Thursday, March 15, 2007

Themes

So last week I ranted on about the inaccurate estimates for Halifax to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games bid - $700 million in fact turned out to be $1.7 billion. Well a similar story has continued today involving London's costs of hosting the 2012 Olympics.

When London won the bid in 2005, they calculated it would cost £2.4 billion, which has escalated to £9.3 billion today, around 18 months later. Wow, quite a difference. And this has been announced in a week where another part of London, Wembley, has celebrated the contractors handing over the keys for the new stadium. Which is just about finished, Great but originally, Wembley stadium was supposed to cost £400 million and be ready for May 2005. Although the official line is that it eventually cost £757 million, compensations and overruns add on another £350 million. And it is two years late in its completion.

So who is making these calculations? I seriously want to find out who comes up with such figures and how as I really cannot understand why they are so inaccurate. It is very strange.

But not as strange as 4pm this afternoon. I flicked on CNN to see the headlines - something about some Govenor something or other was the lead story. So I flicked onto CBC in the hope they were showing the BBC World news. They weren't - it was the Canadian news and their lead story was about this Shiekh Mohammed guy admitting to several acts of terror over recent times (including 9/11) and that he beheaded an American journalist. Pretty serious stuff in my opinion - although what is true and what is not is unknown right now but I was curious as to why CNN hadn't led with this story. Perhaps because it has been flying round all day (I first read it this morning) and they were trying to cover the most recent news and that Canada really is a little slow and behind the rest of the world and had only just picked up on the Al-Qaeda guy?

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