By Mike Wells, posted 16th February 2012, edited 17th Feb 2012

For security reasons there will be no commercial flights within 18 miles of the Olympic stadium for the duration of the Games. This will mean that VIPs and heads of state will not be able to use their preferred mode of transport - the helicopter - they will have to slum it with the rest of us on the roads.

The Pudding Mill White Elephant just won't lie down. CoeLtd is still hoping to bring the 2017 IAAF World Athletics Championships to London. But it all depends on there being an available stadium. After all it's hard to hold an Athletics Championships without one. LoCoe has his own IAAF ambitions with the next milestone in 2015 when he hopes to succeed to the top job. The loss of a stadium could prove terminal to those ambitions.

Dave Hill's been tweeting that he's found a couple of the people he's been interviewing around Clarence Rd who've made mention of lack of the fabled Olympics job opportunities as one of the underliers explaining our rioting. Although pop-up looting might perhaps be an expression more appropriate to the ears of those aspirational about the Olympiad?

The tourism disaster which is London 2012 is turning from a gale into a hurricane. Hotels, outraged by the price gouging being practised by LOCOG's partners Thomas Cook and CoSport, are withdrawing rooms from its preferential-rate scheme. A while back SCoeLtd blamed hotels for jacking up prices and threatening London's good name. However, hotels hit back accusing LOCOG and its partners of being behind the abominable inflation. At the heart of the matter is the undisclosed payment made by Thomas Cook and CoSport to LOCOG to become official resellers of these rooms. This kind of corruption lies at the heart of the Olympic system whereby a range of commercial organisations pay Organising Committees to gain monopolistic access to the Games. Price gouging was supposed to be outlawed at the 2012 Games. In reality it is central to the whole event.

Remember that compact between TELCO and the London Olympic Committee in November 2004 when the Olympic Committee promised to pay the living wage? The one that was abandoned by the ODA in September 2006? And which the ODA said it 'would ask' its contractors to keep in March 2007? Which one in five workers then said in October 2010 they were not being paid?