Feb 25th

Wales

An inquest is being held into the death of a man who collapsed during a fairy-cake-eating competition at a nightclub in Swansea. Reporters asked officers from the local constabulary if they had found any clues. They replied “hundreds and thousands”.

Education

In a survey 71% of school children admitted being bullies. Which does mean competition has hotted up in the search for suitable victims. A few years ago you had to be ginger, dressed in ADSA clothing and have a lisp to expect to have to trade in your lunch money to avoid a kicking. Now even a hole in your jumper or a lack of a comprehensive knowledge of text slang is enough to see you begging not to be given a wedgie. The news, though worrying for pupils and parents alike has been hailed as excellent news by captains of industry who have seen middle management ranks depleted over recent years.

Travel

Motorists will be targeted by a new generation of road cameras which work out how many people are in a car by measuring the amount of bodily fluid it contains. The rather sinister idea uses cameras which work by sending an infrared beam through the windscreen of vehicles which detects the unique make-up of blood and water content in human skin.

The idea is to catch out lone motorists who use car-sharing lanes and try to fool existing CCTV road cameras by placing mannequins in passenger seats or fixing photographs to windscreens.

The technology, originally developed by evil vampire armies, means that while the mannequin-photo strategies will no longer work, you can still use the car-sharing lanes if you have a corpse in the boot.

Iraq

A suicide bomber in a wheelchair killed a top policeman and wounded four others in an attack on the police operations centre in the Iraqi city of Samarra today. You know your security is lax when a dude in a wheelchair slips through.

Health

A care worker has lost her job over claims she used her mobile phone to film two old ladies fighting in a nursing home. Bolton council bosses have confirmed a full investigation has been launched and the carer is no longer employed at the home.

Now, as a legal precedent, what does this mean? Companies using CCTV seem to be allowed to film just about anything, as do the government and the police, but individuals who film stuff will get in trouble?

I can just see it now, Al Qaeda demanding punishment for all the people who filmed the airplanes flying into the World Trade Center. Or more likely it’s just the care home covering their tracks after realising somebody might notice the appalling conditions they in which they keep their patients? Surely the investigation should be into the care home who let two elderly women end up fighting.

Finance

Nine senior American directors of top international companies are preparing to quit Britain over the controversial "non-dom" tax proposals, the Daily Mail reported. The directors work for companies including Bank of America, McDonald's, Ernst & Young, and Bear Stearns and earn well over a million pounds a year and don’t pay taxes on it. So frankly I think at very least we’d all feel better about ourselves if we didn’t have to share our public spaces and services with them.

The nine are all threatening to move back to America, where they would actually have to pay a lot more tax on their earnings than the proposed £30,000 rate being proposed.

The Mail claims: "They are going to sell their houses in Mayfair or Kensington and Chelsea , dumping them on the market at an already difficult time. Then they will take their business overseas. Well, if they actually own multi-million-pound houses in Mayfair or Kensington, they can afford to pay as much in taxes as a highly-qualified an experienced hard-working UK-based professional who earns £90,000 a year. And anyway a drop in the housing market would be great news for all the young families finding it hard to get on to the property ladder.

The Mail adds, "Competing cities such as New York , Geneva ... and Frankfurt , would welcome these wealthy non-dom businessmen with open arms." That’s because New York , Geneva and Frankfurt would love to tax them.

You would think anyway given their usual coverage that the Daily Mail would be in favour of foreigners leaving British soil. Or could it be that the owners of the Daily Mail are all non-dom tax-dodgers...? You decide...

Feb 13th

Religion

And the furore over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments about Sharia Law continues. This week he made a speech today to the General Synod – who I thought was a character from Star Wars - The Phantom Menace. Now it seems everyone has a view on his comments one way or another. Seems to me pretty obvious that if both parties in a dispute agree on mediation by whatever means – be it Sharia or arm-wrestling competition then they are well entitled to use such a means, but obviously if you want to go to a proper court, you should be able to. I also think we should all spend a lot less time worrying what the unelected head of a jumble sale organisation with plummeting membership thinks about our lives. Surely the whole problem with Sharia law is that it imposes religious laws on people who may not want them. I not only want no part of my life governed by Muslim Sharia judges, I also want no part governed by the Church of England.

Entertainment

Amy Winehouse won four Grammys but had to perform from London because US immigration officials refused to give her a visa because of her drug use. That’s fair enough because remember George Bush has a history of drug abuse and I bet they wish they’d never let him into the country.

Military

The US military announced it is bringing death penalty charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. They have apparently confessed to a huge list of crimes including orchestrating the September 11 attacks, the murder of Danny Pearl, the attack on the USS Cole and the bombing of the US Embassy in Kenya. But then that’s what water-boarding will do for you. They also admitted they were the illegitimate love children of Daffy Duck and Porky Pig.

Iraq

A British photojournalist and his interpreter have been kidnapped. I don’t understand. The kidnappers say they want all Westerners to leave their country. But one thing I find makes it really hard to leave a country is being chained to the floor of a concrete bunker.

Sport

Steven Spielberg has withdrawn as artistic adviser for the 2008 Beijing Olympics over concerns China is not doing enough to end the atrocities in Darfur. I think he should have stayed put and used the opening ceremony to make his point. Everyone in black and white, and one little girl in a red dress. And we could have seen an unprecedented level of new world records being set if he’d incorporated a little bit of a Jurassic Park feel into the sprinting events.

Science

Well, sorry, non-science. A report out yesterday says global warming could cut deaths related to cold weather in winter. Apparently if it isn’t cold, less people die of it being cold. They added that less people would die of obesity if there was no food.

Finally a quick headline from the BBC:

Agencies “failed” murdered baby. And they’ve got the word “failed” in inverted commas. I think we can pretty conclusively say that agencies charged with protecting the welfare of young children have failed when the baby’s been murdered.