Russian oligarchs used to love London. Now … not so much. The Economist expliains.
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Oliver Bullough explains how Russian oligarchs launder money in London.
More:
“Boris Johnson claims the UK is rooting out dirty Russian money. That’s ludicrous,” Oliver Bullough, The Guardian
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The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, visualized in a time-lapse animated map, by Ollie Bye. Music by Marten Moses.
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It may be London’s smallest java stop: a coffeehouse in an antique red telephone booth.
Related:
“The Red Phone Box, a British Icon, Stages a Comeback,” Palko Karasz, New York Times
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A 10-ton mass of congealed fat and wet wipes was recently removed from the London sewer it destroyed. The 130-foot-long “fatberg” was under the streets of Chelsea, home to posh restaurants, all of them pouring cooking grease down the bunghole, and prestigious residences flushing wet wipes down the loo. It will take four months and $600,000 to repair the sewer.
This is far from a UK record. In 2013 a 15-ton fatberg was removed from a sewer in Kingston.
Updates:
“Wet wipes could face wipe-out in plastic clean-up,” BBC
“A Pretty, Seaside Town in England Vanquished Its Giant Fatberg,” Jessica Leigh Hester, Atlas Obscura
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A glob of fat the size of a school bus was stuck in the London sewers. The 15-ton ‘fatberg‘ formed when waste food fat congealed around discarded wet wipes in the main drains under London Road in Kingston, Surrey. The blockage was removed by engineers before raw sewage started spurting out of neighborhood manholes. Fatberg-damaged sewer pipes will take six weeks to repair.
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney sought to demonstrate his statesmanship with a trip to the Old World, but he seems to have an odd sense of diplomacy. As a guest in the United Kingdom he opined that London’s arrangements for the 2012 Olympics were “disconcerting” and “obviously is not something which is encouraging,” and “it’s hard to know just how well” the Games will succeed.
Having arranged snowball fights at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City (population 190,000), Mr. Romney is well qualified to assess the 2012 Olympics in London (population 8,000,000). Certainly the organizer of London’s Games should have solved his logistical problems the way Mitt Romney did, by becoming a registered lobbyist and getting $1.3 Billion in earmarks from the national government. Ladies and gentlemen, that is superior business management.
London Mayor Boris Johnson welcomes you to the 2012 Olympic Games in this video by CassetteBoy:
The United Kingdom is sparing no expense in preparing for next summer’s Olympic Games. The host city of London is testing new demonstration sports — rioting, arson, and looting — and enthusiasm for these Xtreme sports is sweeping the country.
A few inches of snow fell in Washington DC yesterday. Predictably, the capital is paralyzed.
Britain is shrieking about the cold. “London colder than Antarctica” screams today’s Daily Telegraph. In true “Sunday paper” form, the Telegraph neglects to mention that it’s summer in Antarctica.
The Independent puts things in perspective, listing the world’s chilliest capital cities. The coldest: Astana, Kazakhstan, where the lowest recorded temperature was -61.6F (-52C). Runners-up: Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (-56F [-49C ]) and Minsk, Belarus (-40F [-40C ]).
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