UK police: Wedding guests to face security checks
April 28, 2011 - 0:0
LONDON (AP/CNN) — British police say guests at the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton will have to pass through security checks to enter Westminster Abbey.
Police would not say what methods will be used. Some 5,000 police will be deployed at the wedding and 60 people have been barred as part of their bail conditions from entering the area.Metropolitan Police Commander Christine Jones said Wednesday that there is no intelligence suggesting any new terrorist threats against the royal wedding.
She says Internet chatter is being monitored and asks the public to be on alert for suspicious behavior.
Jones says police will able to use special stop-and-search powers Friday while monitoring crowds along the parade route and at Buckingham Palace.
One hardly need look at the numbers to know that talk of the Royal Wedding is accelerating rapidly ahead of the April 29 event.
The numbers are nevertheless enlightening, especially in light of where and among whom conversations about the Royal Wedding are occurring.
News stories (as indexed by Bing) are up nearly sevenfold to 7 million per day since the beginning of the month. Blog posts have more than doubled from 46.7 million on April 5 to 102.9 million, according to data obtained from Trendrr.
According to Nielsen, the Royal Wedding has made up more than 0.3% of all news coverage in the U.S. since the engagement was announced.
YouTube videos tagged with top Royal Wedding-related keywords (Royal Wedding, Kate Middleton, etc.) have grown more than 10 times from 37.5k per day to 460k per day.
Perhaps the most amusing is the rise in Royal Wedding-related eBay auctions, up from 7,435 in mid-February to more than 400,000 this week.