Legal action for damage to its reputation is being threatened by a Tunbridge Wells restaurant after a customer posted a negative review on Tripadvisor.

Part-time nurse Sarah Gardner claimed that staff were “rude” and that the food was “mediocre at best” at the High Rocks restaurant. The restaurant say that she put up three low reviews and then took them down because they were “false”, and accuse her of a “campaign of defamation” that had caused “financial harm worth tens of thousands of pounds”.

Olympia London has been sold for £296 million to institutional investors who plan to have hotel accommodation on site.

The 130 year old venue, which hosts 200 events a year across its seven spaces incorporates nearly four acres of freehold land.

Eurostar have announced that they will be running a direct service from London St Pancras to Amsterdam by the end of 2017, taking on the airlines for the lucrative Christmas period.

Current Eurostar route is via Brussels Midi and the journey takes 4 hours 40 minutes. The new service, initially two trains a day is expected to take just under 4 hours, and a new direct service to Rotterdam is expected to follow.

In 2013 Eurostar told the press that the direct Amsterdam service would be operational by 2016.

Those who enjoy the chic of boutique hotels might be interested in a recent rating of 50 of the best in Europe by the experts at the Daily Telegraph, particularly if they’d rather pay less than £200 a night than £600+, so this is for them.

The 50 “Best in Europe” are rated from 8 out of 10 to 10 out of 10, and it is just one hotel in France that is awarded the perfect score and that is the 40-room La Bastide de Gordes in Provence, described as upmarket and family-friendly and costing from £172 a night, a bargain for the quality given that the average price across all 50 hotels listed by the Telegraph is from £223. One other notable French possibility from a total selection of six is the 34-bed La Vieux Castillon in Lanquedoc-Roussillon (9/10 £105). Continue reading →

An exhibition featuring around 100 works, mostly woodblock prints, by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) has opened at the British Museum and runs till August 13 2017, entrance £12.

Hokusai believed that he produced his best work after he had turned 60 and Hokusai Beyond the Great Wave concentrates on the last 29 years of his life, starting with his best-known Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji series, a life-saving commission for him that included the iconic In The Hollow of a Wave Off The Coast of Kanagawa. This, when viewed the Oriental way from right to left put the viewer right under a huge towering blue wave topped with a crest of white foam “claws”, as an admiring Van Gogh described them, reaching out to tear at the boats caught in the wave’s trough below. As well as seascapes and Fuji, which had a religious significance for him, Hokusai also excelled in pictures of bridges, landscapes, waterfalls, fish, flowers and birds. Continue reading →

It’s been 30 years since the 1987 American thriller Fatal Attraction scared the hell out of philandering males everywhere with the morality tale of the weekend affair that lawyer Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) has with editor Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) and how it escalates into a full-blooded nightmare for him after he spurns her and she refuses to give him up, becoming his demented nemesis. “Hell hath no fury…” the saying goes and Alex proves how unpleasant the woman scorned can be when one of her party-pieces is to kill (hopefully) and put Dan’s daughter’s pet rabbit into a simmering pot on the stove at his house, the source of the popular expression “bunny-boiler”. Continue reading →

The Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) and Rape Crisis England and Wales have teamed up to build awareness of the possibility of sexual violence at festivals, targeting more than 25 music events such as Bestival, Boomtown Fair, Parklife and Secret Garden Party.

Measures include zero tolerance towards any form of sexual harassment, confidential welfare services for victims and specialist training for staff.

According to Rape Crisis England and Wales more than half a million adults are sexually assaulted each year with 85,000 women and 12,000 men suffering rape. Only 15% of the crimes are reported to police.

On New Year’s Eve last year more than 90 women reported being attacked by up to 1,000 men “of Arab or North African appearance” around Cologne cathedral.

Passengers understandably concerned that their aircraft, and lives, could be endangered by drones being accidentally or deliberately flown too close to airports and flight paths can probably breathe a little easier since the recent Counter Terror Expo event at Olympia, London.

Here a radar-based drone detection system called Sharpeye SxV from British manufacturer Kelvin Hughes was demonstrated, showcasing its use at airports, detecting and providing early warning of the operation of drones. Some systems also locate the operator of the drone, giving security forces a chance to move in and arrest before a plane is brought down.

In the events industry the main and mostly harmless use of drones is to cheaply capture unique bird’s eye images of events, particularly sports events. However drones are also used to fly drugs and other contraband over prison walls, to drop bombs and to spy on neighbours.

A severe bout of turbulence hit an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Bangkok, 40 minutes before landing and injured 27 people, with some broken bones and three victims needing surgery.

The turbulence was the clear-air type (CAT) whereby the aircraft is caught at the junction of air masses travelling at different speeds. CAT is impossible to predict, and invisible to the naked eye or conventional radar. Continue reading →