Feminists. They don’t shave their armpits and they bathe in toad spit and the pubic hairs of young boys. Right? Well, you could try asking that question at the European Feminist Summit, but we would advise against it. Part of the London Festival of Europe, the summit, titled The Future of European Feminism will discuss feminism in the 21st century, in the context of Europe, politics, art and media. With feminist blog The F......

There are just too many good events around town this week for us to narrow our picks for certain nights. Thus we present you with multiple options and leave that difficult choice to you. In the meantime, we’ll be brushing up on our science fiction in an effort to figure out how to move quickly from event to event. The solution? Teleporting. Clearly. Monday: writLoud returns to RADA tonight. We like this event, as......

This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 37. Fashionably Nice – Ties It’s official, to be nice is on trend. A fashion designer friend of mine told me of an article she had seen on WGSN (a paid subscription service for the fashion industry that forecasts future trends), forecasting that fashion would get a bit more wholesome and nice. It used inspiration......

The 2008 running of the Womens' Head of the River race on Saturday was certainly as unpredictable as many expected given the absence of Britain's elite oarswomen at a pre-Olympic training camp. In the picture above, one of many in a marvellous Flickr set from London Annie, you can see last year's winners, Thames A, on the far right being overhauled by Osiris, the Oxford University Blues Boat, who went on to take the......

Last time we heard from Lords they were taking baby steps towards the 21st century. Today, post membership consultation, they're giving a tantalising glimpse of the future of the hallowed turf, revealing a £200m masterplan in the making to transform the revered ground. Following the club's biggest ever member survey a redevelopment brief has been sent out to a number of architects but don't panic, traditionalists! The sacred pavilion and its exterior will remain......

This Londonista popped to Terminal 5 at Heathrow - due to open in a month's time - and live-blogged about it: It's 7.35am on a grey Saturday morning, and I'm on the piccadilly line. Sure - there are better things to do with my time, but I'm off to be a fake passenger and so to have a nosey around a new iconic building that swishly calls itself 'T5'. It's almost an airport in......

Prior to Mohamad al-Fayed's sensational appearance at the Royal Courts of Justice this week, with his sober critiques and totally non-insane, honest-to-Gawd guaranteed truthful claims of murder most foul, the hitherto dull proceedings of the Diana Inquiry have been enlivened by John Loughrey. Mr. Loughrey describes himself as "Diana's Number One fan", and in living proof of his dedication to what is clearly a hotly contested title, he has attended every single sodding day......

Taking a cue from police investigators and reality TV shows looking to create a scandal, Harrow Council in northwest London has started to use voice risk analysis -- a type of phone-based lie detector -- to try and catch fraudsters claiming unneeded benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions. How does it work? "The technology detects changes in people's voice patterns such as hesitation or avoiding direct questions, and identifies them as a......

SFist worried over drugstore chain Walgreens celebration of Black History Month.Gothamist was surprised that apparently New York City is the fourth most miserable city in the country, after Detroit, Stockton, CA, and Flint, MI.Shanghaiist finds out what the Chinese think of Hilary and Obama.It was with a healthy amount of schadenfreude that Phillyist reported that former Eagle, and now Cowboy (ew), Terrell Owens owes the Eagles a significant wad of cash.Torontoist is two weeks......

From time to time we give one of our writers the opportunity to offer a very personal view of a subject that's weighing on their minds. This time it's the turn of Julie, who's been spurred into print by the hoopla surrounding tonight's big NFL showpiece and the return of the league to our city later this year. Happy Superbowl Sunday, London NFL fans! Things have been looking up for you lately, eh? You......

Our friends in Westminster have voted that more money from the Eamon Holmes fronted tax on the poor, the National Lottery, can be used to plug the funding gap for the 2012 Olympics. Culture Secretary James Purnell said the £9.3bn budget for the Games (almost four times the estimate that helped win the bid in 2005) is "robust". We doubt it. How has it suddenly become robust? The real lottery here is determining how much......

Waterfront London, which opened today, looks at waterside development in London; recently completed, underway or in the pipeline. It considers how our waterfronts are transforming and being embraced as essential public spaces whereas, not long ago, we buried rivers, turned them into sewers or filled in and built on them. The enlightened approach, celebrated here, is to embrace the waterways and exploit their potential as transport routes, leisure facilities and biodiverse environments. The key......

From the government department for investigating blatantly obvious things - a public consultation into whether learning English helps immigrants feel more at home. Spend the money on the courses, you twonks. BBC names rising music stars for 2008. Don't get too excited. Watch out for our Listen Up! posts instead. Market "intelligence" firms gathering data on public health predict that residents of deprived boroughs, Tower Hamlets, Southwark and City & Hackney are likely to......

Hello Jeff! Ho ho ho and a bottle of rum - it's Christmas time! Happy Saint Jesus Day, to almost all of you! And what an event it is - a time for giving, sharing, and taking; a time for thinking about the past, as well as looking forward to the future, all the while contemplating the here and now; a time of remembrance and joy, coupled with inebriation, rage, and light misogyny. And......

Boris Johnson is backing a plan to bring Routemasters back into action, with electric motors and no emissions, and the reintroduction of drivers and conductors on each bus. With characteristic swiftness, Ken Livingstone has taken opposition to the plan and Londoners are once again torn between the two views on the possible return of the famous big red bus. For a brief set by Autocar magazine, design company Capaco came up with the electric......

In Los Angeles, LAist most definitely celebrated Thanksgiving like no other. After all, one has to keep up all the energy to keep on walking the line at the Writers Strike and fighting the unfortunate return of the wildfires in Malibu, which single handedly destroyed over fifty homes within the first 24 hours. National outlets may be covering the fires, but CNN also found it is easier to buy a gun than fruit and......

Toot toot! And honk, honk! For the London Transport Museum has finally reopened after two years and £22 million of renovation. Hot on the (w)heels of St Pancras. Typical: you wait years for a major nexus of transport heritage to open, and then two come along at once. The Covent Garden attraction tells the story of the trotting, crawling and whizzing of our city over the past 200 years. There’s also a section looking......

You can get packed into a club playing bad techno any weekend, but it’s not often that you get to party like it’s 1859. Saturday’s White Mischief, themed “From The Earth To The Moon”, was an evening envisioning the future as the Victorians imagined it (well before George Orwell came along and scared the crap out of us). The crowd was split between those in standard club dress and those who went all out......

With the opening of St Pancras and its high-speed line to the continent, the approval of Crossrail, and glimpses of the futuristic bullet trains that will soon call London home, there are plenty of encouraging signs that Britain's rail network is in good health. They don't come much more inspiring than the former railway man who has set up his own rail service. Grand Central Rail was established in 2000 by former British Rail......

Next week our beleaguered government will be announcing innovative new policies aimed at tackling the public health time bomb of increasingly fat and lazy Londoners. GPs will be prescribing - wait for it - exercise, of all things, and dishing out maps of local parks to encourage us urban, sedentary types to get out there and get fit. Genius, frankly. As long as they don't charge £6.65 per map. Foresight, a government research unit......

We’ve got a right one here – the tale of the wannabe strangler who half choked his chosen victim, immediately felt sorry, and then called 999 to summons an ambulance for her. Young Toby Vane is now quite rightly up in court over his, er, aberration. He claims that he was quite simply pissed off with his (we imagine former) friend after she had verbally tormented him for years. Londonist is impressed. This is clearly......

A glimpse of the future for London rail travel was unveiled today at Hitachi’s depot in Ashford. (And this dumb-broad Londonista thought they just made tellies and stuff). We are to get a bullet train (which some droll spark has named the ‘javelin’ in honour of the Olympics – geddit?) as of 2009. The aim is not only to whisk sports spectators from downtown St. Pancras over to the main-goings-on at the Olympic stadium in......

For those of you who are still dubious about London’s public transport system, you may be interested to hear it’s just been rated as the third best in the world. Although station cleanliness and comfy seats may not initially strike you, it is, apparently, one of the most luxurious transportation systems in the world. Carrying 3 million people a day, and featuring a whole host of options from the iconic double decker buses to......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

From BBC News: London must become car-free if it is to substantially cut carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new report. Crikey. In response to the findings London Green Party member Jenny Jones said: "I have asked the London mayor to do a feasibility study into creating a car free pedestrian zone in central London linking all the main squares and parks. "We need to show that the car no longer rules in London......

In a residential road in North East London workmen in high visibility vests wrestle manfully down muddy holes with broken water pipes whilst smiling, perky local girls ferry tea and biscuits to the hard working hunks, exchanging playful banter. A scene straight out of a "Confessions..." farce? No. It's the BBC reporting on progress with water mains replacement in Walthamstow. Slow news day, then. It seems our BBC News team are astonished that local......

Fresh this Week: If news of the impending Doctor Who hiatus is giving you palpitations, fear not – the Book Grocer brings you not one but three new books based on the popular series: Paul Magrs – Sick Building The Doctor and Martha travel to Tiermann’s World, a planet where sabre-toothed tigers still roam. They arrive to warn everyone that an extremely hungry alien creature is on its way and if they don’t take action......

We all knew it was coming. Yet another tube strike. As of 6pm this evening, we're going to see 72 hours of chaos as more than 2,300 RMT members have promised to walk out. (The TFL website says services will not return to normal until Friday morning.) And what can we do about it? Absolutely nothing. We've been told to 'finish our journeys by 5pm or jump on the DLR'. So what's the deal?......

Lights go on... lights go off... lights go on... lights go off... Contemporary life hums, buzzes, whirrs and recharges with electricity that we take for granted. It's always there - coming out of our wall sockets, stored in our batteries and flowing around us in cable after cable, concealed in every wall and under every floor. BOiLEROOM is a theatre company with a fantastically eclectic line-up, bizarrely well-suited for the kind of stories and......

It seems summer is officially over now (though it seems to have never properly arrived really…), and with that the early autumn tours start to make an appearance. First on Monday night are two bands that are playing at this weekend’s Connect festival, Modest Mouse and the Polyphonic Spree. American band Modest Mouse play the Forum, with standing tickets sold out, but still with seats available at £18.50 each. The Spree brings their triumphant show......