"Maybe some people will fast, and that's good for them. But for me, I can't risk losing any of my matches," Al Darae added.
Although the exact number of Muslim participants in the games is not known, Al Darae is far from alone.
Muslim athletes in London face a stern test, with nearly 17 hours of daylight.
"It's a 17-hour fast in London. It's not like here in the Middle East. How much can a person eat in one meal? You can't have, say 3,000 or 4,000 calories in one meal. You need time to digest," says sports nutritionist Hala Barghout from the UAE, according to the CNN report.
However, some Muslim leaders from the Middle East are insisting that their religious followers stick to the practice regardless of how it affects their performance in the Games.
"Playing sports is not a requirement in Islam. Players become athletes by choice. This optional activity, therefore, does not allow athletes to break their fast. They must be ambassadors of their faith. Meaning that Islam must be present in their actions, and they do not fall into anything that Islam forbids," Ahmed Abdul Aziz al Haddad, a mufti was quoted as saying by the report.
One alternative that has been suggested to some Muslim athletes is that if they observe Islam's teachings on charity by feeding 1,800 poor people, they might postpone their Ramadan fast until later in the year.
Source: www.ibtimes.co.uk
Men arrested after Chelmsford EDL protest - BBC News
Three men arrested following a protest by members of the English Defence League (EDL) in Chelmsford on Saturday have been released on bail.
They were held on suspicion of committing racially aggravated public order offences.
A 35-year-old from Rochester, Kent, a 19-year-old from Dagenham, Essex, and an 18-year-old from Yateley, Hampshire, are due to answer bail on 9 September.
About 30 people took part in the demonstration, police said.
A spokesman said no prior notification of the demonstration was given to Essex Police.
The protest in the city centre was contained within two hours, the spokesman added.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
London 2012: Boris Johnson says capital is 'prepared' - BBC News
Boris Johnson says concerns over security and transport before the Olympics is a "necessary pre-curtain up moment of psychological depression".
London is as well-prepared as any city in Olympic history to host the Games, Mayor Boris Johnson has said.
Playing down concerns about the city's transport network, he also insisted the Games would make money.
"We are going to be selling London," he told the BBC, adding that the Games had already brought "fantastic investment".
Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has called a planned strike by UK border staff on the eve of the Games "an absolute disgrace".
It comes after International Olympics Committee president Jacques Rogge told reporters he was satisfied with security arrangements for London 2012.
Mr Johnson told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show: "If you look at what Jacques Rogge had to say last night, he's been in London for a few days, he thinks that our city is as well-prepared as any city in the history of the Games."
The mayor said: "So far the traffic system and the transport networks generally are holding up well, touch wood."
He added: "I think possibly what we are going through at the moment as a nation, as a city, is that necessary pre-curtain up moment of psychological self-depression before the excitement begins on Friday."
'Selling London'Mr Johnson said the heads of most of the world's great businesses were coming to London over the next few weeks "and we are going to be showing what London has to offer, making it clear there are fantastic opportunities for investment.... we are going to be selling London".
He said: "The Olympic Games have already been responsible for fantastic investment in this city.
"Pension funds from across the world are investing in the Olympic sites right now... to say nothing of all the transport investment, which is transforming London.
"I defy the critics of the Olympics to say that this is not producing economic benefits for the city."
He said 512,000 people were understood to have turned out to see the torch relay on Saturday, and that most people in London were looking forward to the opening ceremony.
Meanwhile, Mr Hunt criticised members of the PCS union who have voted to go on strike on Thursday, the eve of the opening ceremony.
The action will involve staff across the Home Office, including the UK Border Agency, the Identity and Passport Service and Criminal Records Bureau.
Mr Hunt told BBC Radio Five Live's Sportsweek programme: "They are totally out of tune with the mood of the country."
He said: "I find it extraordinary. I mean we've got 600-odd staff who man the immigration terminals at Heathrow, and you've got 60,000 to 70,000 volunteers who are giving their time over the next six weeks, completely free of charge, and you know - they may or may not have a legitimate industrial grievance, but this is surely not the time to pursue it."
Mr Hunt added: "It's an absolute disgrace. It's totally out of sync with the way everybody else is behaving.
"If, you know, Labour and the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats can come together to unite behind the Olympics I think this is just a moment when you've just got to read the mood of the country a bit better."
He denied the strike would impact on preparations for the Games, adding: "We have a contingency plan in place and I am absolutely confident that we will get everyone into the country."
Asked by presenter Garry Richardson about the possibility of sacking the strikers, he replied: "I can tell you amongst ministers there have been people asking whether we should be doing that but I don't want to escalate things by talking about that right now because I know amongst those 600 people there are lots of people who want to do the right thing and turn up for work."
'Last resort'PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka told Sky News the strike was a "last resort" and he hoped it could be avoided.
He said: "We've still got a few days to avoid the dispute, I've written to Theresa May, we've written to the management of the Home Office."
Mr Serwotka said that 8,500 jobs were being cut, and 22% of staff at the border were to lose their jobs "even though we routinely have queues and passenger anger is rising all the time".
He added: "We've had compulsory redundancy notices issued to people in passport offices, when you cannot get a passport at the moment because the service cannot cope.
"So these are not demands about personal gain, they are about defending important services, the security of the country and ensuring that people still have the chance to work all the year round."
A Home Office spokesman said: "We want the PCS leadership to call off this irresponsible strike. We ask members not to walk out at a time when the eyes of the world are on the UK and thousands of overseas visitors are arriving at the border.
"Staff from across government including from the Home Office, MoD police and seconded police officers have been trained to work at the border.
"Those who have not already volunteered specifically for the Olympics are being asked to offer their support on 26 July."
In other developments:
- IOC president Jacques Rogge played down the chances of people being prosecuted for displaying the logos of companies which are not Olympic sponsors.
- The head of the British Olympic Association called for any spare Olympics tickets to go to troops called in at short notice to help with venue security
- The Olympic torch is on the second day of its seven-day tour of London in the final countdown to the Olympic Games
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
London 2012: Coe eyes Olympics glory for Britain - The Guardian
Lord Coe, the man umbilically linked with a London Olympics that will begin in just five days' time, insists he is not losing any sleep despite a string of last-minute problems. As the clock in Trafalgar Square ticking down to the opening ceremony inches towards zero, he says he lives by the maxim of a Tory prime minister from the early part of the last century.
"I do slightly take the Arthur Balfour view of the world that few things matter very much and most things don't actually matter at all. Somewhere in between you always find the right balance," he says.
"Nobody in our organisation was sitting there thinking the final runup to the Games wouldn't be testing and that when planning collided with reality there wouldn't be fragilities."
Which is just as well, because the seven-year project has been marked by soaring highs and crushing lows – a pattern set early when an inspiring bid victory in Singapore was followed a day later by the 7/7 bombings in London.
The last week or so, with the Olympic Park finally open to the world's media, athletes and officials, who began streaming into soggy Heathrow, has represented one of the most testing periods of all.
Questions were asked in the House of Commons and the troops called in following the admission by the security firm G4S that it could not provide its share of 23,700 guards within Olympic venues.
Coe, a gold medallist in 1980 and 1984, is clear where culpability lies – and it's not with his organising committee. He insists there is no correlation between the decision to increase the number of guards within venues from 10,000 to 23,700 – necessitating a fivefold increase in G4S guards – last December and the recent scramble to fill security rosters.
"This company is four times bigger than any other security company in the world. We were assured they could do what they were being asked to do when we made the final assessment of security needs once we knew the sessions and the venues," he says.
With all parties keen to draw a line and move on, Coe stresses that security has not been compromised by the saga.
Asked whether he feels let down by G4S, Coe says: "I'm not remotely dodging the question, but I'm not very good at letting anger, frustration, emotional response get in the way of this. We had a problem and we identified it at the beginning of July. We acted within hours of really understanding that this was a big issue. The point which has been slightly lost is that I know we have the numbers. We have the numbers because we have the military and eight police services here."
As it is, the presence of those troops and police officers will probably end up having a positive impact on perceptions of the Games, he says. "There is a big affection for their presence and they are really smart, engaging people. Their ability to deliver a safe and secure Games is not high on my list of concerns."
On Friday, the curtain will come up on a 17-day sporting celebration that will host 8.8 million ticket-holders, 10,500 athletes and twice as many members of the world's media. The government is selling it as an investment in the future, promising a legacy for everything from tourism to inward investment. Others remain more sceptical, but most are looking forward to the sporting spectacle.
Coe is hard to ruffle. But even he has appeared slightly unnerved in recent weeks. He had spoken recently to two contemporary athletes who had "fallen at the final hurdle" for selection and sympathised with their guilt at letting others down.
"There is a large chunk of me that says I don't – and we don't – want to let people in this country down. We're as excited about doing this. The 6,000 people in our organisation have lived and breathed and slept this. Of course, we feel a massive responsibility to get this right."
It will be "interesting", he says, to compare the feeling 40 minutes before Danny Boyle's £27m opening ceremony – described as a creative "high wire act" by those who have seen it – and his pre-race thoughts as a competitor.
"You learn a lot about yourself in those 40 minutes," he says, munching on pasta from the media canteen.
"I do accept, though, that was very individual. It was about not letting your nearest and dearest down. It will be the same sort of feeling, just multiply that by a lot more people that you don't want to let down."
The London 2012 organising committee, which is staging the Games using a privately raised £2bn budget but also benefits from more than £800m from £9.3bn in public funding, is a strange beast. It starts small and raises hundreds of millions in sponsorship, grows furiously in its final two years, then abruptly dismantles itself and flogs off its assets.
Coe's organising committee has benefited from the work of the Olympic Delivery Authority in building the gleaming venues and transforming a toxic wasteland into an impressive new urban park ahead of time and under budget.
That gave Locog some wriggle room, but it has since faced searching questions over the ticketing process, security and a perceived lack of transparency. In the plus column, the torch relay has been something of a triumph, more than 8m tickets have been sold, and the IOC and athletes are happy. Coe is proud, he says, to have put sport at the heart of the political agenda.
"My whole life, if there's been one continuum through pretty much everything I've done, or said, or roles and responsibilities I've had since the age of 18, it has been to secure a more robust and permanent place for sport in the political and social agenda."
The 55-year-old says the legacy promises that secured the Games have provided a "road map" to hold others to as economic times have got tougher, but accepts that delivering on them after the Olympics will require real political will.
Coe has permitted himself one or two moments of satisfaction, such as when he visited the Olympic Park with British IOC member Sir Craig Reedie so that they could share a Field of Dreams moment.
"We stopped the car and got out and had our little moment and then got back in and continued. But you don't dwell for very long as your mobile goes and there's another conversation to be had," he says.
Yet he retains an unshakeable conviction that the Games will be a triumph. He says he is not surprised the torch relay that arrived in London this weekend has been such a hit around the country, reaching an estimated 10m people. Coe believes it will go "up a notch" again this week in the capital.
For all the last-minute concerns, which have led to articles in the foreign press characterising us as a nation of whingers, Coe believes the Games will showcase the best of Britain – on the field of play and off.
"We were never going to win the bid, we were never going to be able to build it, then we weren't going to be able to raise enough money, then we weren't going to get any volunteers, then the torch wasn't going to ignite the excitement, then we didn't have any athletes — which we put behind us by Beijing. Then it was going to be chaos and it hasn't been," he says.
"We have a great, endearing ability in this country to question our ability. Often, it's quite counter-cultural. We have large parts of Britain in leading edge niche markets around the world, we have some of the most extraordinarily creative people ever put on this planet with a history and tradition that the rest of the world looks on enviously if a bit curiously. I like to think that with odd ups and downs we've shown that when we do things properly and we do things collegiately, we do them as well as anyone in the world."
As for London, he hopes that by the time the curtain comes down on the Paralympics in September it will be seen globally as "a modern, confident – not brash – city at ease in its own skin".
Coe has been selling these Games and their benefits since he became bid leader in 2004, but one telling aside when considering the range of perspectives from which he has seen the various Olympics since Moscow in 1980 reveals that even he recognises this is a leap into the unknown: "It will be interesting. We haven't done this before."
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
Of Indian women changing with globalisation and time (With Image) - Thaindian.com
New Delhi, July 22 (IANS) Sohana Badshah is a carefree rich “Bombay girl”, who moves to London to study interior designing. She falls in love with Jagdish Sachdev, a man of refined intellect. The dream match falls apart, with Jagdish blaming bad blood between the families.
Sohana returns home to discover Mumbai is full of her kind - girls with dyed brown tresses, plucked eyebrows, personalities scrubbed of distinct identities and fortunes to fall back on. She is unsure of her position in the family sweepstakes which pit her against her brother in an inheritance war.
Welcome to “Bombay Girl” (Harper-Collins India) by Los Angeles-based journalist-turned novelist Kavita Daswani’s new trilogy about a tale of new India that straddles several continents. It’s one of the new crossover novels that are making globalised lifestyle statements with live-in relationships and heartaches.
Daswani, a former fashion editor of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, may not be household name on Indian bookshelves but she has made the smart Indian heroine a bestseller in the West and Southeast Asia with her previous books, “For Matrimonial Purposes”, “Salaam, Paris”, “The Village Bride of Beverly Hills (Everything Happens For a Reason), “Indie Girl” and “Lovetorn”.
Daswani writes about the communities in the Indian diaspora and how they fit into the traditional institutions of marriage, families and the opportunities for women. She captures the clash of cultures between East and West - and the change.
Why Mumbai? Daswani says she set her story in Mumbai “because it is the only city in India I am most familiar with, connected with”.
“My acquaintance with the city began as a child during a family wedding. I used to visit the city as a child,” the writer, who grew up in Hong Kong, told IANS. Daswani began her career as a journalist at 17.
“In fact, before the book happened, I had not been to Mumbai for 11 years. The city had changed so much. I needed to get a sense of the city. This was the new Mumbai and I felt that I had to get a lot of time,” Daswani said.
She spoke “to people and read a lot of magazines”.
The women have changed in Mumbai, Daswani said. “Mumbai girls were much more sheltered and conservative in the past. That part has gone. There is new wealth in Mumbai, girls are well-travelled and have more exposure,” Daswani said.
After her wedding at the “Ananda” spa in the Himalayas - the first in the exclusive resort - Daswani did not return to India till 2010.
“I spent many days in Mumbai to research the book. I saw a lot of things that were not around in my childhood… the shopping malls. My first thought was I could be in LA right now…the quality of things, the bars, new restaurants and the sophistication. These were not mentioned anywhere in the book but made the backdrop,” she said.
For the little details, Daswani sent her draft to a friend who was an “editor at the Vogue in India - trendy, wealthy and well-travelled”. Daswani’s friend picked on a few things that made a big difference, like her heroine drinking milk and Old Man cookies. My friend told me that girls in Mumbai were drinking espresso and eating biscotti. Fifteen years ago, no one knew about biscotti,” Daswani said.
Daswani explores the idea of marriage, migration and freedom - in all six of her books featuring Indian women with diverging outlooks to life.
The defiant Anju in “For Matrimonial Purposes” escapes India for the US after she fails to marry, to find a career and to drop the “failure” tag. In “Salaam, Paris”, ambitious Tanaya Shah lands in her fantasy city to marry a man chosen for her but rejects him in the last for a life in high fashion and glamour. Priya in “The Village Bride of Beverly Hills” balances her life as a dutiful daughter-in-law and a secret ambition.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)
Source: www.thaindian.com
London 2012: Olympic Stadium shortlisted for RIBA Stirling Prize - Daily Telegraph
The favourite to walk away with the prize is David Chipperfield Architects, for their Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Yorkshire.
The company is the only previous Riba Stirling Prize winner on this year's shortlist.
In 2007, it scooped the award for the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany.
Also nominated is OMA's Maggie's Centre at Gartnaval Hospital in Glasgow, which was described as "thoughtful and intimate" by the judging panel.
Rem Koolhaas, who founded OMA, had known Maggie Keswick Jencks, after whom the Maggie's Centres are named, since the 1960s.
Lily Jencks, Maggie's daughter, was the landscape designer on the project.
The doughnut-shaped building is set in the old hospital car park, which has now been landscaped into a woodland.
The judges said: "The building succeeds in the central aim of all Maggie's entries - to create an environment of practical and emotional support for people with cancer. They aim to kindle a sense of curiosity and imagination - to be grand in ambition but small in scale."
OMA has also been nominated for the new Rothschild's Bank building at New Court in London, designed with Allies and Morrison.
The bank has been on the same site since 1809, which is now a conservation area.
Judges praised an "imaginative solution to a very constrained site".
The building, which also houses the Rothschild art collection, was also praised for its "synthesis between an office and a museum".
Riba said heritage and education were strong themes in this year's shortlist, with the the Sainsbury Laboratory housing Charles Darwin's collection, and the Lyric Theatre in Belfast making the shortlist along with New Court and Hepworth Wakefield.
The shortlisting of the new Lyric Theatre, by Dublin-based O'Donnell + Tuomey, marks the fourth time the practice has been nominated for the prize.
Last year, its An Gaelaras cultural centre in Derry was shortlisted.
The distinctive red Belfast brick echoes the existing south Belfast residential landscape.
The panel said the auditorium has a "special, sculptural interior and incredible acoustics".
The Sainsbury Laboratory, by Stanton Williams, is a "stimulating working environment" to attract world-class scientists, the judges said.
It was praised for its energy efficiency and green approach. Rainwater is collected from the roof and stored in two huge tanks which irrigate the garden's glasshouse and plant chambers.
Riba president Angela Brady said: "The annual Riba Stirling Prize celebrates architectural excellence and this year we have an incredibly strong list of contenders.
"All of the shortlisted buildings demonstrate the essence of great architecture; they are human-scale buildings, places to inspire, entertain, educate and comfort their visitors and passers-by
"Every building not only works beautifully from within but has a superb relationship with its surroundings, with a strong interplay between the two.
"They don't shout 'Look at me' and even the tallest building, New Court in the City of London, has created good views for passing pedestrians, meeting the challenge of delivering good urban design in an historic area.
"The 2012 Riba Stirling Prize judges have a difficult job to select a winner from this pool of great talent. I can't wait to see which project they choose."
The chair of the judging panel is former Royal Academy president Sir Nicholas Grimshaw.
The panel includes Sir Mark Jones, Master of St Cross College Oxford and former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, architects Joanna van Heyningen and Hilde Daem and designer Naomi Cleaver.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
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