Olympic champion Tim Brabants will defend his Olympic K1 1000m title after the 35-year-old was confirmed in the Team GB canoe sprint squad for London.
Brabants, who won a race-off with Paul Wycherley last month to earn his place, is one of nine athletes in the team for the canoe sprint events at Eton Dorney.
"I am really excited to be selected for my fourth Olympic Games," he said.
"Now the selection process is complete, I can really focus on defending my Olympic title in London 2012."
Ed McKeever is a leading hope in the K1 200m after recent World Cup success, while Jonathan Schofield and Liam Heath, who have won two World Cup silver medals this year, will compete in the Men's K2 200m.
Richard Jefferies will be the only British athlete to race in the canoe where he is set to compete in both the C1 200m and C1 1000m events.
Jessica Walker, 22, will become GB's first representative in the women's K1 200m event, and Rachel Cawthorn, the 2010 European champion over 1000m and world bronze medallist over 500m, goes in the K1 500m race.
Walker and Cawthorn will team up with Angela Hannah and Louisa Sawers in the women's K4 500m.
Team GB chef de mission Andy Hunt said: "The canoe sprint team has really progressed since Tim Brabants won the first ever medal for Team GB by taking bronze in Sydney back in 2000.
"Having a veteran and defending Olympic champion like Tim in the team will be a huge inspiration to everyone involved, and it is a chance for the younger competitors and the debutants to use that kind of motivation to create their own Olympic legacy."
Men's K1 1000m
Tim Brabants
Men's C1 200m & Men's C1 1000m
Richard Jefferies
Women's K1 200m
Jessica Walker
Women's K1 500m
Rachel Cawthorn
Women's K4 500m
Jessica Walker
Rachel Cawthorn
Angela Hannah
Louisa Sawers
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
London Irish centre Joseph to make full England debut - Reading Evening Post
London Irish centre Jonathan Joseph will make his first start for England in Saturday's second Test against South Africa in Johannesburg.
The 21-year-old helped set up England's only try after coming off the bench in the final minutes of last Saturday's 22-17 defeat in Durban.
And he will now make his full debut as England look to add a cutting edge to their backline.
Joseph comes in for the injured Brad Barritt with Manu Tuilagi shuffling across to inside centre.
England boss Stuart Lancaster said: "I am delighted for JJ. He has trained very well and showed against the Barbarians and in his short time on the field in the first Test that he is ready to make the step to international rugby.
"To have two 21-year-old centres is exciting and we are looking forward to seeing this combination in action."
Prop Alex Corbisiero, Joseph's London Irish team-mate, has recovered from a knee injury and is included among the replacements, while former Reading back-row forward Tom Johnson, who now plays for Exeter Chiefs, retains his place at blindside flanker.
England: 15 Ben Foden (Northampton), 14 Chris Ashton (Northampton), 13 Jonathan Joseph (London Irish), 12 Manusamoa Tuilagi (Leicester), 11 David Strettle (Saracens), 10 Toby Flood (Leicester), 9 Ben Youngs (Leicester); 1 Joe Marler (Harlequins), 2 Dylan Hartley (Northampton), 3 Dan Cole (Leicester), 4 Mouritz Botha (Saracens), 5 Geoff Parling (Leicester), 6 Tom Johnson (Exeter), 7 Chris Robshaw (Harlequins), 8 Ben Morgan (Scarlets).
Replacements: 16 Lee Mears (Bath), 17 Alex Corbisiero (London Irish), 18 Tom Palmer (Stade Francais), 19 Phil Dowson (Northampton Saints), 20 Lee Dickson (Northampton Saints), 21 Owen Farrell (Saracens), 22 Alex Goode (Saracens).
Source: www.getreading.co.uk
London poverty and wealth both moving east - The Guardian
Alex Fenton of the LSE's Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion:
There has been much speculation as to whether the coalition's housing policy, especially on housing benefit, will displace lower-income households from inner London. At the same time, some worry that income inequality means that rich and poor households live increasingly segregated from one another into well-off and disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
The Centre for Analysis for Social Exclusion has been looking at what happened to poor neighbourhoods under New Labour in the 2000s as part of a major research project for the Trust for London. We find that in London poverty was already becoming more suburban and more diffuse even as income inequality in the city rose.
Fenton has found that while poverty rates fell in much of poor inner London, it rose in much of outer London, "especially in the eastern suburbs." His analysis of the data includes attributing much of this change to the continuing loss of social housing in inner London, resulting in poorer families renting privately in the cheaper outer-east.
This seems to fit with what Newham and Barking and Dagenham have been complaining about for years - that the poverty-related problems they already have to deal with are made worse by high-rent inner London boroughs exporting their poor.
Yet there's a parallel trend in the same geographical direction, which may or may not give grounds for hope. Here's Boris Johnson in June 2010 opening the examination in public of his replacement London Plan:
It provides the springboard for my broader aim of moving London's heart eastward... If you look to the east you can see the scale of what is possible. Achieving the vision in this Plan will require us to make sure we make the best use of the under-and-unused land in east London. What you can't see from here, though, is the sheer extent of the need east Londoners have for regeneration and development. We need to focus on the need and the opportunity, and meet both. I suspect it will be impossible to deliver on one without the other.
An Olympics legacy, which Mayor Johnson described in the same speech as the Plan's "highest regeneration priority," is an important component of this eastward shift in growth potential and investment, a theme that outgoing London 2012 legacy chief Margaret Ford speaks about here and that her colleague Andrew Altman has stressed repeatedly.
Will exploitation of the great east London opportunity meet the great and growing need of east London? Big question.
Footnote: Alex Fenton's article identifies several other important issues about the diffusion of London poverty and what it means. Read it all here.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
London 2012 Olympics will come in under budget, government says - The Guardian
The government has promised the Olympics will come in under budget – at a cost of less than £9bn to taxpayers – but will spend extra money within that on crowd control measures in light of a bigger-than-expected turnout for the jubilee celebrations and the torch relay.
The sports and Olympics minister, Hugh Robertson, admitted that organisers had underestimated by around a third the amount that would be required to pay for signage, stewarding and crowd control measures such as crush barriers and temporary bridges that will ease congestion in Greenwich and Hyde Park.
It is expected that larger than expected crowds could throng the capital in the three days before the opening ceremony as the torch enters central London and will turn out in huge numbers for the marathon and the cycling road race, which finish on the Mall.
"There is a certain amount of this that you assess as the thing develops and these costs emerge. As a government, you're caught here. The first responsibility of a government is the safety and security of its people," he said.
"We have to do everything we can reasonably do to ensure the safety and security of the very many people, judging by the jubilee, who will attend. There is an element of managing success here."
An extra £19m will be added to the budget for crowd-control measures and managing central London, taking it to £76m. Overall, there was an increase of £29m in the money released to Locog over the most recent quarter, including £8m for putting in concessions and toilets around the Olympic venues.
That will take the total that the London organising committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) has received from the public funding package to £736m, including a security budget to cover guards within Olympic venues that almost doubled to £553m.
Robertson said that the crowds who lined the river during the jubliee river pageant despite the inclement weather, estimated at around 1.2 million, and the popularity of the torch relay showed that numbers attending might be even higher than expected.
"We knew this would be the moment when people suddenly got this. But we have been pleasantly surprised by the sheer scale of it. If you consider that the torch is coming down the Thames [on July 27] the capacity for lots and lots of people to come and see it is increased," he said.
The additional investment was an insurance policy to ensure that London could cope with the influx, he said.
"London is going to be the place this summer, if the rain holds off, to come and have a party. It is very difficult to estimate how many people will take the car, the train or the ferry and come here for a party with a rucksack on their back."
Transport for London is planning on the basis that there will be 1 million extra people in the capital, although that could be offset by a decline in non-Olympic tourists.
Critics have claimed that Locog, which has a privately raised budget of £2bn to stage the Games but has now received £736m in public money on top of that, should be subject to greater scrutiny. But the government argues that all the public money that has flowed to the organising committee is either for pre-agreed elements of the budget such as security or is for new tasks that it has taken over from the Olympic Delivery Authority.
With the project 98% complete, there is £476m of contingency funding remaining, and Robertson said he could now be confident that it would come in under £9bn.
The National Audit Office had warned there was a real risk that the budget would be bust, but the Department for Culture and Media and Sport and the Government Olympic Executive have continued to insist that they would come in below £9.3bn.
The original bid estimated the cost of the Games at £2.4bn but didn't include VAT or security costs.
The Labour government, chastened by the experience of the Millennium Dome and Wembley, built in a huge contingency fund of £2.7bn when the current funding package of £9.3bn was set in March 2007. The huge increase was justified on the back of the regeneration of east London and other claimed legacy benefits.
Robertson said that the large contingency was a wise move because it allowed the project to weather the economic downturn, bearing the cost of building the Olympic Village and the International Broadcast Centre from public funds before selling them back to the private sector.
Much of the credit for coming in on time and on budget will go to the Olympic Delivery Authority, which came in more than £500m below its baseline budget through savings made during the construction process. Delivering the venues on time, despite the ongoing debate about the future of the £428m stadium, meant that it avoided the prospect of escalating costs as contractors rushed to finish venues.
Robertson said the publicly funded budget had delivered value for money: "I have been a cheerleader for this process right from the beginning. There was a recognition right from the word go the original figure would have to change dramatically. Everybody's eyes were opened to the possibility that this gave us once we had won the bid."
Attention is now likely to turn to the use of a surplus of more than £400m. Despite lobbying from some sports organisations, Robertson said there was no chance that it would remain within sport and would instead flow back to the Treasury.
But campaigners said that would "verge on money laundering", because lottery money that was partly used to fund the Games was diverted from other causes.
"It will be an utter outrage – and verging on money laundering – if lottery revenues raided by the government to fund the Olympics go back to the Treasury," said Jay Kennedy, the head of policy at the Directory of Social Change.
"This money was taken away from supporting vulnerable people and communities across this country at a time when they needed it most. Government needs to keep its promises and do the right thing – any underspend must be used to refund the Lottery as soon as possible."
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
London men stake their place in the fashion spending arena - fashion.telegraph.co.uk
Notable rises in male spending have been reported ahead of London's first men's fashion week, London Collections: Men.
BY Alice Newbold | 14 June 2012
Burberry men's live stream Photo: REX
The reputation of menswear has long been shackled by the image of begrudging males sitting outside female changing rooms on endless, uninspiring weekend quests to department stores. Or the stalwart socks and tie or socks and knitwear combo invariably bought for fathers and grandfathers across the British nation for birthdays and holidays, alike.
Tarnishing the notion that men remain only excited about football, Rihanna and varieties of lager are the American Express Business Insights team. Ahead of London Collections: Men, which launches today, the banking sector conducted a study assessing the aggregated spending behaviour of millions of card members. The trend that emerged was, ironically (and pun-worthy), men's fashion.
READ: London to get its own Men's Fashion Week(end)
The data analytics arm of America Express found that males born after 1982 - "Generation Y" - increased their overall spending on fashion faster than all other generations. Shopping at a heightened rate of 4% every year Generation Y whipped out their plastic at twice the rate of the next fastest generation, the "Baby Boomers" (those born between 1945 and 1964).
Tagging the male mentality towards fashion as a basic "famine or feast approach", men, it appears, resist high street splurges in favour of luxury goods, spending 24% more per transaction, though less often, than their female counterparts.
Commenting on Burberry's announcement last month that they had experienced a 26% increase in menswear sales, chief executive of the British heritage brand, Angela Ahrendts said: "In this economic environment, men want to look better, they want to look sharper."
READ: Burberry's Angela Ahrendts: men want to look smart
While Burberry's tailoring and enhanced ranges drove a 26% rise in their menswear sales, the overall year-on-year spending on luxury fashion increased by 5.7% in Generation Y men and 1% in all males. British male shoppers subsequently snubbed mainstream lines decreasing their spending by 1.2%, while women lapped up the high street, spending 0.7% less on luxury goods and 5.7% more on high street fashion fixes.
"There is a reason that London is hosting its first men's fashion week: men in the city are clearly staking their place in the fashion spending arena," affirms Sujata Bhatia, vice president of International Business Insights at American Express.
Source: fashion.telegraph.co.uk
Get off Hampstead Heath! What point does Occupy London hope to make by setting up camp on a park open to rich and poor alike? - Daily Mail
By Anna Maxted
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Occupy London are determined to protest against the City of London Corporation, so today they set up camp on that ugly symbol of elitism and privilege, Hampstead Heath.
Sadly, in another victory for the overarching forces of international capitalism, the park's police escorted them off the premises just after teatime.
I've lived near the Heath all my life and it's one of the most serene and beautiful areas of the capital; one of the few that you don't need money to enjoy. When Karl Marx lived in London, he loved to visit with his family. Kenwood House - part of the estate bestowed to the nation by that privileged toff Lord Iveagh in 1927 - may look tatty on the outside, but if you nip inside (donations are voluntary) you can show your five-year old a Gainsborough.
A privilege to be there: When you're on Hampstead Heath, your status, your bank balance ceases to matter
I was there this morning, beaming at the exquisite views of the City, breathing in the delicious air, marvelling at the gorgeous profusion of green, along with various other capitalist pigs (an old lady on a Zimmer frame, an artist, a young photographer, an elderly man walking his dog, a young couple with a newborn...)
Eventually I spotted the Occupy London set, trudging along the sun-dappled paths, squinting at their maps - though they were hardly obvious: none of the people wandering around the Heath this morning were head-to-toe in Dior.
They set up camp in the Vale of Health (convenient for Hampstead High Street; Starbucks, Tesco Metro and Gap). One doesn't have to eschew all trappings of commercialism to make a huffy point against capitalism - I don't expect them to scrape for nuts and berries and live on rainwater - but this exercise was little more than a hypocritical student jolly.
Trespassers in tents: Will we soon see scenes like this, outside St Paul's last year, on the Heath?
I feel aggrieved at the wretched difference between wealthy and poor - but I feel as aggrieved that these protestors were so witless as to think that they were doing the less privileged a favour by camping out - with their litter, and worse, judging from the mess they made of St Paul's - in the one place that is an oasis of peace, and serenity - and free to those who have everything and nothing alike.
When you're on Hampstead Heath, your status, your bank balance ceases to matter. You feel privileged to be there. You feel rich. Until you chance upon a massive bunch of trespassers in tents, and then the Heath loses its magic, and your carefree ramble becomes yet another irritating, slightly depressing exercise in trying to enjoy London despite it being stuffed full of sociopaths and egotists.
Truly, harassing a bunch of dog walkers is not a valid form of protest against bankers. It was facetious, brattish; bullying. If they wish to get their point across in a democratic manner, they have civilised options - from blogging to, hmm, politics - but they made the laziest, most slovenly choice: to make a nuisance of themselves and inconvenience, oh, just everyone. A minority, imposing their selfish will on the majority, is nothing less than tyranny.
Exquisite views of the City: Misty view over London from Hampstead Heath
They claimed that they wanted to 'reach out to the community about shared concerns'... I can tell you what the community's main concern was today - that a bunch of pseudo-crusties had illegally pitched their luxury tents in a public beauty spot. (Hampstead Heath's by-laws forbid 'the training of whippets,' 'the beating of carpets,' and 'Persons in an Offensive, Filthy Condition.' And no camping, either.)
One of OL's excuses was that fans of the Heath ponds were 'up in arms' about the recent outrageous decision by the City of London to charge a couple of quid for a swim. My husband has swum there for years, occasionally with our 10-year old son, and says that most who use the pond have no objection - if they want a lifeguard, and basic maintenance, they see it makes sense to contribute a little.
As far as I can tell, this protest was a feeble excuse for a spot of glamping. If they are genuinely serious about protesting against capitalism, I suggest they occupy Legoland: nearly 200 on the gate, for a family of five. However, if they prefer to occupy a green space owned by the City of London, why not try West Ham Park? It has all the traditional trappings of privilege (children's playground and so on.) Or are the views not spectacular enough?
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
Forget it Hazel. You will never convert people wedded to lazy prejudice and used to sticking simplistic labels on everybody.
- Suit & Tied, London, 14/6/2012 13:50
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