Showing posts with label sunday news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sunday news. Show all posts

Sunday 29 November 2009

The Sunday Section



Still raining, still cold. Still knackered. Bit of a change today, some ‘proper news’ and some not so proper.








If labour wins the next election they have a cunning plan to make all 16 to 18 year olds complete 50 hours of community work as part of its move to raise the school leaving age.

In the speech announcing the plan, which will be a Labour manifesto pledge, Gordon Brown specifically mentioned that teenagers would make a difference by "helping in an old people's home or tutoring younger pupils".

Sounds like a good idea, but:

Under the Government's strict new vetting regime, anyone over the age of 16 working with children or vulnerable adults will have to start registering with the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) from November next year.

Which means that half a million teenagers will be forced to undergo CRB checks, so not only will they be forced to do “community work” which I still think is a good idea but they will be forcibly added to the growing Gov database, what next; will we all have to be chipped like pets?








Bit of a look at the surreal side of life, and they don’t come more surreal than Berlusconi who wants to strangle people who write books or made films about the mafia.

'If I find out who is the maker of the nine seasons of The Octopus and who has written books on the mafia, which give such a bad image to Italy across the world, I swear that I will strangle them,' he said.

Mr Berlusconi has a nice stable personality I see.




Also from the land of pizza: More than 100 helpers broke the world record when they produced the biggest drink of orange juice on the planet.

The record breakers, in Palagiano, Italy, crushed more than 5,000 lbs of oranges to produce 700 litres of juice.

One organiser told the Austrian Times: "We had 5,000 spectators who all got a glass of very freshly squeezed orange juice when we'd finished."

The drink smashed the previous record attempts and broke the new Guinness World Record in just one hour.


So much for the world food shortage then.



Edinburgh has a new tourist attraction, a “cosy post”: a thick woolly jumper is currently adorning a signpost in Edinburgh's Bristo Square.

The entire pole has been wrapped in multi-coloured knitted squares, creating a bright "signpost cosy" that's stopping passers-by in their tracks.

The jumper first appeared last Wednesday, and while no-one has yet taken responsibility,
Anna MacQuarrie, President of Edinburgh University's Knitting Society, bumped into its creators.

"I was on my way to our weekly KnitSoc meeting when I saw them," she said. "It was part of a project they were working on and having filmed. There are lots of things like this going on in the knitting world at the moment."

An Edinburgh University security guard working in Bristo Square said: "It's been there for a while now, I don't really understand it. It looks like a tea cosy. Maybe people were just trying to keep the signpost warm.


Makes you feel all cosy doesn’t it.




Last but not least:









The BBC may cut digital and radio services after the analogue switch-off in 2012, according to the director general, Mark Thompson.

The size and scope of the BBC has come under increasing scrutiny at the same time as other media organisations have been hit by declining advertising revenues.

Mr Thompson said that the future of BBC's operations would have to include “reductions in some kinds of programmes and content" and an examination of the scope of its websites.

He said: “Expect to see reductions in some kinds of programmes and content - a look for example at the current scope of our website - and a close examination of the future of our service portfolios once switchover has been achieved”.

Earlier this month, Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, said the public broadcaster could be dramatically slimmed down under a Tory government.

Mr Hunt expressed scepticism about the value of the niche television channels BBC Three and BBC Four, (costing £114m and £71m) as well as digital radio stations such as 1Xtra, 6 Music and Radio 7. Collectively these new ventures cost hundreds of millions of pounds out of a total BBC budget of £4.6 billion.

On the BBC website, Mr Thompson said it was important to make sure that the "many millions of pages that are up there need to be there". "Is it sufficiently up to date, is it relevant?" he asked.

The corporation was criticised over executive pay after it disclosed that it was paying the 100 most senior staff £20 million a year.

Mr Thompson defended the salaries saying that many senior staff had taken a “considerable” pay cut by working at the BBC. He revealed he had taken a 58 per cent cut when he moved from the private sector.

According to a poll conducted for BBC Newsnight, seventy per cent of people questioned said the salaries and expenses of BBC senior managers should be made public and 64 per cent said stars earning over a certain amount should face a similar move, and 59 per cent said the pay of all presenters should be made public.

The BBC has refused to reveal stars' pay saying it is commercially sensitive and could trigger an exodus.

So we get our services cut while Mr Thompson continues to receive his £800,000 plus salary, good plan Mark.


That’s it for now.


Angus

AnglishLit

Angus Dei-NHS-THE OTHER SIDE

Angus Dei politico









Sunday 14 June 2009

Sunday Section

Yet another week comes to an end (or beginning, depending where you live), and the news is all a bit odd, especially from across the pond.

First up:
Thar's Gold in them thar gills ELEELE, Hawaii - Hawaii resident Curt Carish boasts a timely fish tale - a 25-centimetre reef fish he caught by hand in shallow water coughed up a ticking gold watch.

Carish says he was enjoying a picnic Wednesday on Port Allen beach when he saw the nenue fish awkwardly swimming close to shore.

He says a friend gave him a bamboo stick and told him to get the fish.

So he jumped into the waist-high water and hit the nenue until it went limp.

He noticed the fish had an abnormally large belly as he tossed it into a cooler.

A friend opened the cooler later to discover a gold watch next to the fish's mouth.
Carish says the watch was ticking and keeping correct time.

Well that was a timely catch!


Bite me she said so he did! MERIDEN, Conn. - An analyst at the Connecticut Police Academy says a co-worker responded literally to her "bite me" remark and chomped on her.

Former Waterbury police captain Francis Woodruff was charged Tuesday with disorderly conduct and released on a promise to appear in court. He's accused of biting academy licence and applications analyst Rochelle Wyler on April 24.

A police arrest report says Wyler had teeth marks and bruising on the back of her left arm.

Wyler's complaint alleges Woodruff was annoying her by calling her a clerk.
She says she responded with "bite me" - and he did.

Woodruff is also a training co-ordinator with the 130-member police department in Meriden, just south of Hartford.

He says he was joking.


Once bitten?



Big Mac man calls police ALOHA, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon man spent Memorial Day in jail after dialling 911 to complain that a McDonald’s worker was rude and didn’t give him an orange juice he ordered.

Raibin Osman of Aloha is accused of improper use of the emergency telephone number.

The Oregonian newspaper reports that the 20-year-old bailed out of the Washington County Jail on Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

Sheriff’s Sgt. David Thompson says Osman ignored deputies who told him the emergency number isn’t to be used for straightening out fast-food orders.

A McDonald’s employee also called 911 during the incident to complain that Osman and the people with him were blocking the drive-thru lane and knocking on the restaurant windows.

What a whopper! Or is that another “caterer”?
Some home grown “news”:



New sat nav badge for scouts tying knots map reading and lighting fires, traditional skills for a scout, but now it seems that a new “Hiker” badge is to be awarded for the use of Sat Nav devices.

Mary Spence, a former president of the British Cartographic Society, said: "These youngsters don't need any instruction on this kind of technology.

"They are born to things like mobile phones and sat navs. For a start, there is nothing to work on a sat nav – they are so intuitive and easy to use. I'm astounded at this news. I am on a tirade now.

The new badge also promotes "geocaching" – which involves following a series of predetermined way points using a GPS – as an alternative to the more traditional scouting activity of orienteering, which involves following map references around a course.

Even I can use a Sat Nav and this sort of defeats the object.



And finally:


The Government wants to use our BBC license fee to finance news programmes on commercial TV channels A long-awaited white paper by Lord Carter, the technology minister, is understood to propose "top slicing" of the BBC's budget – using up to £100 million of BBC funding to pay independent companies to make regional news programmes for ITV.

It is also said to recommend taking an extra £30 million – or possibly more – of licence fee money to allow producers to make current affairs documentaries to be viewed either on television or on the internet.

Another plan, which would see financially troubled Channel 4 "bailed out" in a partnership with BBC Worldwide, the corporation's commercial arm, is still being wrangled over by ministers this weekend.

The proposals will be published this week in Lord Carter's report, Digital Britain, which will propose the biggest shake-up of British broadcasting for a generation – as well as mapping the future of broadband services and measures to deal with internet piracy.

It will be presented to the Cabinet on Tuesday and be published "later in the week," government sources said.

Last week, in what some critics saw as a public relations exercise ahead of the report's publication, it was revealed that BBC star names, including Jonathan Ross, Jeremy Clarkson and Graham Norton, are to have to take pay cuts of up to 40 per cent.

The Sunday Telegraph understands that Ben Bradshaw, the newly appointed Culture Secretary who will take the lead in presenting the report, held a meeting with senior BBC executives in the last few days.

Bennie Lego-Bradshaw was a pillock when he was a health minister and it seems he hasn’t changed, if ITV and Channel four are short of money they should stop making pathetic “reality TV” shows and use the money for News programmes, we pay our money for the BBC and that is where it should stay.


A bit of good news (or bad) depending on your outlook-the Angus Dei politico
And Angus Dei-NHS-THE OTHER SIDE sites will be back on line tomorrow after a revamp.

"'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in't."-Lord Byron

Angus