by Ralph Lauren for the July 27 opening ceremony at the London Olympics.

Men will wear navy-blue blazers with the Olympic-team patch, along with a red-and-navy tie and cream-colored pants. Women will pair the blazers with scarves and wear knee-length, cream-colored skirts.

All team members will top their uniforms with navy berets that have stripes.

In 2002, the U.S. team wore powder-blue berets at the Winter Olympics that became instant hits and quickly sold out at stores around Salt Lake City.

Court shoots down London residents’ missile claim

A member of Britain's armed forces closes a gate at an apartment complex overlooking the Olympic Park where residents have been warned that surface to air missiles will be installed, in east London.

A group of residents in East London fear for their safety after authorities ruled in favor of transforming their peaceful apartment building into a weaponry site.

Council tenants at the Fred Wigg Tower have lost a High Court battle to stop surface-to-air missiles from being stationed on the roof of their 17-story building during the Olympics.

Residents were appalled to hear that the British government was willing to go to such extreme lengths to protect the Olympic venues.

“If it's going to affect our children, our own safety, our security, then there's a potential for people who are evil-minded who may sabotage the situation. I’m a father of young children, so I have reservations about having missiles placed here,” said one tenant to ABC Radio.

A judge ruled on Tuesday that tenants did not have a case to argue, despite their concerns that the weapons could make the building the target of a terrorist attack.

The Ministry of Defense says the placement of the missiles is both “legitimate and proportionate,” and that they pose no credible threat to civilians.

Residents applied for judicial review on the grounds that their human rights were violated – claiming they were not properly consulted over the proposals for the defense system.

The tenants’ lawyers argued that concerned occupants should be relocated during the Olympics, or that a gantry should be built away from the block to host the missile system.

However, the court justice ruled that “the law and the facts militate against the claim for judicial review.”

The UK government plans on stationing missiles in six locations throughout London.

Secret Olympics deal gives minister power to shoot down aircraft over London

Minister could order firing of missiles from Leytonstone flats after agreement with local council, army chief tells high court

Residents protest against government plans to station missiles on the roof of the Fred Wigg Tower in Leytonstone. Photograph: Andrew Cowie/AFP/Getty Images

The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, could personally order missiles placed on top of a tower block in east London to shoot down an "unauthorised" aircraft approaching the Olympic Park following a secret agreement reached with the local council, one of the army's most senior officers has told the high court.

High-velocity missiles placed on the flats in Leytonstone amounted to "a goalkeeper system, as the last line of defence", according to General Sir Nick Parker, commander of UK land forces.

He revealed the nature of discussions within the cabinet and Waltham Forest council in evidence to the high court, where on Monday occupants of the flats will challenge the decision by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to deploy the missiles.

The Fred Wigg Tower in Leytonstone is one of six locations chosen by the MoD out of 100 sites in London for their suitability in meeting "technical and operational requirements", Parker disclosed.

He added: "Following the on-site evaluation and my review, officials entered into discussions with the landowners to secure rights to use and access sites. In respect of the FWT [Fred Wigg Tower], confidential discussions with the chief executive (and through him the leader and leading councillors) of the London Borough of Waltham Forest led them to agreeing to grant a lease [of the FWT roof], on 19 April."

Parker said the plan to site the missiles in residential and built up areas was unprecedented. The deployment was approved by the cabinet's Olympics committee, which is chaired by the prime minister.

Parker warned the high court of the "dire circumstances" in which the missiles would be called upon - namely, "where an unauthorised aircraft, possibly one that has been hijacked, is making a determined approach to the park and has evaded all other forms of air defence and efforts to divert it out of the restricted airspace".

He added: "In those circumstances, where the alternative if the aircraft is allowed to proceed could result in huge loss of life in the park, [the defence secretary] has made clear he would give the order to shoot down that aircraft.

"The ability to shoot down an airborne threat using HVM [high velocity missiles], in this location, provides further options to ministers, and means that more time would be available for such a momentous decision. Ministers have been assured that shooting down a plane in such circumstances would be lawful."

Martin Howe, the lawyer representing residents from 61 of the 108 occupied flats in the tower block, said on Friday: "It is astonishing that a secret deal was done with democratically elected council leaders and council officials, for the MoD to use the roof of the Fred Wigg Tower as a missile battery and place explosives over the heads of men, women and children, without any form of consultation with them.

"The residents of the Fred Wigg Tower recognise there is a need to protect the Olympic Games, and none of them are saying that there should be no security for the Games."

"Whilst many Londoners might be surprised at the pre-authorised decision to potentially shoot down rogue aircraft over one of the most densely populated cities in the world, the issues to be decided by the court are of significant importance to the residents in Leytonstone and other sites all over London".

UK MoD confirms Olympic missile plans

Rapier and Starstreak surface-to-air missiles are to be deployed at sites around London in order to defend the Olympic Games from an airborne terrorist attack, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.

While there are said to be no specific threats against the games, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said that the public expected strong safety and security measures throughout the event.

"Ground-based air defence systems (GBADS) will form just one part of a comprehensive, multi-layered air security plan which, I believe, will provide both reassurance and a powerful deterrent," said Hammond.

The MoD has confirmed that the Lexington Building, in Bow and Fred Wigg Tower in Waltham Forest will host the Starstreak High Velocity Missile system, while the larger Rapier missiles will be based at Blackheath Common, William Girling Reservoir, Shooters Hill and Barn Hill.

Residents of the Fred Wigg Tower last week launched a legal challenge against the government's decision to site the missiles in a residential area, but Hammond said the government was confident of defeating the action.

"We have undertaken a wide programme of engagement with the communities affected, involving relevant local authorities, landowners, MPs, Council Leaders, and community meetings," he said. "These have shown that, while people understandably have questions and concerns which we have sought to answer, broadly speaking communities are supportive of our work.

"A small number of activists object to the deployment of these defensive measures and a legal challenge to the government's decision to deploy GBAD has been initiated. The MoD will defend these proceedings vigorously and is confident of defeating them."

Three Russian athletes disqualified ahead of Olympics

Evgeniya Zinurova

Doping has put an end to the Olympic dreams of three Russian female runners; Evgeniya Zinurova, Nailya Yulamanova and Svetlana Klyuka have received two-year bans less than a month before London 2012.

­The statement from the anti-doping body of the International Association of Athletics Federations, explains the athletes were punished for the “abnormal readouts on their biological passports”, which means they were tampering with urine samples.

The disqualifications would see the trio not only missing the Games in the British capital, but parting with some silverware they won earlier as well.

Yulamanova will see all of her results after August 20, 2009 annulled, which means she’ll lose her European marathon gold of 2010. 

While Zinurova is to be deprived of the indoor 800-meter title she won at the European championships in 2011.

Klyuka’s results starting from August 15, 2009 will also be annulled, which means she’ll keep the silver she took at the Euros in 2006. The 33-year-old was fourth on 800-meter in Beijing 2008. 

The 2012 Summer Olympics are to take place in London between July 27 and August 12.