An Irish building magnate has won the £100million contract to run London's Olympic building programme - after making a secret donation to Tony Blair's 2012 bid team.

Reclusive Ray O'Rourke gave the 'confidential' sum as the Prime Minister spearheaded the drive to secure the Olympics for Britain. Now a consortium led by his firm Laing O'Rourke has beaten some of the world's top construction companies to win the six-year Government deal. Laing O'Rourke won the Olympic contract as the leading member of the CLM consortium which also involved another British builder, Mace, and American group CH2M HILL. An industry source said: "There was much surprise that Bechtel, which has the most experience worldwide in this sort of thing, did not win. But then it has long been rumoured that O'Rourke made a substantial sum to the bid."

News Shopper 17th September 2006

Greenwich Council has joined forces with four other Olympic boroughs in a £50m bid to encourage business growth in their areas.

An elderly couple from Barnet say they would rather go to jail than pay the part of their council tax used to fund the 2012 Olympics.

Eurostar is set to close down its operations at Ashford in Kent and delay the launch of services from its new station at Stratford, adjacent to the London Olympic site, for at least two years as part of a sweeping cost-cutting plan.

Landlords with houses in multi-occupation (HMO) are selling up to avoid the new licensing arrangements introduced by the UK Government in April 2006.

John Husband, Mirror Money, 27 9 06

Prices in Newham in East London are set to take off by 43 per cent as the 2012 London Olympics draw closer.

Ellie Levinson, Guardian Unlimited, 27 9 06

I wasn't there, but I'm told that the reason the Millennium Dome was so roundly criticised in the press is that a bureaucratic cock-up left journalists stranded at Stratford, East London, with nothing but a plastic cup of warm white wine on new year's eve 1999.

Protesters last night picketed a London event in a row over what they claimed was the Olympic Delivery Authority's refusal to guarantee a wage deal.

Martin Slavin writes;

The East London Advertiser for September 28 2006 has an article titled ‘Peeking at Beijing’. It describes, by quoting the diary of Tower Hamlets Council leader Denise Jones, the four-day trip undertaken by a Council delegation to see the progress of the Olympics development programme for 2008.

Mihir Bose, Telegraph.co.uk, 28/09/2006

The stadium in London's East End will have 80,000 seats for the Games, but most temporary seating will then be removed to leave a 25,000-seat facility for athletics.

London's planned stadium for the 2012 Olympic Games has drawn fewer than four bids after cost overruns on similar projects deterred candidates from the £280 million ($525 million) contract

THE Government wants two million people to take part in large scale athletics events in the run up to the 2012 Olympics, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said yesterday.

AFTER they leave the arena, life is a trip back down for most sportsmen. The greater the peaks of achievement, the more humdrum the future.

Lu the cab driver says that I can call him Ronald because his girth has been aided by a diet of burgers from the ubiquitous American multinational food chain.

An attempt to use women's football to railroad through a British men's team for future Olympic games has been condemned as "bizarre".

The Olympic organising committee has been “inundated” with enquiries from waste and recycling companies wanting to be involved with the 2012 games environmental project manager Phil Cummings said. But he added that a sustainable procurement strategy did not yet exist for the 2012 games as it was “in planning at the moment”.

BETHNAL GREEN and Stratford have come first and second in a poll of the capital's most promising hotspots for first-time buyers. (Newham Recorder)

BRITISH homeowners are facing a house-insurance crisis as global warming and a surge in house building and conversion raises the risk of flood damage.

Britain is to get its first school of excellence in darts as part of an effort to achieve Olympic status for the game.

An Olympic watchdog group is calling for another Referendum on the 2010 Games, saying organizers are racking up their broken promises.

A joint bid for £70million is being made by Greenwich and the other London Olympics boroughs to ensure long-term benefits for businesses.

Vancouver - The federal government has ordered a comprehensive audit of the millions of dollars it has given the organizers of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

There are choppy waters ahead for swimmers in Oxford after it was revealed there is no cash to build an Olympic-size pool for the city.

HMP Wayland at Griston, near Watton, yesterday revealed that from next February it will become a national hub for prison labour, supplying big business with skilled workers from jails across the UK.

London needs a 30-year overhaul of the rail system, less regulation and a surge in Asian investment to ensure its economic future, Mayor Ken Livingstone said.