Live Royal Wedding Updates

From the Telegraph:

4:48pm (Britain Time) Regular users of the roads around Westminster will be relieved to know that, before tens of thousands of wide-eyed tourists descend on the place, they're going to have a bit of a clean-up. Like before your guests turn up at a dinner party, you disinfect the carpets and scrub worst of the vomit from the walls. PA reports:

Quote After roads are closed to traffic on Thursday night, street sweepers will make sure every step of the route is gleaming, ready for the royal couple. And as soon as the newlyweds leave Westminster Abbey, teams will hit the streets again to clear up an expected 140 tonnes of waste.

Mark Banks, waste and recycling manager at Westminster City Council, said: "We're fairly well-rehearsed with this kind of thing because we're at the centre of London so this is a bit like New Year's Eve, or the Notting Hill Carnival. Everyone is up for the challenge."

4:34pm More than 5,000 police will be on duty for the ceremony, Scotland Yard says.

4:15pm We know that the old stereotype of Americans not understanding irony is entirely false, as anyone who has ever watched The Simpsons or Curb Your Enthusiasm or really any television at all in the last 20 years will know. But they don't always help themselves - witness CNN:

Quote Isn't a rainy wedding day good luck? Or at least ironic, according to Alanis Morissette? Downpours on the day of the royal wedding could play havoc with the meticulously planned preparations, not to mention dampening the spirits of hundreds of thousands of spectators expected to line the streets of London.

How many times? "Unfortunate" is not the same as "ironic".

3:51pm, 4/26 Poor John Laughrey, the ardent Royalist who has camped outside Westminster Abbey, has apparently been pestered by "hundreds" of tourists (and presumably no small number of journalists) since staking his territory.

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