The world's most expensive cable car is undergoing tests in London – but authorities admit the project, which links two Olympic venues, may not open in time for this summer's Games.

The 1,000-yard gondola lift line crosses the River Thames in east London and is planned to be both a commuter route and a tourist attraction.

It has been enthusiastically backed by London Mayor Boris Johnson, but opponents point out the scheme will use public money despite a huge $57 million sponsorship deal with Dubai-based Emirates Airlines which means the facility will be officially known as the Emirates Air Line.

PhotoBlog: London's new Thames cable car in place - but will it be ready for the Olympics?

It will cost up to $95 million in total, with around $20 million coming from local public funds.

Transit authority Transport for London (TfL), which will operate the cable car, will only say the project will be open "in the summer," raising the prospect that it will not be ready in time for the London 2012 Games in July. TfL insists the route was never part of the Olympic transport plan.

Two 300ft-high pillars will carry more than 30 gondolas across the river from the O2 – the Greenwich concert venue that will host events including the gymnastics and basketball finals – to the Docklands-based ExCel conference center which is being used for boxing, fencing, judo, taekwondo, table tennis, weightlifting and wrestling.

The cost of a journey on the Emirates Air Line has not yet been set, but TfL says it will be similar to the frequent Thames River Boat service whose fares are around $8. Passengers will be able to pay with Oyster cards, the pre-payment "smart card" used by millions of Londoners.

Slideshow: When the Olympics is your neighbor

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A diverse community in East London will welcome the world to Britain for the 2012 Olympic Games. Meet residents and hear how they feel about having a huge, world stage in their backyard.

Launch slideshow

Although the cost will be significantly higher than the equivalent bus or subway journey, the views from the 10-person gondolas traveling 160 feet above the ground are undoubtedly more appealing. 

TfL says the system will move 2,000 passengers an hour -- the equivalent capacity of more than 30 buses.

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LONDON -- Queen Sofia of Spain has reportedly decided not to attend a lunch celebrating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee on Friday because of a diplomatic spat over Gibraltar.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy earlier this year raised Madrid's long-standing demand for the return of Gibraltar -- a British territory on the Mediterranean Sea -- during talks with U.K. counterpart David Cameron.

Click here for more coverage of the UK's royal family

According to El Pais newspaper, Queen Sofia's snub was in response to a scheduled trip to Gibraltar by Prince Edward.

Celebrations marking Queen Elizabeth's 60 years on the throne will culminate with a four-day long weekend from June 2 - 5.

Read more on this story from Britain's ITV News.

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Beryl Renwick and Betty Smith with Simon Reeves attend the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2012 recognizing national and regional radio stations at Grosvenor House in London, Monday night.

LONDON - In the entertainment world, youth and celebrity are usually the key to success…but a pair of radio hosts with a combined age of 176 have been awarded top prize at an industry ceremony in Britain.

Beryl Renwick, 86, and Betty Smith, 90, were named Britain’s best radio entertainment hosts at the Sony Radio Academy Awards on Monday night.

Their weekly broadcast on local Yorkshire station BBC Radio Humberside has been going for six years and gathered a cult following.

Full story: ITV News

The elderly pair chat with co-host David Reeves about fashion, the war and their love of Michael Buble.

The judges said they were: “A joyous, entertaining double act. They give a voice to a sector of society unrepresented on radio, and do it with a joy that puts many of their fellow broadcasters to shame.

You can see the pair discuss their nomination in this BBC website video from April.

ITV News is the British broadcast partner of NBC.

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Ian Johnston, msnbc.com

Nick Letchford, co-founder of Jaguar Shoes, outside the bar in Kingsland Road, east London.

SHOREDITCH, London – A British arts "collective" visited by stars like Natalie Portman, Amy Winehouse and Beyonce is locked in a legal battle over its name with automaker Jaguar.

Jaguar Shoes -- a cafe, bar and art gallery -- opened in London’s Shoreditch in 2001 at the start of the transformation of the area from a run-down district to a hub of artistic activity that's become a favorite haunt of the city’s “hipsters.”

Founders Nick and Teresa Letchford, who are brother and sister, created the venue by knocking together a former bag store and a former shoe store. Partly due to a lack of money, they decided to keep the storefront signs, and the quirkily titled “Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes” was born.

Because the Jaguar Shoes sign was over the main door, that became the name they were known by, the name of the collective of artists who show their work there and the name of their website.

Portman partied, Beyonce borrowed office
But when they sought to protect “Jaguar Shoes” with a trademark –- a move Nick Letchford said was a response to their work being copied -- car company Jaguar Land Rover submitted an objection that might ultimately make it impossible or impractical to use the name.

The gallery has promoted more than 600 artists, musicians and fashion designers and has been featured in ads for the likes of sneaker firm Adidas.

It was name-checked in the song “You Want History” by British band Kaiser Chiefs. Actress Natalie Portman once danced to the music of Animal Collective in the basement, and Beyonce borrowed their office to do a webcast.

“In Shoreditch, that sort of thing doesn’t come as a massive surprise,” Letchford told msnbc.com in an interview at Jaguar Shoes, because it is “completely full of creative-industry types.”

A former assistant film director who worked with Madonna's ex-husband and filmmaker Guy Ritchie, among others, Letchford said when they adopted the shoe store’s name, “it never crossed our mind” that there might be a problem.

“This has been going on for about two years. We’ve tried to settle it, we’re looking to settle, but it feels like we’re banging our heads against a brick wall,” he said.

“Conceptually, Jaguar Shoes is a very different thing to a Jaguar [car]. If I think what jaguar shoes are, what they represent … most people are going to see a pair of catskin shoes,” he added. “I think it’s basically a default objection to any other use of jaguar, the word.”

Asked if losing the case would mean they would not be able to use the name, Letchford said, “I don’t really want to contemplate that.”

Navajo file trademark suit against Urban Outfitters

A hearing at the U.K.’s Intellectual Property Office is due to be heard in the coming weeks.

Catherine Wolfe, president of The Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys, told msnbc.com that the “basic test” was whether people were “confused” and thought Jaguar Shoes had something to do with the car company.

“Are you more likely to go to that bar because it’s got the name of a cool car?” she wondered.

Gandalf saved 'The Hobbit'
U.K. law also says a trademark will not be registered if it takes “unfair advantage” of or is “detrimental” to an earlier trademark.

In a recent, separate case, a bar in Southampton, England, called The Hobbit was threatened with legal action for copyright infringement by California-based Saul Zaentz Co., which owns worldwide rights to a number of brands associated with author J.R.R. Tolkien.

Attempts made to trademark 'Occupy' slogans

After public outcry, a deal was reached that saw Gandalf actor Sir Ian McKellen help pay a copyright license fee to enable the bar to carry on using the name.

Letchford clearly hopes publicity will persuade Jaguar Land Rover to drop its "irrational and inappropriate pressure," as he said in a press release on Jaguar Shoes' website.

A petition has been set up asking people to sign if they have “never experienced any confusion between the restaurant bar and gallery brand JAGUAR SHOES and JAGUAR who make cars,” and wish to ask the trademark authority to allow Jaguar Shoes to trademark its name.

As of Tuesday morning, the petition had 859 signatures. News of the legal fight has also been spreading on Twitter. Letchford said he thought it likely that most people in London’s creative industries had heard about their case. 

Letchford said Jaguar’s attempt to protect its brand seemed to have achieved “completely the opposite.”

“People have just been like ‘Is this for real?’ It doesn’t feel like it’s for real,” Letchford said.

“I’ve been stressed out about it for two years, and now it’s about to come to a head. It’s a point of principle. really.… The sign is what started the business. That’s the genesis of Jaguar Shoes, that’s the authenticity.” 

Jaguar Land Rover, owned by Indian car giant Tata Motors, did not return a call from msnbc.com asking for comment.

While public records show that Jaguar Land Rover has objected, they do not reveal the grounds for the objection. Letchford said there had been negotiations with Jaguar Land Rover but added that he had been advised not to go into detail.

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LONDON - Police in Britain released video footage of an apparent road-rage incident between an angry woman and a man on a bicycle on a country lane, ITV News reported Monday.

The clip shows a man wearing Wellington boots and flat-cap cycling along the narrow road when he is approached by a woman on foot, who appears to throw punches and kicks.

Police have issued the video, which was shot by someone in a car following the pair and posted on YouTube, as part of an appeal for witnesses of the January 28 incident in the western England county of Gloucestershire.

Some reports on Monday suggested there could be more to the altercation than meets the eye.

ITV News said longer versions of the clip include allegations that the cyclist was deliberately blocking traffic because he was a supporter of fox-hunting and wanted to stop anti-hunt campaigners reaching their destination.

Fox-hunting – a British country pursuit which involves tracking, chasing and killing foxes - was outlawed in 2005. But hunting by a smell or trail is still lawful and monitored by anti-hunt campaigners, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Police have appealed for the pair captured on the film to come forward.

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Updated at 1:03 p.m. ET: LONDON -- Prince Charles, the heir to Britain's throne, made a surprise appearance as a television weatherman Thursday.

He gave viewers of BBC Scotland the news that it would be "cold, wet and windy" across most of the country.

The prince -- who is Queen Elizabeth's first-born son -- was on a visit marking 60 years of BBC Scotland Television.

Robin McCallum, a weather presenter for ITV London, told NBC News that the prince looked "very relaxed."

"He's doing a very good job of explaining the weather," McCallum added. "He's very easy on-screen."

More coverage of Britain's royal family

However, McCallum said Charles wasn't quite perfect -- describing him as "a little bit trigger happy."

"I have to point out a slight criticism -- he's pressed his plunger -- which is the thing that scrolls from one graphic to the next -- and we should really still have been on the graphic at the end of the weather report. Other than that, it's an immaculate job."

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The Times

The front page of Wednesday's Times newspaper in London.

LONDON - The organized sexual exploitation of girls as young as 13, for which nine men were jailed in Britain Wednesday, is abuse in the most pernicious form imaginable. 

Last year I spent six months investigating this crime for British television on Channel 4's investigative news show, Dispatches. It was one of the most grueling stories I have worked on in my 17 years as a journalist.

I met victims, their families, police investigators and people who helped the victims piece together their broken lives – as well as men with an inside knowledge about the underworld of ‘on-street grooming’.

I spent time in some of the areas where these crimes took place and listened in great detail to the nature of the crime and the impact it had on the young victims.

I was haunted by what I learned. During my time off or away from the story, I had vicious nightmares. Graphic accounts of rape and sexual abuse are not easy to put out of mind when heard in detail, especially not when the victims are barely pubescent. The men I met, who spoke to me anonymously about the motivations of the gangs who carry out these crimes, told me things that disgusted and enraged me. That was the impact on me, a professionally dispassionate reporter long accustomed to remaining cool no matter what the story. Imagine the impact on someone at the heart of this terrible crime.

Investigating Britain's 'sex gangs'

The parents of the victims, whose destroyed lives were so obviously in pieces, were fighting feelings of guilt, sadness and anger. And the girls, who had faced rape and gang-rape at the hands of men much, much older than them, were some of the bravest I've ever met. I saw pictures of them before their ordeal; they could have been anyone's daughter, sister or niece. But the girls who sat before me were damaged, perhaps beyond repair, their innocence stolen.

What I now find more terrifying than the crime is the sheer scale of it: case after case is turning up in British courts. What we know about it is still emerging, and those who work with the girls say organized sex abuse is at least a generation old.  That, too, makes me shudder: There are victims who never received the help they needed or the justice they should have had.

Newspaper front pages on Wednesday showed the faces of the men who will now spend years in prison, but behind other closed doors there are girls whose lives were brutally stolen from them and whose future will always be marked by the horrors they faced in their childhood.

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Greater Manchester Police

Eight of the nine men convicted Tuesday as part Greater Manchester Police's investigation into child sexual exploitation are seen here. Clockwise from top left: Abdul Aziz, Abdul Qayyum, Adil Khan, Hamid Safi, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Mohammed Amin and Kabeer Hassan.

LONDON -- Nine men were jailed on Wednesday for grooming and sexually exploiting girls aged as young as 13 in the north of England.

Five victims were "shared" by Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons, The Guardian reported. 

The Times

The front page of Wednesday's Times newspaper, in London.

The men were aged between 24 and 59, all but one were of Pakistani heritage. The other was from Afghanistan. They were found guilty of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child, the BBC News reported. Other convictions included rape, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.

They were given sentences ranging from four to 19 years, the BBC reported.

Jurors were told that the men gave the victims alcohol and drugs and then would "pass them around" for sex, according to the BBC. Some of the victims were forced to have sex with "several men in a day, several times a week," the jury heard.

NBC News Correspondent Tazeen Ahmad: Investigating Britain's 'sex gangs'

The gang preyed on girls -- all of whom were white -- from "chaotic" backgrounds, the BBC quoted the police as saying. 

The men, who live in the run-down industrial towns of Rochdale and Oldham, were found guilty on Tuesday. Two others were acquitted after the 11-month trial. 

50 members of grooming gang?
It emerged after the conviction that police believed the grooming gang had 50 members, the Manchester Evening News reported.

Sentencing the men, Judge Gerald Clifton said they treated the girls "as though they were worthless and beyond respect," the BBC reported.

"One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion," he added. "Some of you, when arrested, said it (the prosecution) was triggered by race. That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed."

Police and social workers have been accused of initially not acting on allegations raised in 2008 for fear of appearing racist.

"This is an absolute scandal. They were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness," former member of parliament Ann Cryer told The Daily Telegraph.  "They had a greater fear of being perceived in that light than in dealing with the issues in front of them."

The tabloid Daily Mail newspaper ran the front-page headline: "Why did no one listen to teenage victims of sex gang?"

Cop: 'Not a racial issue'
However, a senior police officer involved in the investigation rejected calls for the case to be seen through the prism of race. 

"It is not a racial issue. This is about adults preying on vulnerable young children," the Telegraph quoted Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood of Greater Manchester Police as saying. "It just happens that in this particular area and time the demographics were that these were Asian men."

"I am currently running several other inquiries about on-street grooming and it is not Asian men," BBC News quoted Heywood as saying.

Nevertheless, the case was seized on by the head of the far-right British National Party (BNP), raising the specter of an extremist backlash.

The leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, tweeted before the jury had announced its decision that seven verdicts had been reached. It is not clear how he learned of the jury's decision given that strict reporting restrictions were in place. 

The case has already sparked protests by far-right groups. Greater Manchester Police said on Wednesday they were preparing for possible racially motivated violence. 

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British police on Tuesday arrested two men in connection with the death of a teenager whose body was discovered on the Queen’s estate on New Year’s Day.

The identities of the two men -- aged 28 and 31, respectively -- were not immediately released.

Alisa Dmitrijeva, 17, was reported missing last September. The discovery of Dmitrijeva’s body by a dog walker near Queen Elizabeth II's Sandringham Estate sparked the murder investigation.

The queen, who traditionally spends the Christmas and New Year’s holidays at Sandringham, was in residence at the time of the discovery, and police kept her informed.

Dmitreijeva moved to the U.K. from Latvia with her family in 2009.

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Arshad Butt / AP

Pakistani security officials stand next to covered body of British Red Cross worker Khalil Rasjed Dale at the site in Quetta, Pakistan on Sunday, April 29, 2012.

The International Committee of the Red Cross condemned the murder of its staff member, Khalil Rasjed Dale, and asked Pakistani media not to broadcast a video of his execution.

"We are devastated," ICRC Director-General Yves Daccord said in a statement. "Khalil was a trusted and very experienced Red Cross staff member who significantly contributed to the humanitarian cause."

Dale's beheaded body was found by the roadside on Sunday in the southwestern Pakistan city of Quetta, police and Red Cross officials said. Dale, 60, who was a British doctor, was abducted by suspected militants on Jan. 5 while on his way home from work.

Red Cross via Reuters

Khalil Rasjed Dale is seen in this undated handout photo. The beheaded body of a kidnapped British doctor working for the International Committee of the Red Cross was found by the roadside on Sunday in the southwestern Pakistan city of Quetta, police and Red Cross officials said.

Police discovered Dale wrapped in plastic near a western bypass road in the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province where Baluch separatist militants are fighting a protracted insurgency for more autonomy.

His name was written on the white plastic bag with black marker.

"A sharp knife was used to sever his head from the body," said Safdar Hussain, the first doctor to examine the body. "He was killed about 12 hours ago."

According to The Guardian, a note left with the body read: "This is the body of Khalil who we have slaughtered for not paying a ransom." The note went on to say a video of the execution would also be released.

The newspaper reported that the Red Cross's policy is not to pay ransoms as part of "a consistent and systematic approach that keeps people safe wherever they are."

"We did everything possible to try to get Khalil out and we are very sad that our efforts failed," ICRC's spokesman Sean Maguire told the BBC.

Dale had worked for the ICRC and the British Red Cross in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq before coming to Pakistan. He had been managing a health program for Baluchistan for almost a year when he was abducted, the ICRC statement said.

At least four foreigners are currently being held in Pakistan, The Guardian wrote.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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