All last week I was a panellist on The Wright Stuff on Channel 5, a daily morning programme a full two hours long. Its presenter Matthew Wright engages the common man and woman, harvesting and challenging their opinions and feelings about life, culture and politics. The viewers, sharp, sensitive, smart, come from sectors of society largely disregarded by the elite.

I wait by the wall, camera in hand, for someone to walk by. I've always liked walls, and this one would make an especially red backdrop. The early morning sun casts shadows across cracking layers of alternating care and neglect, and I begin to see shapes in the shades: pentimento flames in the gradations of red.

Burger King has reintroduced some of the food colours associated with possible hyperactivity in children in a small number of restaurants, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said.

The International Olympic Committee issued public backing of its Games sponsors Coca-Cola and McDonald's today, a day after President Jacques Rogge was quoted as saying there was a "question mark" over their sponsorship due to obesity concerns.

Adam Balon, 40

More than sixty years after it was last legally available in the country, Coca Cola plans to start supplying its soft drinks to Burma. It will mean there will soon only be two nations – North Korea and Cuba – where the drinks giant doesn't do business.

US Outlook The image of the sedentary, pop-swilling American is more than a stereotype; one in three people here is obese, and the numbers are going up, along with the incidences of chronic disease, such as diabetes, that disproportionately afflict the overweight. There are many causes, inevitably, but one villain in particular is in the sights of government: the fizzy drinks industry.

New York City's mayor is proposing an unprecedented ban on the sale of large fizzy drinks and other sugary drinks in the hopes of combating obesity — an expansion of efforts to encourage healthy behavior that have led to shouts that America's largest city is becoming a "nanny state."

A detective sergeant was jailed for eight years today for raping a mother in her own home.

With only a few weeks to go, it is almost illegal to not be excited about the Olympics. By the middle of June, local councils will order us all to meet in our local park at 6.30 each morning and say communally, "Oooh, it's only a month to the opening ceremony" and recite the competitors in the first heat of the 200-metres backstroke.

Coca-Cola has spent $100m in sponsorship just because they love badminton

Ken Livingstone today admitted that he encounters lifelong Labour voters who are backing Boris Johnson in the London mayoral election because he is funny.

England's three-Test summer tour of South Africa will include midweek matches in Kimblerley and Potchefstroom against SA Barbarians teams, it was confirmed today.

Soft drinks manufacturers would be forced to reduce their sugar content under a parliamentary move to prevent more children and adults developing the life-shortening disease diabetes.