Editorial Photographers UK | WATCH OUT! There’s a G4S about. G-Force is an animated film by Disney in which a specially trained squad of guinea pigs is dispatched to save the world. We should be so lucky. As everybody now knows the similarly named G4S is no Disney fiction but an all too real “humiliating shambles” of a security company tasked with looking after the London Olympics. Not so long ago “the world’s leading international security solutions group” was boasting that nobody cared if G4S controlled the issue of firearms licences in the UK and of its exploitative employment policies. G4S chief executive Nick Buckles takes a ride. Buckles agreed his company’s handling of Olympic security was a humiliating shambles. So it’s no surprise that many of the guards deployed on the low-end work of Olympic perimeter security at £8.50 an hour (after 12 days unpaid training) are drawn from the less-educated job seekers and have little or no experience. Private security firm “has no role outside of the Olympic Park” Beyond limits.
A walk on the riled side. Britain flooded with 'brand police' to protect sponsors - Home News - UK. Almost 300 enforcement officers will be seen across the country checking firms to ensure they are not staging "ambush marketing" or illegally associating themselves with the Games at the expense of official sponsors such as Adidas, McDonald's, Coca-Cola and BP. The clampdown goes on while 3,500 soldiers on leave are brought in to bail out the security firm G4S which admitted it could not supply the numbers of security staff it had promised. Yesterday, the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, refused to rule out that even more soldiers may be called upon to help with security, but dismissed the issue as merely a "hitch".
However, as well as the regular Army, the Olympic "brand army" will start its work with a vengeance today. Wearing purple caps and tops, the experts in trading and advertising working for the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) are heading the biggest brand protection operation staged in the UK. Some £1.4bn of the Games' £11.4bn budget comes from private sector sponsors. 1. 2.
Anish Kapoor's house in London occupied by protesters | Art and design. The ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the Olympic Park, designed by Anish Kapoor. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA In the first of what could be a summer of protest linked to the Olympics, a group connected to the Occupy movement has taken over an empty Georgian house owned by the Olympic park sculptor Anish Kapoor for a one-day arts event.
The group, calling itself Bread and Circuses, a reference to its argument that the Olympics are a means of distracting people from pressing economic and social issues, said it had "liberated" the part-derelict five-storey house on Lincoln's Inn Fields, one of central London's most picturesque and expensive garden squares and the scene of a rough sleepers' "tent city" in the 1980s. The group says the house has been left empty since the artist – whose ArcelorMittal Orbit tower, a 115-metre tall sculpture and observation platform, dominates the skyline of the Olympic Park in east London – bought it in 2009.
London's 'Capital clean-up' The pre-Olympic 'clean up' is well underway in London, with homeless people, sex-workers and other marginal groups being managed and, sometimes violently, concealed. Far from exceptional circumstance, this initiative in the capital is worryingly indicative of a trend of wider authoritarian measures being implemented in London and across the UK. This piece is part of our debate 'The Great British Summer? '. In the run up to the London 2012 Olympics, officials have co-ordinated a 'clean up' of the capital. While there's nothing wrong with sprucing up the city, local authorities have begun seeing urban life – sandwich board men, the homeless, touts - as 'mess' to be 'cleaned' through the imposition of bans and fines. The mayor-backed campaign 'Capital clean-up' aims to improve London by organising local litter picks and tidying up the banks of the Thames.
For some local authorities, this is not just about scrubbing walls or planting flowers. Olympics 2012: London is starting to look like a militarised zone | Wail Qasim. With the Olympics less than a month away, small but noticeable changes are transforming London. Special signs in Olympic pink that guide visitors to venues have appeared, announcements at major London Underground stations have become multilingual and the first of the Olympics traffic lanes have been painted. More immediately disconcerting, however, is the appearance of Royal Military police in London. For those out in Leicester Square last Saturday night the Olympic-prompted mutual aid between the Metropolitan police's territorial support group and service personnel from the army and Royal Navy police was certainly a startling and confusing sight.
It isn't every day you see patrols by officers in desert camouflage. But beyond the unease generated by this development there are also concerns about how the use of these officers will play out in practice. One question that this immediately raises is of accountability. London 2012: the East End itself is the real Olympian challenge | UK news | The Observer. In Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, east London, there is a shop that sells handsome old-fashioned hardware – enamelled pots and wooden scrubbing brushes – at new-fashioned prices: beneath a sign in crisp, utility-style sans serif type, it makes what were objects of working-class use into middle class objects of desire. A few doors along are a cafe and patisserie whose coffee has been rightly hailed as among the best in London. In the same street are art galleries, an expensive clothes shop with a boutique cinema in its basement and another place selling a playful selection of antiques and faux antiques.
In the same ownership as the latter is Les Trois Garçons, a nearby restaurant whose large windows, chandeliers and palpable campness heroically dare unreconstructed locals to put a brick through them. In another direction is Brick Lane, where in the 1970s Bangladeshis and anarchists fought violent battles with fascists. This development went bust in the early 1990s.