Reports that hate crime is on the rise don't really surprise us. In the wake of the earlier shocking news about the murdered French students and the relentless wave of violent crime we seem to be riding at the moment, we're not really feeling the love at all. However, Barnet is specifically reporting a 20% increase in reported race crime, whilst other boroughs report a decline. Statistics, of course, can be wonderfully open to......

Boris Johnson might just have won himself the election with a pledge to abolish the bendy bus and bring back the Routemaster. Emotions were high today as the Bethnal Green tube station disaster was commemorated, 65 years on. Londonist is feeling left out: we want to climb up something and protest: today saw two up a crane grumbling about the EU Treaty. On the Olympic front, today saw the announcement that the IOC is......

Blogophobia: an irrational fear, intolerance of, or aversion to the blogosphere. Martin Amis has been accused of far worse, but after hearing him talk at RADA yesterday evening, this was the only accusation we felt it safe to lodge against him. The offending remark came early in the evening when, during his reading from the recently published The Second Plane, Amis effectively dissed Londonist and its ilk as “semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere”. Gauntlet,......

Now Londonist gets to see some pretty cool gigs in the name of keeping you apprised of stuff. But NME staff writers we ain’t, and quite often we can only blog and dream. Someone out there has gotta go see The King Blues supporting at this gig ‘cos we can’t and we’re real sore about it. Londonist was racking our rather small brain trying to think of how best to describe The King Blues’......

Sickening news this morning that the aspirational Stephen Lawrence Centre, which only opened last week, had bricks thrown through its beautifully designed front windows this morning. It's shocking enough that there are are people out there who are so against a community centre designed and purpose-built to encourage young people, help them out of deprivation and foster better community relations that they feel the need to damage it. Shocking too that this act of......

Blues skies aside, winter is upon us - the halcyon days of summer a distant memory; thermals and visible breath a present reality. Therefore what better way to raise darkened spirits during these darkened days than going to the comedy and loosing yourself in laughter? We at Londonist certainly think this is a great plan (we’ve been on a not-so-secret comedy revival mission for years), and good news for us, Stewart Lee is playing at......

It turns out that being a genius doesn't mean you're a nice person. That's a lesson that the Science Museum reinforced today as they cancelled a talk by scientist Dr James Watson, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for his work in discovering the structure of DNA. Watson was scheudled to give a talk at the museum on Friday, but this was nixed after his controversial remarks in an interview with the Sunday Times.......

It's a bad news day for the Met as the unfortunate Det Sgt Gurpal Virdi publicly advises potential ethnic minority recruits to London's police force to think twice about it. Det Sgt Virdi has undeniably had a torrid time. Accused of instigating a foul racist internal hate mail campaign he was exonerated by a tribunal in 2002 and won compensation for being a victim of racial discrimination as well as a personal apology from......

While SFist cringed at the fatal dose of crime littering the Bay Area, it found solace in Hillary Clinton's San Francisco campaign headquarters opening, which featured loads of exposed mammary glands. In other news, SF Taxi Commission ruled that Satan's cab must keep its (in)famous medallion number, 666; and in an un-fashion-forward frenzy, San Francisco Fashion Week (chortle) bars bloggers from covering and getting smashed at their shows and parties, respectively. Also, they found a......

This week ended with the launch of the seventh and final Harry Potter installation. But while the world was consumed with Pottermania, it's important to remember that there were more serious things going on in the world, too – two of them in -Ist cities. Sampaist was shocked when a passenger jet crashed into the center of Sao Paulo, killing at least 200 people. The airplane, an Airbus A320, skidded off the runway at the......

Over 270,000 people have signed a Christian petition to oppose the proposed building of a supposedly enormous mosque in Newham. The petition, which closed this week, stated: We the Christian population of this great country England would like the proposed plan to build a Mega Mosque in East London Scrapped. This will only cause terrible violence and suffering and more money should go into the NHS. Human rights organisation Blink lobbied the No. 10......

Free music is where it's at. Fact. But free music combined with a campaign against racism gets a nice fat thumbs up from us. This weekend sees the annual Rise festival hit London and this time round it's going two days. If you're over on the outskirts of London, near Dagenham, then Saturday will be your bag. From 4pm, Dagenham's Central Park will be transformed into a concert venue as part of the long......

This Day In London’s History 1937: A Japanese aircraft lands at Croydon Airport, setting a world record for the fastest flight from Tokyo to London. In the 1930s there had been considerable interest in establishing records for long distance flights, and a prize had been offered for the first flight between Paris and Tokyo to take less than 100 hours. However nobody had yet won this prize, despite many attempts, including one that failed......

The phrase "it's PC gone mad!" usually comes from the mouths of those such as Bernard Manning, taxi drivers and the hairdresser who just cut this Londonista's hair who used the phrase with regard to immigrant children being allowed to go to 'our' schools. Yikes. However, perhaps it applies with regard to an incident last week which left a Barnet councillor facing calls to resign after he 'blacked up' as part of his Nelson......

Maybe because it is Friday afternoon and we swtiched off the hard working part of our brains (the Captain's Log for this particular Londonista has been showing "Offline" since Wednesday lunch time) but we thought we would share this WTF gem with you all as a special end of week treat. Brian Gordon, who has served as Tory councillor for Barnet for nine years, is in trouble for his criminal dress sense. Gordon's misdemeanour......

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't officially start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to... Over at Sampaist, spring has more than sprung: it's sweltering! But, as everyone knows, museums are an ideal......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

Mark McGowan is the 'artist' who does his best to get into the press by creating 'art' that gets him into the papers. You'll remember him from such installations as 'Hey media! Look at me push a peanut with my nose, as well as 'Look at me, I left a tap running (until I was told to turn it off)' and 'Don't beat me up for keying your car, I'm an ARTIST'. His last......

We've been doing our best to ignore Celebrity Big Brother we really have. We close our eyes when walking past the tabloids and blank out any mention of the nonsense in the broadsheets, but now that questions are being asked about it in the House of Commons (and oh, was a house ever so aptly named?) we thought we'd see what all the fuss is about this time. It turns out that the knuckle......

Is there such a thing as bad publicity? The ban on posters for comedian Reginald D Hunter's show has got to give him more mileage than the actual poster. Dressing in a wig and frilly collars to advertise comedy seems about as cutting edge as those tedious insurance adverts with the talking parrot. If it weren't for the ban we wouldn't have bothered to check out the website and found out that the guy......

Tanika Gupta's new play Sugar Mummies has opened at the Royal Court Theatre and runs until 2 September. This comedy-drama looks at female sex tourism in Jamaica - white women (usually older types) going to the islands for easy sex and companionship; the men enjoy the unofficial "pay" they get, in cash or in lieu. Four women hang around on a beach, lapping up the attention of the young men who buzz around them,......

Guardian writer Julian Glover thinks he knows just the man for the Tory Mayoral candidacy: The applicant must have proven executive experience at high levels in government or business and clear and longstanding links with London. Ok... An interest in sport (especially the Olympics) will be taken into consideration as will international experience. Must be used to dealing with a hostile media, good at talking to people in the street and on television. A......

Some crimes are more than just crimes - the Dreyfus affair is one example that comes readily to mind. In modern Britain, no murder has had more of an impact than that of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 (was it really 13 years ago already?), the black teenager killed by racists, whose murder triggered an inquiry that found institutionalised racism Stephen's murder will never really go away, but it is brought back into the spotlight......

Is this the coolest thing Ken has ever said? Daily Mail is ‘broadly racist’ and the Standard is only less so because racism would hurt their sales. Nigeria has warned its citizens to be wary of fraudsters when travelling in Britain. Apparently one of the favourite ticks on the Tube is "to “pick up an object which had fallen under their victim’s seat” in order to distract attention" The Government wants to turn London's......

Officials have admitted that the intelligence behind the Forest Gate raid was 'wrong'. Security vetting of the thousands of 2012 Olympics volunteers is going to be a 'major concern' apparently. A teenage girl who stabbed an 84-year-old 14 times in Golders Green, has tried to pass off her detailed plan for the killing as the draft of a crime thriller. Ken has launched an anti-racism mobile phone photo competition. Our future king watches girl-on-girl......

Saturday July 8th sees the 6th Rise Festival taking place at Finsbury Park, Mayor Ken's freebie anti-racism gig; so maybe the one day in the year when he'll have to be nice to the Americans. Lord Coxon of Camden is headlining along with The Buzzcocks, The Wailers, Sway and, erm, Roy Ayers. No doubt a few other acts to be announced, perhaps we could recommend some of the fine bands featured in our juke......

Just a couple of gigs coming up that we wanted to mention quickly since we've been away for a few weeks. Saturday: is of course the Love Music Hate Racism free gig in Trafalgar Square. Along with Belle and Sebastian, Lethal Bizzle, Boy Kill Boy, Kray Twinz, The Paddingtons, Roll Deep and a bunch of Babyshambles fans wondering whether or not they should just follow Dirty Pretty Things instead will be all girl post......

Ken likes his conferences: just this week, he's hosting the Disability Capital Conference in Hammersmith and then on Saturday he's hosting the State of Race Relations in London Conference at his own pad in City Hall. Registration for the DisabilityCapital Conference has now closed but for those who still want to take part or cannot get to the Hammersmith venue, the conference will be broadcast on the Mayor of London website here - the......

If you attended any of the events which made up the Rise Festival (renamed the ' London United free festival' after the bombings) back in July, you might like to know that today is the first day of the Rise Student Week. As you would imagine, the Rise Student Week takes the themes of diversity and anti-racism which make up the main festival and encourages colleges and universities to stage events promoting those ideals.......

Next Monday (the 10th October) the LSE will be hosting the official campaign launch of the Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign. The aim behind the campaign is to: - find out the truth about Jean’s unlawful killing. - bring those responsible for his death to justice. - end the ‘Shoot to Kill’ policy and so prevent a similar tragedy happening again. - to campaign against the rising tide of racism and the attack......