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Recall how the Olympic Committee - LOCOG - introduced a confounding and elitist ticketing system which has resulted in many events running practically empty and begging for an audience. Tsk. Tsk.
And, of course, there's no ignoring the fact that security has been a hideous debacle and our army were drafted in at the last minute to pick up the slack left by security firm G4S.
A company who have previous form for messing up on their Government contracts - remember the escaped prisoners? - and were further rewarded with a multi-million kings ransom to do so again.
Oh, and here's my personal big irritant: the financial disparities that have taken place.
How musicians have been paid a big fat zero to play in the opening ceremony and during the events - and were not even allowed to use their spot to promote themselves outside of the games -while figureheads, such as Seb Coe, have enjoyed packages worth in excess of 300,000 pounds per year since our Olympic bid was annou...
So, yes, fair to say, there has been a great deal about The London 2012 Olympics that has served to tick me off. But here's what I love love love about it. The role models.
Yes, The Jessica Ennis's and the Usain Bolts. The Bradley Wiggins and the Laura Trotts. The Rebecca Adlingtons and the Tom Daleys who, even though he didn't win an award in the syncro event, still showed that he was prepared to 'go for it' in the first place. A stance worthy of admiration.
These are the type of role models I want my teenage daughter to see. Young people who have a goal and they are disciplined enough to pursue it.
As opposed, that is, to those other great non-aspirational role models that our children have been subjected to for too many recent years.
I refer, of course, to the WAGS and the reality show stars, the glamour models and the pretty girl and pretty boy - but talentless - pop bands.
Oh how I have deplored the rise of 'idiot fame' - people who are famous for being famous. Or famous for who they are dating. Or famous for being ignorant and saying things like 'Where is East Angular - is it abroad?'.
The type of fame, in my opinion, which has led to a generation of children leaving school with no goal beyond being famous. An end game, to them, rather than being known for something adrmirable.
This absurd phenomenon has created a peculiar state of affairs whereby really dull people - Kim Kardashian, Jordan, TOWIE cast - are given a camera and a slot on TV to fill us in on their achingly dull and shallow lives.
A time in our history whereby 15 minutes of TV airtime can be dedicated to some brain-drain going for a manicure and a lug of Botox. ARGH! Shoot me now!
I have despaired that my child has grown up in such a vacuous era and it has taken enormous effort on my part, and the rest of our family, to work to counter-balance the visual stupidity that has become the hallmark of this celebrity-obsessed period.
So when I see Olympians, young and older, step up to their moment of truth on that Olympic stage I have experienced a feel-good surge of excitement.
For when I take account of all the hard work and endless practice it will have taken to bring them to this point, then I know the type of character worthy of influencing my child. Thankfully, so does she.
And, this much we both know: the stuff of role models, and decent ones at that, requires rather more than tweeting a picture of your half-naked body and calling it a job.
So, hooray for the Olympians. They have reminded me, at least, that when it comes to inspirational images for our children, all is not lost. And for that I thank them.
Summer starts this weekend, but that doesn't mean that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and company get to kick back and work on their tans. The department has a long and wonky to-do list for the summer and beyond, including some overdue homework assignments.
And some key, still-pending announcements could have big implications for extensions of state's waivers from pieces of the No Child Left Behind Act.
• Some sort of peer-review process or other criteria for examining state assessments. This is a really big deal, in part because states must use tests aligned to standards that will prepare students for college and the workforce in order to keep their waivers from many of the mandates of the NCLB law. A handful of stat...
Typically, the department uses peer review to determine whether state assessments pass muster, but that system has been "paused" as the department rethinks its process, in light of the transition to common core. The department planned to hold hearings on a new process for evaluating assessments last fall, according to ...
• Recommendations to put teeth in the federal requirements for teacher preparation. My colleague, Steve Sawchuk of Teacher Beat has been all over this issue for, well, years. Read his most recent take here.
• New School Improvement Grant regulations or guidance. This is another in-the-weeds issue that could also have a big impact on NCLB waivers.
Some background: In January, Congress passed a spending bill that added new options to the list of four turnaround models mandated under the SIG program, which has been widely panned as rigid and unworkable. Under the new law, states can either stick with the four models that were previously on the books, or go with a ...
The problem? No one has any idea what criteria (if any) the secretary will use for judging state strategies, or how all this interacts with NCLB waivers, which required states to intervene in "priority schools." (That's the wonky, waivery name for the worst schools in a state, including some schools that get extra mone...
The administration has said some sort of guidelines on all this will be available later this year.
• The 50-state strategy on teacher equity. This is supposed to help states ensure that low-income and minority students have access to just as many good teachers as more advantaged students. This was originally supposed to come out in January, and now most folks are expecting to see it sometime in July. Much more on th...
• Final rules and program applications for Preschool Development Grants. Earlier this year, the department sketched out the general parameters for these grants, which are meant to help states beef up their early-childhood education programs. Sometime this summer, we're likely to see the final rules and applications. Fi...
On Friday’s segment of The Sean Hannity Show, Abbott joined Hannity to discuss the U.S. Supreme Court’s 4-4 split on President Obama’s immigration plan. But as news of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union spread, Hannity asked Abbott about some Texans’ desire to separate from the United States.
Abbott added that nations and states “asserting sovereignty” is essential, saying it is a sentiment that emerges in places around the world.
Q: If one accepts Darwinian evolution, how can one truly reconcile that theory with religion as practiced by most Americans? Even if evolution doesn't conflict with the existence of a God, it does seem to clearly refute the idea that God plays an active, day-to-day role in the course of earthly events.
To me, religious inspiration, religious reflection, and religious life belong to different realms of human experience than scientific knowledge.
I'm sitting in my office, which is a corner office on the third floor of a building where my department is. And just outside my office is a park, and I see the trees. I don't actually see the ground, but I see the leaves of trees of many different species and many different colors. And in fact, now I can see hummingbir...
Another way that I can look at this view from my office is in terms of aesthetic experience. There is much beauty to be seen there. The point I am making is that the same way I can look at reality from two different perspectives -- the scientific and the aesthetic -- there are still additional perspectives like an ethi...
These are not contradictory or need not be contradictory, but complementary. If I can focus for a moment on a work of art, that famous painting, Guernica by Picasso, which reflects the first time in which air raids were used to destroy a civilian population, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in the town of Guer...
We can have different descriptions of this work of art. We can describe the huge dimensions of this painting. We can give the coordinates if we want of all the figures in the painting, and we can talk about what colors and what pigments the painter used. If we do that, we give in some way a complete description of the ...
Similarly, science, when it gives a description of the real world, may encompass all of reality -- material reality and also biological reality and the phenomena of life and of human life. When science has its say, there are still many other dimensions that transcend the scope of science, for instance, about meaning an...
All of these have their own validity. They bring us different kinds of knowledge about what reality is. Science is important as the original perspective for the dimension that leads to technology, but precisely because of the natural scientific process, that science is not all there is to know about the real world.
Well, first of all, I think it's a very sad dilemma that some Americans at least have got themselves in the position of thinking it's either God or evolution. To me, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and I think if God was Creator, then we have to understand that God was creating through evolution. And I don'...
Clearly, biological death is not the result of sin in the way, to go back to the previous question, a literal understanding of the Adam and Eve is sometimes used to imply. But it does seem to me to be an exciting picture that God is all the time creating -- present tense -- through the processes of the natural world. N...
I think it seems to be that science unveils the work of God and creation in that way. I don't find any great conflict in this. Of course, how it's all arisen, particularly on the American scene, is a part of the social history of America. It is a particularly distinctive feature of the American religious scene at the m...
I think what's exciting is that evolution shows very clearly how we as physical creatures have emerged from the physical world and are capable of mental life and capable of spiritual life -- that is, relating to God. And that's precisely, in a way, what in the Christian perception the doctrine of the incarnation is abo...
And of course, Christians believe at least that in one particular person this capacity of the physical to become spiritual reached its apogee, reached its consummation and its height in a particular person in history, whom they revere. And it seems to me this fits very well with evolutionary ideas.
The difference between the two parts of that question contains the answer to the question. The first question is: Do not the facts of evolution conflict with the way religion is practiced in the United States? And the second part of the question is: Does not evolution suggest that God does not play a day-to-day role in...
Well, I think if I were to say to you that the world was created 20 minutes ago complete with memories, then you would not have any better handle of the question of whether God plays the role in day-to-day events than if you say the world was created 5,000 years ago. The problem of special creation is it doesn't speak ...
I don't see what is gained by giving up the intellectual and emotional power of the scientific method to explain natural phenomena by underlying, straightforward, understandable mechanisms. I don't see what's gained by throwing that out in place of unreproducible special events which then do not tell you anything more ...
So to me, the question contradicts itself. I find it more pleasant in those terms to imagine God everywhere and at all times rather than having picked one moment to step in and then step back. So to me the question cancels itself, or I don't understand it.
Also, one would have the problem, inside special creation, of understanding why create a universe of perfection and eternal stability and imbue it with death? Why then must we die inside a world of special creation? Inside a world of natural selection, death is the very essential motor of natural selection. Death allow...
So it seems to me that [mortality] is consistent with natural selection more than it is with special creation. In other words, the system we're in is a system of ever-evolving change and new understanding. That seems to be consistent with a Creator's intention that we arrive at a moment of saying, "Thanks for the mercy...
In any event, I don't consider when I pray that I'm negotiating. It seems to me that the gift of God is a universe which is, as I say, informed by the purposes of mercy and justice which will play out in the long-term. And I don't claim, nor do I think anyone else I know of any religion claims that those purposes pick ...
I think at least two things must be said here. If by Darwinian evolution someone means a theory about all of life that affirms basic materialism, if it's a theory of life that refuses to countenance the possibility of any kind of design in nature, any kind of purpose in nature, then the questioner's issue is entirely a...
The second thing that needs to be said, however, is that evolution means many different things to many different people. If evolution is taken to be the series of conclusions that responsible scientists deliver responsibly about, say, DNA similarities throughout the life chain, about geological evidence, about other so...
And the way that that issue is handled fairly easily is by reference to the doctrine of Providence.
The doctrine of Providence in Christian, and I believe Jewish and Muslim teaching also, does not say that God's ruling of the world is going to take place as opposed to natural material conditions. It's not a zero-sum game, where the presence of God means the absence of things we can figure out by nature, or the things...
Rather, Providence says God works in, through, with, under the material processes of this world. Many believers, for example, pray when they're sick and go to the doctor. And that's an entirely legitimate thing to do in terms of theistic faith, because by going to the doctor someone is trusting what science has discove...
A fancy word was developed in the Catholic Middle Ages -- "concursus" -- that was then picked up by a variety of Protestants in the 16th century and continued on in theological discussions in the 19th and 20th century. Concursus just means that there may be in many, many, most important aspects of life multiple ways of...
I think the reason this question is an important one and really disturbs a lot of people comes not from sober, responsible work done in either religious sphere or the scientific sphere, but from the draconian, the extreme, the hyperbolic statements made by spokespersons on the fringes of either side. So for example, I'...
Well, if you have great comprehensive claims like that in the name of evolution, it's no wonder that people like the questioner worry about carrying on religion that is practiced by many believers. But what should be recognized is that these are extreme, metaphysical, irresponsible claims. More responsible understandin...
I will like to reiterate what I said earlier. My view is that we can have different descriptions of reality, different realms of knowledge, within which we try to understand reality from different points of view. To me, the scientific in no way excludes the religious view.
Kevin Costner in "Man of Steel"
A young Superman gets some fatherly advice from Pa Kent, who tells him to find the reason Jor-El sent him to Earth.
Man of Steel pulls at the heartstrings in its latest TV spot, which shows Clark Kent dealing with his alien roots.
Speaking of Clark’s Kryptonian father, last week Warner Bros. unveiled a TV spot focusing on Russell Crowe’s Jor-El.
Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder, also stars Henry Cavill as Superman, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon and Diane Lane. It is set for release June 14.
At a time when animal buffs are concerned about plastic articles being abandoned in forests, a 40-year-old female elephant was found dead with about two kg of plastic waste in its bowels in a forest near the holy hill Sabarimala in Pathanamthitta district recently.
The plastic articles consumed by the jumbo was believed to have been the left over of the two-month long pilgrimage of Sabarimala, which concluded last month.
The carcass of the jumbo was sighted at Valiyaanavattom under the wildlife area of Periyar west division on Saturday.
A top official said huge piles of plastic waste,including polythene carry bags, aluminium foil papers and wrappers of packed food were found in its abdomen during post-mortem.
"The carcass of the elephant was spotted during routine field check. About two kg of plastic waste was found in it's abdomen during post-mortem. It could not take any food at least for some weeks," Sunil Babu, deputy director, Periyar west division, told PTI.
"According to the veterinarians, the animal died of constipation and intestinal blockage. It could not digest the plastic in the intestine or take any other food," he said.
He, however, said no similar incident was reported in the area in the recent past though the presence of plastic waste had been found in the dung of the wild animals before.
Stern action was necessary to keep the forest clean and plastic-free, the official added.
The carcass was cremated inside the Valiyaanavattom forest yesterday.
Australia off-spinner Nathan Lyon today said he will look to exploit the footmarks created by Indian pacer Ishant Sharma during his spell to David Warner on the opening day of the first cricket Test.
The 27-year-old Lyon bowled a brilliant spell of spin through the day, troubling Indian batsmen, and dismissing both Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane after they had scored fifties.
"We had big Ishant Sharma running down the middle of the wicket, bowling to David Warner around the wicket, so I am thankful for him making some footmarks for me and bowling around the wicket to Davey," he said.
"I'm looking forward to bowling more into those footmarks and hopefully he bowls there again and does it for the whole series," he added.
Talking about Rahane's dismissal, Lyon said: "That's all part of the variation. We knew if I was able to keep putting the ball in the rough there, something was going to give. I'm lucky enough that one kicked there and took the glove and popped up for a nice catch for Shane Watson.
"It shows a good Test match wicket out there with the variations for spinners. But as we saw if their batters got in it was pretty hard to get out," Lyon said.
The horror of Phillip Hughes tragic death came flashing in mind today when India skipper Virat Kohli was hit on the badge of his helmet by a bouncer from Mitchell Johnson on the very first ball he faced. Immediately, all the Australian players rushed to check on him, including a worried Johnson.
Kohli then shook off the blow and struck his seventh Test hundred to guide India to 369-5 at close on day three at the Oval here.
Talking about the incident, Lyon said: "As bad as it sounds, helmets work and that has been a positive thing today.
"It is vital for our quick bowlers to have that confidence for our quicks to bowl the bouncer again. We spoke about that at lunch time with Mitch, so he's feeling good and I can guarantee he's going to come out and fire in the second innings and have that aggression we all love him for."
Johnson was charged up towards the end of day's play, dismissing Kohli with a short ball and then testing Wriddhiman Saha with some very quick bouncers.
Katy Perry has addressed whether or not her new single is about her feud with Taylor Swift.
The singer appeared on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon last night (May 19) and discussed the meaning behind ‘Swish Swish’, which features a guest spot from Nicki Minaj.
Host Fallon asked Perry if the song, which is the third to be released from forthcoming album ‘Witness’, is “about anyone we know”.
“I think it’s a great anthem for people whenever someone’s trying to hold you down or bully you,” the star replied quickly.
Watch the interview below, via Rolling Stone.
It was recently confirmed that ‘Witness’ will be released on June 9.
Meanwhile, Perry will serve as the musical guest on the season finale of SNL tonight (May 20).
“You’re my California girl,” replies Johnson, before Perry tries to stop him naming more of her songs.
The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week, pointing to still strong labour market conditions, though the pace of job growth has slowed after last year's robust gains.
[WASHINGTON] The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week, pointing to still strong labour market conditions, though the pace of job growth has slowed after last year's robust gains.
The Labour Department said no states were estimated. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims falling to 225,000 in the latest week. Claims have been drifting in the middle of their 200,000-253,000 range this year.
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday and its policymakers abandoned projections for further rate increases this year, noting that "the labour market remains strong but growth of economic activity has slowed from its solid rate in the fourth quarter."
The unemployment rate is 3.8 per cent and annual wage growth in February was the strongest since 2009.
Gov. Cuomo is set to lose his top Jewish liaison David Lobl, who is leaving to join powerhouse lobbying firm Kasirer.

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