London 2012: First Look At An Olympic Lane Outside London - Huffington Post
Canadians learning what it takes against London-bound U.S - Calgary Herald
Maddie Secco waved to her Oak Bay High soccer teammates as they arrived Tuesday afternoon for the Ryan Cup city final at UVic. The Grade 12 all-rounder was occupied in another sport on an adjacent pitch as Canadian player of the match in a 5-2 field-hockey loss to the London Olympics-bound U.S. team.
Secco, part of a Canadian program looking further afield to Rio 2016 after failing to qualify for London 2012, said she had enough energy left over to play in the high school soccer final.
"But I don't think the national team [field-hockey] coaches would allow that," she said.
The U.S. field-hockey team, meanwhile, picked the right site to acclimatize for the London Olympics, right down to the kind of typically cool and damp English summer weather it can expect. The Americans have defeated Canada 3-1, 4-1 and 5-2 in their Test series, which concludes today at 12: 30 p.m. on the UVic turf field.
That's to be expected for a U.S. side that has the immediacy of the London Olympics for which to peak while Canada is trying out many emerging junior players with an eye toward building to Rio 2016.
"The Americans are 87 days out from the Olympics," said two-time men's Olympian and current Canadian women's coach Peter Milkovich, about the lopsided results.
"We are trying to create a culture where we are competitive and win every day. But that takes time."
A key to that rebuild will be Secco.
"In my mind, Maddie is definitely a star of the future," said Milkovich.
Field Hockey Canada wants to recapture the era when the women's national team - fuelled by Island players Nancy Mollenhauer, Shelley Andrews, Lynne Beecroft, Milena Gaiga, Deb Whitten, Laurelee Kopeck, Rochelle Low, Diane Mahy and Sue Reid - won silver and bronze medals at the 1983 and 1986 World Cups and qualified for the 1984 L.A., 1988 Seoul and 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
But Canada hasn't been back to the Summer Games since. And this week has belonged to the U.S. as rebuilding is clearly not easy.
"They [Americans] have been playing together for some time now getting ready for the Olympics, while we are trying out many young players," said Secco, headed next fall to play on a full-ride U.S. collegiate NCAA athletic scholarship at Stanford in the Pac 12.
Players such as Secco, NCAA Duke senior Mary Nielsen of Duncan and UVic Vikes products Danielle Hennig and goaltender Kaitlyn Williams have deferred their Olympic aspirations to Rio after failing to get to London through the 2011 Guadalajara Pan Am Games and the last-chance qualifier in February at Delhi.
"I dream of going to the Olympics, but unfortunately it won't be this time at London. But I am hoping to be a major player for Canada and stepping on the field in 2016," said the 21-year-old Hennig.
That road to Rio began this week at UVic.
cdheensaw@timescolonist.com
London Welsh denied chance of promotion to the Premiership - The Guardian
Newcastle will be playing in the Premiership next season after the Rugby Football Union today ruled that London Welsh, who play the first leg of their Championship play-off final against Cornish Pirates in Penzance tonight, did not meet the entry criteria for the top flight.
London Welsh, who have never been in the Premiership, proposed playing at Oxford United's Kassam Stadium, the venue of next week's second leg, because their Old Deer Park ground did not have a big enough capacity or floodlights.
The RFU's board of directors this morning considered a report from the auditors, PMP Legacy, which found that "various failures" of the minimum standards criteria demanded of clubs who win the Championship meant that London Welsh should not be promoted.
The Pirates did not subject themselves to the criteria test so the ruling means the Championship winners will not be going up, reprieving the Falcons who finished at the bottom of the Premiership despite a late rally, one point below Wasps.
That will mean a return in the top flight for the club's director of rugby, Dean Richards, whose three-year ban for masterminding the Bloodgate affair while he was in charge of Harlequins ends in August.
The main failure of London Welsh cited by the auditors was that they did not have primacy of tenure at the Kassam Stadium, raising concerns that they would not be able to play their home matches at a time demanded by Premiership Rugby or the tournament's broadcasters.
Under the regulations, teams who share grounds must nominate a second stadium. It is understood that Welsh's nominated fallback was Brentford's Griffin Park, which is more than the stipulated 30 miles away from the Kassam Stadium.
London Welsh have 14 days in which to appeal and they have indicated they will take up that option. The Exiles have maintained throughout that they met the primacy of tenure clause, pointing out that in the history of the Premiership, no club has been forced to use its nominated second ground.
The Championship clubs met earlier this year and considered whether to mount a legal challenge against the minimum standards criteria, arguing that they amounted to a restraint of trade. London Welsh's chairman, Bleddyn Phillips, is a senior partner at the law firm Clifford Chance and in recent weeks has expressed his confidence that the club met the criteria.
The last time a club from the second tier was denied promotion was Rotherham 10 years ago. They were rebuffed because the RFU ruled the club had not signed a legally binding agreement to play at Rotherham United's ground and received £720,000 in compensation, cash that had been earmarked as a parachute payment for the bottom club in the Premiership, Leeds, in the event of relegation.
The RFU board today felt it had no option under the minimum standards criteria but to reject London Welsh's bid. It is open-minded about whether they are too restrictive, but that will be a matter for the professional game board, a body made up of members from the union, Premiership Rugby and the Professional Rugby Players' Association.
Newcastle's commercial director Duncan Edward said: "To be given the lifeline of playing in the Aviva Premiership next season and keeping top-class rugby in the region is unbelievable."
London Mining starts the year well - stockmarketwire.com
He said: "Turning to each of our assets, at Marampa, we are pleased to say that the plant is successfully processing tailings and weathered ore to a consistent high quality and we are on track to achieve our full year target of 1.5Mtpa of iron ore concentrate. The logistics from mine to ship have been proven to work as designed and over the first quarter we produced 300,000 dry metric tonnes of iron ore and shipped over 230,000 dry metric tonnes to Europe and China.
"This was shipped in five Supramax vessels, four of which went to China and one to Europe. Since the end of the quarter, we have successfully reached an average run rate of 4,300 tonnes per day which is in line with our ramp up plans and puts us firmly on track to reach the 2012 production target.
"Expansion works at the first plant continues apace, and we have commenced works for the second plant which when combined together will ensure we continue to grow capacity at Marampa and reach our production targets of 1.5Mt in 2012, 4.2Mt in 2013 and 5Mt in 2014.
"Work on the Bankable Feasibility Study for a further expansion to 9Mtpa is expected to be completed in the third quarter of this year, with completion of the Environmental and Social Impact Assessments expected after that sometime in the fourth quarter.
"In Colombia, construction of the coke ovens continues although we were severely hampered by the unexpected rains caused by La Nina. None the less we produced 5,800 tonnes over the quarter. We have caught up some lost ground and we continue to aim for our target of 200,000 tonnes production capacity in the first phase. We are also exploring and undertaking feasibility studies on nearby coking coal concessions.
"Briefly turning to Isua, as we announced on 29 March, we have now completed the BFS for a 15Mtpa operation. The BFS defined a three year construction period to begin producing 70% Fe premium grade iron ore pellet feed with a payback period of 3.5 years. Since the BFS, we have commenced the permitting process.
"To realise our growth plans we know we must continue to attract and retain talented people and also ensure that the communities and countries in which we operate are able to see tangible and long-lasting benefits from our activities. We are particularly proud to provide employment and training for over 2,000 Sierra Leoneans.
"2012 is significant as we will contribute directly to the economy of Sierra Leone through payments of royalty and taxes to the Government of Sierra Leone; and indirectly through our social development royalty, local employment and local supply chain initiatives.
"As we enter a new phase of operations, construction and development we are ever more appreciative of the need to minimise the impact of our operations to the surrounding environment and communities and to keep our employees safe."
At 10:46am: (LON:LOND) share price was -3.62p at 242.63p
Story provided by StockMarketWire.com
London 2012: Remaining Olympic tickets released for general sale - BBC News
About 500,000 tickets for events at the London 2012 Olympic Games have been released for general sale, organisers Locog have said.
There are some £20 tickets left for sports such as volleyball, table tennis, weightlifting, taekwondo, boxing and fencing.
But several sports have sold out, and there are only higher-priced tickets left for most medal events.
The tickets went on sale at 11:00 BST, with a 24-hour window for purchases.
Organisers Locog say there is a good number of tickets at the cost of £45 to £450 in sports including archery, badminton, basketball, beach volleyball, canoe sprint, diving, handball and hockey.
A list of sports available as of 11:00 can be viewed on the 2012 ticketing website.
Only a limited number of tickets are available in race walk, mountain biking, artistic gymnastics and rowing.
Up to four tickets can be purchased per session, and up to four sessions in one transaction for all available sports apart from football - where more tickets are available to encourage groups to attend.
A London 2012 spokesman said the site had been "busy" and people were being put in a queue for tickets as they went through the process.
"The site has been working well and we are delighted that more people have been able to get Olympic tickets", he added.
Colin McKinnon in Haslemere, Surrey, told the BBC: "We have just got tickets to sailing in last general release of tickets. The system seemed to work well with only minimal wait time."
'Delivered on promise'All tickets have been sold in some sports, including athletics, cycling, equestrianism, rhythmic gymnastics and swimming, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies.
Locog commercial director Chris Townsend said: "Our priority has been to get as many people who missed out in the sales process last year to the Games.
"We have delivered on our promise and now another 150,000 people have successfully purchased up to four tickets each."
He warned: "Wednesday's sale is a live sale, and, like other high-demand events including pop concerts, we expect the website to be very busy and customers may well be held in queues for over 30 minutes at peak times."
Dominic Foster in London told BBC News the application process had been the "easiest so far".
"The website held me for 10 minutes, I bought some tickets and then made another application - both of which were successful."
But other users reported problems with the site and unsuccessful attempts, including Londoner Andrew McManus.
He told the BBC: "At 11:00 I selected the two events I wanted and was advised that the wait was 10 minutes.
"The first six minutes counted down normally, and then it got stuck at four minutes for an hour."
And Ian Waldie in Wakefield said: "After spending three hours trying to get tickets today from 11:00 I've given up. Not once did I find any available tickets."
The online ticketing system sparked criticism last year after it crashed under high demand.
In some cases, the system reportedly informed potential buyers they had secured tickets, and then later told that they had failed.
Meanwhile, plans have been unveiled for a 10,000-spectator area with a giant screen showing live events in the Olympic Park during the Games.
"Park Live" will be open from early morning until late evening for fans without tickets for the sport venues.
London 2012: Heathrow Airport in numbers - BBC News
Heathrow in numbers - how the UK's biggest airport is getting ready for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Some 500,000 people will be flying into London for the Olympics and Paralympics this summer.
That includes 100,000 athletes, 20,000 members of the media and 150 heads of state. Most of them will arrive via Heathrow.
It will be the start and finish line for the bulk of visitors, giving the country's biggest airport its busiest day ever.
That day will be Monday 13 August, the day after the closing ceremony and the day 65% of visitors are planning to leave.
Some 203,000 bags will be squeezed on to the baggage system - that's 35% more than on a normal day and about 13,000 more than it is designed to handle.
Of those bags, 15,000 will be oversized - full of canoes, javelins, bikes and poles for the pole vault. There will also be more than 980 firearms to check, plus ammunition.
'Heavily-congested skies'A special temporary terminal is being built just for the "Games family" - athletes and coaches to you and me.
It will be open for three days, snuggled between terminals four and five, and will boast 31 check-in desks and seven security lanes.
Meanwhile, hundreds of extra border staff - they will not give an exact figure - will be on hand to try to keep passport queues down.
Sixteen mobile teams of 10 guards each will be available to target trouble spots if, or should that be when, the queues build up.
It is not just Heathrow of course.
Air traffic control is facing its biggest ever challenge, coping with heavily-congested skies, the threat of a terror attack and possible bad weather. Twenty-five controllers are practising in the simulator every day.
In all, 400 have been specially trained over the past four years to deal with the extra workload.
Any rogue planes should be spotted within two to three minutes, after which military controllers take over that zone and a decision is made whether or not to scramble fast jets.
Extra plane?The Paralympics is a third of the size of the main event but it is still a huge challenge.
“Start Quote
End QuoteThe Chinese team are arriving on 27 different planes and they'll probably need an extra plane at the end to carry all their medals”
Heathrow will have to deal with a month's worth of wheelchair users in just a week - about 1,800 in total.
Thirteen new scissor lifts and 100 new ramps have been deployed to load and unload wheelchairs while there are six new powered stair climbers to move large electric wheelchairs.
Two-hundred extra staff will welcome the Paralympians and help with the biggest challenge of all - making sure every athlete is reunited quickly with their chair.
As one Paralympian put it, you wouldn't expect able-bodied athletes to leave the plane in someone else's trainers would you?
The Chinese team are arriving on 27 different planes and they'll probably need an extra plane at the end to carry all their medals. I made that last bit up.
Finally, 1,000 local volunteers will greet athletes off the plane, help with their luggage and welcome them to London.
Then a few weeks later, as the Olympic flame dies, those volunteers will wave them off again as they head for home.
One thousand people will be standing there waving goodbye at planes, so if you happen to be going on holiday that day, you might want to wave back.
London Dining: Steak Near Covent Garden And Lesser Calamint Near Goodge Street - Huffington Post
The first Hawksmoor steakhouse opened in 2006 near London's Spitalfields Market, a couple of minutes' walk from the beautifully restored Christ Church Spitalfields, designed in the early eighteenth century by the architect Nicolas Hawksmoor. Hence the name.
Jackie and I never managed to get there for a meal, largely because steak is not often something we crave when traveling, but with the late-2010 opening of Hawksmoor Seven Dials near Covent Garden, the convenient location tipped the balance and we reserved a table for after the theater. Another factor was our eagerness to eat dry-aged beef from The Ginger Pig, a butcher shop whose owner raises his own longhorns in the wilds of Yorkshire.
Hawksmoor Seven Dials is in the iron-columned, brick-vaulted basement of what was originally a brewery, decorated largely with reclaimed furniture and presenting an image of always-been-there solidity. Our server told us that toward the end of the week, when filled with drunken traders, this can be a noisy space, but it was pleasant late on a Tuesday night. She too was pleasant, and well-informed. She instantly took it on board that we weren't the customers who order two-and-a-half-pound porterhouses and proposed that we share a sirloin (shell or strip loin as we'd call it in the US) weighing around a pound and a quarter including the bone: a steak offered on the menu as a one-diner portion (£30 - $48). She didn't push side dishes beyond what we wanted (crunchy chunks of potato fried in beef fat -- delicious). She didn't try to sell us fancy wine either. Some might say that she wasn't doing her job, but I'd say that she took our wishes seriously.
The steak, charcoal grilled and thickly sliced off the bone in the kitchen, was excellent: Not sweetly rich or eerily tender like a typical American steak from a feedlot-bloated animal, but funkily deep in a long-aged flavor that stayed with me (in a good way) long after the steak was gone. As usual, it got better as it cooled: next time I must remember to have them bring the steak while we're half way through our first courses.
Oh: First courses. We shared a generous smoked eel and hamhock salad (£10), an appealing idea marred by superfluous ingredients (peas or pea shoots, please, preferably the latter, as all the peas do is roll around the plate evading your fork), tough croutons and under-seasoning. Desserts, on the other hand, were wonderful, notably an orange-flavored variation on sticky toffee pudding: a good reason to go easy on the rest of the meal.
While there are costly wines, the list includes bottles starting at £18, and many wines are available by the glass or half-liter carafe.
I haven't eaten enough steaks in London to say that Hawksmoor's are the best, but they are awfully good.
The half-year-old Dabbous (named for its chef/co-owner, Ollie Dabbous, about whom you can read here) could hardly be more different from Hawksmoor and its grilled slabs of meat. Here too the décor involves ironwork and hard surfaces, but I found the effect brutal rather than solid. The food, however, is elegant, subtle, thought-through and (mostly) clear-flavored: no brutality there at all. Portions are (happily) moderate but not tiny: unless you are particularly hungry, greedy or curious, two of you will do fine sharing, say, three first courses and two mains -- plus dessert, of course. (Note that many dishes contain nuts, even if not as a principal ingredient; those who do not eat nuts should keep well away.)
And you will eat bread: The home-made loaf, modestly studded with nuts and seeds and its crust crisped and caramelized over live coals, is extraordinary. Slices of it, brought in a brown paper bag, come with a dish of creamy, salty butter, also home-made and made with skill.
Home-made butter yields a byproduct: buttermilk. The night we were there, this was the basis of the sauce for a bowlful of tiny new-season potatoes, wild St. George's mushrooms and fava beans (like most first courses, a bargain at £7). The favas, sadly, were overcome by the richness of the sauce and might as well have been saved for another purpose -- or included in larger numbers to add freshness to the dish.
Mixed alliums (members of the onion-garlic family), including intensely flavorful flower buds, were served in an irresistible crystalline broth scented with pine: subtle but aromatic. A lovely way to serve asparagus was with toasted hazelnuts and a "virgin" rapeseed oil mayonnaise topped with meadowsweet.
Main dishes (£14) too were delicious (that is sometimes the perfect word, even if it is imprecise). Halibut cooked to pure-white perfection, very gently grilled, was served with beets, watercress stems (which, come to think of it, were more than a little chewy) and a marvelous emulsion called iodized sour cream, containing herbs and oysters but tasting less specific than that. Cheese added extra flavor to lamb shoulder served with grilled runner beans and what else but lesser calamint, a member of the mint family. A medium-rare shoulder cut of Ibérico pork could have been more tender, but it was beautiful and flavorful.
Custardy milk curd with fragrant rose petals was a happy way to end, as was a ganache dessert made with a good citric chocolate. The dish was lightened with sheep's milk ice cream and scented with dill (brilliant) but freighted with a basil "moss" that, while beautiful, did nothing for the dish. One-bite cannelés prettily topped with cherries came with the very reasonable bill.
The cooking here is not perfect, but it is consistently interesting, pleasing and -- that word again -- delicious. While it would be possible to wax intellectual about Dabbous, I found it easy to enjoy, which can't be said for all restaurants with similarly clever menus.
Hawksmoor Seven Dials, 11 Langley Street, London WC2H 9JG; +44 (0) 207 856 2154; www.thehawksmoor.com (reservations can be made through the website). Open lunch and dinner (lunch only on Sundays). Our dinner for two, including wine and service charge, totaled £115 ($180).
Dabbous, 39 Whitfield Street, London W1T 2SF; +44 (0) 207 323 1544; www.dabbous.co.uk (reservations for the restaurant and its downstairs bar can be made through the website, though they are hard to come by). Open lunch and dinner Tuesday-Saturday. Our slightly too large dinner for two, including wine and service charge, cost £111 ($175).
Follow Edward Schneider on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TimeToCook
The Olympic and Paralympic Games will be the biggest sporting event in the UK this year. Will you be travelling to the UK to see the Games? Please send us your comments and experiences.