Jan 31st

[Sorry - no podcast yesterday - I was working in Taunton Tues night and got back very late, some of yesterdays stories featured today though!]

Health

Statistics released by the Office for National Statistics say that the number of children being born to immigrant mothers has risen sharply over recent years. Really? And this comes as a surprise? Turns out some Polish people have noticed the differential between the rates of pay in their own country and the UK, plus the fact that it’s totally legal to move to the UK and actually come over. Worse still, shock horror, some of them fuck.

What are the shock-horror headlines suggesting? A ban on shagging migrants? Two sets of maternity wards – nice ones for the mothers who can prove Anglo-Saxon or Celtic descent and then cattle sheds for anyone with a bit of an accent? And of course the focus is all on foreign-born mothers, no-one bothers to mention that a fair few of these babies probably have British fathers.

Meanwhile the aghast journalists tell us, British women are having less babies. Yes, we all know how badly the NHS’s standards are falling and we don’t want to do that. Bearing in mind that there’s another story out today that a drug addicted mother has had 14 of her children taken away from her by social services. Could it be that Britain is generating the WRONG KIND OF BABIES! And we’re still forgetting that women don’t just get pregnant on their own.

Maybe the solution is to target men. Posters in gent’s toilets: Don’t be a shit, only shag a brit. Don’t be like these mugs – say “no” to girls on drugs.

Science

A group of medical researchers believe they may have found a way to reverse memory loss in patients. The process involving deep brain tissue stimulation was originally being trialled as a means to combat obesity. However the process backfired when the patient suddenly remembered how much he liked chips.

Crime

Maxine Carr, the accomplice to the Soham murders is to marry and is rumoured to be pregnant. The news revealed in the Daily Mail doesn’t say very much for the effectiveness of the police efforts to change her identity and allow her to live in obscurity. I hate the Mail. Here’s their actual comment on the story “The news will devastate the parents of Huntley's ten-year-old victims, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.” But the parents of Wells and Chapman wouldn’t know about the news if it wasn’t all over the Daily Mail.

Papers

My other favourite paper The Daily Express leads today with “council tax up to pay fatcats £50,000 a year”, claiming that 30,000 people working in town halls across the country now earn more than £50,000 a year. Now given that there are 45,000 towns in the UK, that’s not even one well-paid councillor each, but of course the Express glosses over that to describe these people as “faceless bureaucrats. So presumably half the money is disability allowances to help them cope with having no faces.

Finance

The US central bank is desperately trying to ward off a recession, cutting interest rate by a further half a percent. They also called up George Bush and pleased with him not to do anything or say anything. At all. Ever.

International News

An Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death for reading an article about women’s right. Boy I’m glad we invaded Afghanistan and threw out those evil Taleban eh? They must be really grateful to us for bringing them freedom, human rights and democracy. The Independent coverage of the story featured a picture of a woman in a burqa with the caption “The burqa is seen by many as a sign of female subjugation” which is a bit like saying “shooting people in the head is seen by many as a sign of violence”.

Travel

A transatlantic flight has to make an unscheduled landing after one of the pilots started behaving strangely, shouting, swearing and asking for God. A lot of religious groups are allowed to overlook employment discrimination laws. They keep gay people and women and so on out of positions of power in their communities because they still live by rules invented a couple of millennia ago. Well now I want a special airline for atheists, where all the pilots don’t believe in an afterlife.

Jan 23rd

Science

One thousand people are to have their complete genome mapped as part of a major new study. The first volunteer will be Jade Goody. The lead scientist says she has been deliberately chosen to save time since they have already mapped the code for the fruit fly.

Health

Ministers have told the food industry that labelling is the key to tackling obesity. Really? You don’t think it’s getting people to eat less crap? I mean I don’t know many fat people who are there going “I don’t understand how I’ve gotten so heavy, I guess I must have misunderstood the label on that rich chocolate truffle gateaux – I thought it counted as one of my five-a-day”. The best way to use labelling to combat obesity is to make the labels on all food over 100cals weigh 20kgs. Then carrying the food home would burn of the energy.

Now I agree that food labelling is terrible. These days if your food wasn’t made on farm equivalent of a Guantanamo bay isolation cell there’ll be a special label to tell you so. But if it was, then they just, aaah, won’t mention it.

Politics

George Bush has spoken at an anti-abortion rally in the US. His words clearly had a big impact with two thirds of those who saw him saying they now believed abortion should be compulsory. What he said at the rally was “You’re here because you know all life deserves to be protected. I’m proud to be standing with you.” What he meant was “I’m going to need a lot more cannon fodder for my illegal wars”. He went on to say “America [can do] better than this” which is exactly what most Americans have been thinking since the day he took office. He went on, “We will continue to work for a culture of life”, then he popped out, authorised a few executions, did an oil trade with king Abdullah and told his defence officials to stop wasting all that money on body armour for the troops in Iraq. When he got back he decided to bamboozle the crowd with science, this time saying “Each unborn child is a separate individual with his or her own genetic code”. Sure but a bacon sandwich has it’s own genetic code. And if you’re definite right to life on the basis of unique genes then it’d be ok to kill one of each set of identical twins. Although if you’ve seen as many horror films as I have, you might be up for that – why do they never cast the twins as the nice ones?

Lifestyle

A survey whose results were released today says more people are comfortable with the idea of pre-marital sex than ever before. The survey conducted by Brad Pitt and Abi Titmuss revealed 70% of the population had “no objection” compared to only 48% in 1984 when John Prescott conducted the survey.

A disgusting 30% of the population described themselves as prejudiced against other races, amazingly the same percentage as ticked the box for “I read the Daily Mail”. The authors of the report (that’s Brad and Abi, pay attention) say they put this down to the reaction to Sept 11^th the reaction of the press that is.

Papers

Daily Express headlines today include “Girl Attacked by Frenzied Knifeman” as though most knife attacks are very casual affairs with breaks for tea and muted applause for particularly complicated artistic stabs.

Then on page 34 their headline screams “We’re Breeding A Generation Of Teenage Killers”. Which is interesting, and ironic, because if anyone is trying to engender a culture of poverty and panic, it is the Express. Also if that’s true – if we are building a secret murderous child-army, surely that’s big enough for the front page. Instead the front page says Britain’s Muslims are Too Extreme. I’d love to have seen them out on the streets surveying people “Would you like your local Muslims (a) Very extreme, (b) quite extreme or (c) not extreme at all?”

The story behind it is that Iraq’s deputy prime minister visited a Mosque in the UK and said that the preaching and books used were shocking and “would be illegal in Iraq”. And Iraq has such a better track record on law and order than the UK. We should definitely follow their example.