Independent - Snipers, missiles and fighter jets over London: Get ready for a £1bn Olympic ring of steel

Inside a ring enforced by six ground-based missile stations, RAF Typhoon fast jets will patrol the skies, alongside navy helicopters carrying snipers from the Royal Marines, whose job it will be to shoot aircraft pilots who refuse to turn back from the Olympic Park.

Almost £1bn is being spent on security at the coming Olympics, and over the next week Londoners, and those at other venues such as Weymouth in Dorset, will get a look at what they are getting for their money.
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Six sites, at Epping, Enfield, Blackheath, Greenwich, Bow and Waltham Forest are planned for installations of air defence missile systems. One, at Lexington Avenue in Bow, received attention over the weekend when residents expressed dissatisfaction at having notification of a missile system on their roof given to them by a note under the door.

Independent - Ruth Whippman - As long as the Catholic Church pushes homophobia, it shouldn't be allowed to run state schools

You have to hand it to the Catholic Church.  It takes a certain level of chutzpah to come through arguably the most widespread global paedophile scandal in human history and its subsequent alleged cover-up, and still be dishing out moral guidance on `disordered sexual practices.'

A few days ago, it was revealed that the Catholic Education Service, the body responsible for all state-funded Catholic schools in England and Wales, had sent a letter to all of the schools in their network urging them to encourage their pupils to sign a petition against gay marriage.  Critics, including the British Humanist Association, who hope to mount a legal challenge, claim that the move contravenes the Equality Act of 2010, which prohibits, amongst other things, discrimination on the grounds of sexuality.
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Catholic state schools are in large part funded by the taxpayer, and surely in the 21st century, the taxpayer shouldn't be expected to sponsor bigotry. As long as the Catholic Church insists on pursuing, in my opinion, an openly homophobic agenda, it cannot be the right institution to be educating vulnerable young people

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2012/05/the-wage-profit-squeeze.html

Guardian - Yoga: it's never too late to reap the benefits

Looking at the famous photographs of BKS Iyengar - the grey-haired, bendy-bodied yoga guru (born, so we're told, in 1918) - might have one of two effects. First, to inspire awe at how this form of physical exercise, popularised in the west in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, can keep an individual strong and flexible, never mind at fortysomething but nudging towards a century old.

Yoga for Life
by Josephine Fairley
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Those who can't even touch their toes, however, may equally take one look and despair. Because at 80-plus, Iyengar (who's still going strong) is still effortlessly touching his toes - not by bending forwards, but backwards, like a scarily supple Cirque de Soleil act.

It's unlikely, of course, that anyone who embraces yoga in mid-life is ever going to be able to pipe-cleaner themselves into Iyengar-esque backbends. But there is certainly evidence that yoga can help fight all manner of challenges that ageing bodies (not to mention minds) face: loss of bone density, stiffness, hardening of the arteries, hormonal fluctuations, mild depression ... If yoga's starting to sound like a universal panacea - well, there are plenty of yoga teachers who'd argue it is indeed just that.

It is, so experts insist, never too late to take up yoga....

If you see a history of May Day in the newspapers this year, it is most likely to recount the mystical, medieval origins of a pagan fertility festival. And though you may never have seen a maypole in your life, you will be assured that a ribboned piece of birchwood is the sign and sanction of May Day.

Yet this has little to do with the reason that 1 May is celebrated in Britain, or why it is an international holiday, or why the Occupy movement is planning "global disruption" today. May Day is international workers day. As such, it is - in the words of Eric Hobsbawm - "the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar". And its past is more rowdy than is suggested by the imagery of Morris dancers serenely waving hankies and bells around.