Olympic fashion

Here in the UK we are starting to get ready for the 2012 London Olympics. The UK won quite a lot of medals in the last Olympics and we are more confident of success than in other international sports. We have not had a good summer for our major sports, so far, with England going home early from the World Cup.

Now our Olympic team will look good even if they do badly. Team organisers have just announced that fashion designer Stella McCartney will oversee the development of the team’s kit. This includes the clothes they will wear on the track, casual tracksuits and also tops sold to fans.

These have been provided by Adidas until now. Adidas will be working with Stella McCartney on the new clothes. The team says wearing good clothes can give athletes an advantage.

Stella McCartney is very well-known in the UK. Her father is the former Beatle Paul McCartney, and she was chief designer with the French label Chloe two years after graduating. She now has her own label as part of the Gucci fashion group.

UK visitors love sport

At least two million visitors to the UK came to watch sport, including football matches, horse racing and golf. Another 1.4 million came to take part in sport themselves.

Visit Britain says that 3 million visitors to the country spent £2.3 billion watching and playing sport. The most popular spectator sport was football. This option was particularly popular with American, Norwegian, Germa,n and Spanish visitors.

Horse racing was the second most popular sport, whilst golf attracted large numbers of American tourists.

Women bishops closer for UK church

The Church of England has been doing a lot of arguing about when and how women can become bishops, which is a senior position in the Church. Bishops are usually in charge of priests (called vicars in the Church of England) over a large area and will be based in a Cathedral church.

Traditional members of the Church are not happy about the idea of women in senior positions. They argue that Jesus specifically chose men to work with him.

This week a special meeting of the Church decided that women should be allowed to become bishops, and voted against a plan which would have allowed people to have access to a male bishop. There will be a final vote in a year.

Population count to end

The Government is thinking about ending the system of taking a “census” of the UK population every ten years.

Governments have taken a Census for over 200 years now. The current government thinks it is an expensive and not very accurate way to get information. A government minister said results were not available for 18 months after the work had been done and were then often out of date.

The 2011 Census, which will go ahead, will cost £482 million. Many people do not take it very seriously. In the last Census, 390,000 people said their official religion was “Jedi” referring to the Star Wars films.

The Government is looking at other ways of counting the population more often, using existing databases.

by Susan Young
susan@englishuk.com