Spare a thought for Jo Ankier. Last month she was devastated to miss out on the Team GB Olympic squad. The selectors chose Hattie Dean ahead of her as the third member of the 3,000 metres steeplechase.

Ankier, 26, finished third at the national Olympic trials which Dean failed to attend, nursing a fractured tibia.

As revealed, the Barnet Shaftesbury Harrier told me that "there was no way Dean would be fit in time". How right she was.

Is anyone else getting excited about the new football seasons about to begin in the Premier League and JC MSFL?

This year, as always, I will be interested to see how my Spurs will do. I have to say it's a very different-looking team which, to be quite honest, can only be a good thing for us.

What interests me most is how young the team is. I don't believe we will get close to competing with the top four for a Champions League place, but it will be interesting to see if this team can stay together. With the likes of Dos Santos and Modric, I think it will be very strong in midfield.

As someone who loves sport and writes about it professionally, people are under the assumption that I must enjoy watching the Olympics. Guess again. I’m not sure if I’m overawed by the enormity of the beast but, quite simply, it just doesn’t do it for me.

I grew up on a diet of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett having a broiges with Steve Cram coming in as the new kid on the block. That's not forgetting my childhood hero Daley Thompson, the original superman.

Most people seemed impressed by the colourful opening ceremony but not me, I didn’t even watch it, and that had nothing to do with the fact that it was on a Friday night. As it transpires, some of the fireworks were pre-recorded, pre-Shabbat me thinks, or edited via computer graphics.

This week, I wrote about the serious security implications of the story of the little girl who got left behind at Ben-Gurion airport while her family flew on to Paris.

How, I asked, could an airplane take off from such a security-sensitive airport with luggage on board that did not belong to any passenger? Isn't this a basic security no-no?

Now it emerges that the same problem exists on planes coming into Israel. As Haim Watzman blogs:

Many of you will have caught the feature in the Guardian this week on Germans who converted to Judaism and are now living in Israel.
It included a rather remarkable interview with an unnamed professor of Jewish Studies at one of Israel’s universities, who claims that his grandmother Erna was, at one point, married to one Hans Hitler – the illegitimate child of Adolph’s half-brother, Alois Jr.
As he explains:

"Hans married my grandmother Erna after she divorced my grandfather."
He immediately states that he hates the Hitler branch of his family. He becomes agitated. "I have neither any blood nor DNA from Adolf and his family," he insists. "I was not socialised by that family." He met Hans only once. The Hitlers came for tea when he was 12 years old. "Hans was a very nice man," he says. "No passions, no brutality." But Erna was thrilled to have married into the Hitler clan, and remained a Nazi until she died. "I didn't know her," he says of his grandmother. "She wasn't part of my family."

The professor gave the same account of his relationship with Hitler two years ago to the American Jewish Action magazine. It included many details about the awkward situations he faces as a German convert - he doesn't, for example, participate in Holocaust Day ceremonies - and on the sometimes hostile reaction of his friends and neighbours to his background.
At the time, it provoked much excitement in Jewish circles, and the article was widely reprinted on the internet.
And now, the JC has learned, the Mail on Sunday is also chasing this gentleman – and intends to expose the “Jewish relative of Hitler” this weekend.
Well, I hate to ruin the party. But I am simply not convinced by his story.
According to Ben Barkow of the Wiener Library – the most authoritative Holocaust archive in the country – there is simply no record, anywhere, of a “Hans Hitler”.
Hitler’s half-brother Alois Jr, according to Mr Barkow, certainly had one son, William Patrick. There was also another son, Heinz, who was reputedly Hitler’s favourite nephew but who was killed in 1942 on the Russian front. But certainly no Hans Hitler.
So who is the unidentified and mysterious Israeli academic who is apparently trading on Hitler’s name in a rather sickening manner?
I suppose we will have to wait for the Mail on Sunday to find out….
Meanwhile, this just proves once again what a predilection we have to believing such stories. Nothing makes us happier than hearing of a descendant of a Nazi who converted to Orthodox Judaism, or of a one-time PLO terrorist who now preaches Zionism, or (in some circles...) of a Jew who eats pork on Yom Kippur becoming a Belzer Chossid. Such stories are a way of assuring ourselves we were "right" all along -- if even our greatest enemies (or their descendants) can come over to our side, surely the truth is with us.
There is also an enormous appetite for stories creating a personal connection between Hitler and Jews. Who amongst us hasn't heard the old urban legend of Hitler having a Jewish great-grandmother? But hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good headline?

The Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Yona Metzger, recently called on women to take on their husband's surname.

As a married woman who (mostly) still uses her maiden name, I am grateful to blogger Lion of Zion for providing this fascinating reminder that the way we allocate surnames has changed greatly throughout the centuries - and that a woman taking on her husband's name was not, historically, the only Jewish practice.

As he explains:

So Benzion Dunner, a pillar of Charedi society, had cocaine in his system when he died, according to his inquest. Whatever next?

The temptation for the Charedi community will be to suppress this genuinely shocking story, internally, altogether. But since it has been widely reported in the national press this may prove impossible.

And a good thing, too.