The Beijing 2008 Olympics is officially 'over' on the evening of 24th August, when the closing ceremony takes place in their enormous 'bird's nest' stadium. London gets a few minutes in the ceremony as part of the Handover, which will be shown on big screens hastily put up in London and across UK cities. This happens to be on the early afternoon (in UK time) on the Sunday of the big august bank holiday/Notting......

Now, stories from the IT world ordinarily don’t do much for Londonist besides make our eyes glaze over. (We’re sorry, IT people, we’re sure you’re lovely, that your jobs are fascinating, and that we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without you. It’s just that we can’t understand what you’re saying.) So when we noticed this story about a new website created to help IT companies bid for contracts for the 2012......

'If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy all her friends?', and 'Where has all my money gone' are two of the imponderables listed on the Any Questions Answered text service's website as favourites. In the latter case, the wonga may well have been frittered away on the addictive information service, which charges £1 to answer anything from the number of the local Chinese to 'Will I get lucky tonight?'. Armed......

Seb Coe has announced the first official sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics - a race of monochrome aliens known only as the Kanamits: "Since first discovering that the Kanamits had landed on Earth and promised to be nothing but helpful to the cause of London's 2012 Olympic bid we have kept things under wraps. We were of course initially wary of the intentions of such a highly advanced race", Lord Coe told a......

Last week the 2012 organisers were promising that the London Olympics would be the greenest yet. Normally we'd scoff at such a claim, but it looks like this time no one is talking out of their hat. By building part of the Olympic village on a radioactive dumping ground things will be very green. And glowing. Documents seen by the Guardian say waste contaminated by an isotope of thorium, a nuclear fuel which can......

So first we say we can put on a better Olympics than Paris and much to our surprise we were taken seriously. Much backtracking later and a LOT of scaling down of the very same plans that won us the bid, we realise that we can't afford it. And now the new security director of the 2012 London Olympics reckons that al-Qaida will want in on the games too: The al-Qaida terrorist group is......

Wandsworth Council have given consent to six planning applications and one variation concerning detailed designs for one of our favourite lump of bricks - the Battersea Power Station: These consents, representing a total area of 4.5 million sq ft mean that, for the first time, the project can now move forward towards the construction stage and leasing programme. Victor Hwang, President of Parkview International explains why it's taken so long to get this far:......

This day in London’s History 1948 The last Olympics to be held in London draw to a close. With most of Europe still under ration and all the piggybanks long smashed to pieces, it wasn’t a universally popular decision to hold the XIV Olympiad on this side of the Atlantic, if at all. Still, London got the nod, with a slightly remoulded Wembley as the focus. We weren’t exactly the most magnanimous of hosts:......

That's what you'll all be saying when the The Tate Modern £140m extension is opened. The Times: It is inspired by the ziggurats of ancient Babylon, but to some the giant glass structure planned for the south bank of the Thames resembles the work of an eight-year-old with a tub of bricks. This is as it should be. The South Bank already features a number of buildings and landmarks that shouldn't work together but......

Just when you thought there could be no more depressing London property stories and just as you were beginning to pray that lazy journalists couldn't come up with any more contrived Olympics-related crap, along comes: First time buyers will not win housing gold until London Olympics. 'Housing gold'...God help us. Yes the story here is that evil old house price inflation and the fact that those of us still on the 'first diving board......

Estate agents, Tess Daly, and racists - sounds grim, doesn't it? Yes, perhaps to reflect the unrelenting yuckiness of the weather (look, it's almost April - please can we have a little, just a little sunshine?) the TV schedules are about s appetising as day-old tramp sick. Apart from the old stalwarts (Footballers Wive$ Thur 9pm ITV1 - Tanya is back! With Joan Collins!, and Desperate Housewives Wed 10pm C4 - getting better again......

There's been a quite a few Olympics stories popping up over the past few days, but we're quite aware that it's still seven years away and we're not all that bothered yet. So we thought that we'd save them all up and stick them all in one post to save a bit of time and energy. So, here we go: The story that's probably of most interest to the average Londonist reader (and the......

After the recent rise in exotic nature stories and yesterday's news that we were the zombie capital of the world things get a little weirder today. We just found out that plans are afoot to scupper the 2012 Olympics... no it's not a French armada intent on taking the moneypit back to Paris - it's killer brain-eating alien weeds from outerspace. Well alien weeds anyway. It's a short story so here's the whole thing:......