While the world rejoices in the victory of Barack Obama, West Ham United have a particular reason to feel proud. As we reported back in March, the President-elect is something of a Hammers fan: during 200, while visiting relatives in Britain, he attended a game at Upton Park. Since then, he's tried to watch Premier League games whenever his schedule allows. With Obama's election win, the east London side have extended an invitation for......

As the repercussions continue around the Premiership's shock announcement that it was going to take its brand of football around the world in a weekend, its chief executive Richard Scudamore is determined that the plan should survive in some way, shape or form. As we mentioned last week, FIFA's regional associations and its president Sepp Blatter himself have come out in opposition to the idea of our league matches encroaching on their territories at......

Thursday 7th February, 2008 will forever be the day that English club football did not so much cross the line as surge over it like the tape had just gone up at the start of the Grand National. The smaller Premiership clubs raced down the opening gallop, seemingly even more enthusiastic than the elite few to extend jet-set football beyond the confines of exhibition kickabouts. And yet, eight days later, it looks as if......

Erm, police agents lose the security codes for 73 of their stations. Dolts. The Royal Marsden re-opens for business. Troopers. Paddick is Elton’s candidate of choice. Sweeties. The East London Line is on schedule to be on schedule. Can’t call them liars, so let’s settle for optimists. Beckham honoured for being Beckham. Top man. It’s-that-time-of-year piccie courtesy of shadow of my future self’s flickr photo stream.......

Don't get us wrong. As you can probably tell from last week there's a good deal of enthusiasm for the NFL on here. This Londonista in particular has to confess to a near addiction. However, while last night's Miami Dolphins hosting of the eventually victorious New York Giants at Wembley was the ideal meet-up for the sport's many fans in this country, and the NFL can finally put a big tick in the box......

Hot on the heels of basketball and ice hockey, the third of America's big four sports has begun its landing on our shores. The advance guard for Sunday's NFL encounter between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants consists of just one man. Albeit a very big one. Pictured above is the specially commissioned twenty-six foot high animatronic statue of Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor which is touring London and the South East......

Banner week for SFist as the site's new editor introduced himself -- hooray for Brock! While the NY Times weighed in on SF's mayoral race, only SFist had the (insert tongue firmly into cheek) hard-hitting latest on candidate/activist Josh Wolf. Coverage of a protest vs. gentrification spawned a fantastic debate amongst SFist's readers. Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous: video of a man that confused a Board of Supes meeting with "open mic......

So ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Milan, deducted eight league points for their involvement in the Calciopoli scandal, provide Europe's club champions, sitting alongside the Italian nation's triumph at last summer's world cup. (Incidentally, anyone who still disbelieves Filippo Inzaghi that Milan practice free kicks such as the one they scored from should have a look at this.) Former Milan CEO Adriano Galliani, banned for five months for his part in Calciopoli, was prominent amongst......

LAist is experimenting with blogging dates from J-Date, but finds the best men are found offline. Some date vicariously online and that is one reason why porn is big -- really freaking big -- so they ask if they should cover XXX since the heart of it lays in the city's San Fernando Valley. A writer grapples with her food porn photography obsession, another gets censored on Flickr, one gets scooped by the LA......

The nicer the weather gets, the busier we get across the Ist-A-Verse. But we like being busy. Here's a peek at what we've been up to since last week! Chicagoist had an interview with Audrey Niffenegger, whose popular book, The Time Traveler's Wife, was based in their fine city. They also had a heated discussion about Rush Limbaugh's controversial Barack Obama parody, talked about whether Uncle Julio's Hacienda is a good place to get......

After the football, London now takes on Liverpool and Glasgow in June for a City v City 10km race with a distinctly silly videolink set-up. Our runners will start at 9.30am in Greenwich. The winner crossing the finish line will appear on a big screen in Liverpool, signalling the start of their own 10km course through the Mersey tunnel. Their winner will in turn trigger the start of the Glasgow race, around a loch.......

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us. Austinist has a chat with the ever-fashionable Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, and managed to catch some local fashionistas making......

We don't know about where you are, but it seems like spring can't decide whether or not to happen. Some days are warm, some days are cold, and sometimes you aren't sure which. Baseball may have started up (and soccer/football winding down) but it still seems cold out there. Unless it's not. Anyways, onto the -ists. Austinist happily anticipated fall's Austin City Limits, even though they're not fully recovered from South By Southwest. In......

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists. We start with SFist which broke the -ist record for comments with nearly 500 comments on a post about our Mayor's girlfriend. She responded back on charges that she's not a "girl's girl" and, whoo boy-- the floodgates? They......

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,......

A man emailed us to tell us about his website . It's a website that helps people swap football stickers. It didn't strike us as having an instant correlation with London, but then we thought that there are people in London who buy sticker albums and fill them with little stickers. We know some of these people. Some of these people might be us. One of these people might well have gone into a......

Crushed at our cricketing walloping from the Wallabies? Numbed at our humbling on the international soccer stage? Tempted to down cratefuls of the sponsor's product to submerge the memory of the autumn rugby fiascos? Then why not treat yourself to a few hours of a sport where the UK is still the dominant force? The first big snooker tournament of the year, the SAGA Insurance Masters, breaks off at Wembley on Sunday with the......

Happy Holidays! Chances are, you're reading this the day after Christmas, back at your day job after all-too-short a holiday, and the last thing you want from us is stuff about the holidays. But that's just too bad. Because, see, here in the Ist-A-Verse, we do things ahead of time. It might be December 26 for you, but that's what you get for not checking your Favorite Local Blog on Christmas Eve. Austinist is......

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Londonist wants you to know where to......

With visions of sugar plum fairies dancing through their heads, the -Ists began to get into that holiday mood. Well, some did. Austinist wasn't as the NY Times dissed them and a local Tex-Mex institution sold out. Making them feel better was music, sweet music and the local theater getting name checked on "Heroes" Chicagoist tried to wrap their heads around a religious movie being banned from a Christmas themed park. To wash that......

London has overtaken Paris to become the city with Europe's best jobs outlook.. It's not often you hear this phrase but due to the UK's "better weather conditions", a friendly between Australia and Denmark will be held at QPR next year. A strange one. Today China have unveiled Thames Town - a copycat British town, complete with Winston Churchill statue, a chippie, and a pub. Is it April fool's day? A former boxer has......

The Nelson Mandela Challenge football match between South Africa and Egypt scheduled to take place at Brentford’s Griffin Park stadium on Wednesday November 15th is in danger of being called off. Two weeks ago, the South Africa Times announced that this annual fundraiser would be moved to London for the first time “to raise its profile,” but, with the game less than a fortnight away Brentford claim to have received no more than a......

Here at Londonist we’re a sucker for a damsel in distress, and so it is that we commend to you, dear reader, the plight of one Jennifer Nobis (that’s not her in the picture, incidentally - that’s somebody called Hess – you’ll see later what her portrait is doing here). Jennifer is very good at football. So good, in fact, that she has attracted the attention of Charlton Athletic’s womens' team who are keen......

Ah, the autumn of 2003, with imitation Russian hats for sale on Fulham Broadway amidst gathering hope that plucky “Chelski”, bankrolled by glamorous Russian gazillionaire Roman Abramovich, were going finally to break open the Arsenal – Manchester United deadlock. In the three years since then the loudest criticism the Chelsea owner has had to endure has been that the traditional big boys can’t keep up. A few voices have stubbornly alleged darkness in Abramovich’s......

As that stadium near Neasden inches its way towards completion the world’s top soccer nations still can’t resist the draw of the capital. If you’re Welsh or just interested in watching four teams from this summer’s world cup on your doorstep then the next few weeks will be very appealing. First up are two teams who surpassed expectations in Germany. Ghana play host to Togo at Griffin Park, Brentford this Tuesday night giving West......

The Premiership hasn't even started but already there's a lot to say about this season's football in the capital. Tonight sees most of our professional clubs in competitive action as the six Football League sides are joined by Arsenal playing their Champions League qualifier away to Dinamo Zagreb (live on ITV, 8pm) minus the 'keeper (suspended) and half the defence from their appearance in the final three months ago as everybody continues to work......

A surprising headline, to be sure, but we shouldn’t be that shocked. After all, he was first considered for the job six years ago. Then he was said to be unhappy with administrators overseeing team affairs, but now Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri, Dunga to his friends, captain of Brazil’s 1994 world cup winning side and member of the Queens Park Rangers board since Gianni Paladini’s arrival as majority shareholder in 2004, has succumbed to......

Whilst driving through London's banlieu on Sunday, an item on Radio Five Live caught Londonist's attention. In between news from the test match and the awful opinions of that rank Scotsman Nicky Campbell, a cheerful broadcaster spoke of a three week contest taking place upon the streets of our own fair city, in which the contestants are tasked with hunting each other down and opening fire with water pistols. It sounded rather entertaining and......

Is just one of many things more important than the World Cup. This vital bit of information was made public after Boing Boing received a silly letter warning them not to stream any football matches illegally on their website. Baker & McKenzie LLP can't use the Internet very much if they thought there was any danger of that happening: Oh brother. I don't even know what the FIFA World Cup is. I'm guessing it's soccer,......

Given that we're actually due some sunshine this weekend, we have our doubts that attending a film festival will be at the top of many people's lists. Especially when they learn that all the films being shown are about FOOTBALL. For most, the only cinematic football offering that approaches anywhere near an acceptable level of quality (and then only in an ironic 'this is shit but in a good way' fashion) might be 'Escape......