“Can do” U-turn cam: Smooth operator: Stone Numptys: Missus on yer back: China 5: and Shark infested golf.

Dull, wet and nippy at the Castle this morn, as I sit here watching the Japanese Grand Prix his Maj has jumped through the window and landed in my lap-he is soaking wet and cold so the Angus body warmer is working well. 

Apparently under the “destroyer of Blighty”

Piss Poor Policy U-turn Cam’s 'can-do' Britain has 20,000 fewer companies.

David Cameron's claim to be the champion of new business was undermined yesterday as new figures showed the number of firms in Britain fell by 20,000 during his first year as Prime Minister.

Mr Cameron used his party conference speech last week to promise a plan that would do "everything we can to help businesses start, grow, thrive, succeed". In the wake of his speech, the Federation of Small Businesses demanded "clear action to match the rhetoric"; while the manufacturer’s organisation EEF warned promoting growth is "now a matter of urgency".

This week there is expected to be a series of announcements from the Department for Business, the Treasury and No 10 on job creation, particularly in manufacturing, which lost 4,800 businesses alone. In March 2010, there were a total of 2.1 million businesses with VAT or PAYE registrations but a year later it had fallen to 2.08 million, according to the ONS.  

The only announcement I want to hear is that the Millionaires Club Coalition has resigned....

And:

Thanks to the arseholes at the GMC

A surgeon who is facing claims he botched 85 operations is still working for the NHS.

The hospital trust where Manjit Bhamra worked has already paid out £1 million to 10 patients whose surgery went badly wrong.

Now it is facing a further 85 complaints – in what could become one of Britain's biggest clinical negligence claims against a single surgeon.

Mr Bhamra has twice been referred to the General Medical Council but is now working at a different hospital which said it had "no concerns" about him.

The orthopaedic surgeon, 55, is accused of leaving hip patients in such pain that they were housebound and unable to work, with one man forced to sleep in a chair at night because he was unable to lie down.

Payments of between £1,750 and £500,000 have already been made in ten cases treated by Mr Bhamra at Rotherham Hospital, South Yorkshire – though liability was not accepted in all cases.

A spokesman for Rotherham Hospital said the trust had "a robust procedure in place in which to fully investigate any complaints that are received".

Tim Hendra, Medical Director at Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs Pinderfield hospital said that delivering safe high quality care was the hospital's top priority, and that all medical staff were subject to a robust recruitment process and routine monitoring.

Bollocks...

A while back I posted about thieves who stole a driveway.

It now appears that the stone Numptys didn’t get far, as they were forced to abandon their haul on the M25 and flee after their transit van collapsed under the weight.

Sharon Gould, 52, from Spindlewoods, Tadworth, was horrified to return home on September 21 to find 120 York stones, dating back to 1910, had been taken while she was out to lunch with her mother.

After the back-breaking work of digging up the stones and loading them onto their white Ford transit van the thieves must have thought that driving them away would be a doddle.

But they had not reckoned on the impact of three tonnes of stone on a van.

As they drove down the M25 a tyre blew out and the suspension collapsed.

Forced to abandon the vehicle on the hard shoulder between the junctions 9 and 10, the two men were last seen running away into nearby fields after removing the vehicle's number plates in a bid to avoid being traced.

 Natural justice?

Over the saline pond on the left

The 2011 North American Wife Carrying Championship was held yesterday.

Wife Carrying teams are comprised of a male and female competitor, however, the female does not need to be the legal wife of the male nor does she have to let her male teammate carry her. Teams have the option to have the male carried by the female if they so choose. 

So it isn’t really a “Wife carrying” contest then, still the results are here.

Keep going West for quite a bit

And several Chinese online stores are offering die-hard Apple fans the opportunity to buy the much-anticipated next-generation iPhone 5. There's just one catch -- the US tech giant hasn't released it yet.

The fake smart phones are available for as little as 200 Yuan ($31) on hugely popular websites such as China's largest online marketplace Taobao.com, which has 370 million registered users.

Some of the smart phones offered are billed as "HiPhone 5" in a bid to avoid accusations of counterfeiting, but photos of the devices show the Apple logo on the back of the phones and "iPhone 5G" printed in the battery compartment.

Even before Tuesday's launch of the iPhone 4S at Apple headquarters in California, Chinese authorities had seized fake versions of the US firm's supposed latest offering.

Commerce department inspectors in the south eastern city of Fuzhou found 61 iPhone 5s on sale that featured new capabilities such as dual sim cards, the official Xinhua news agency reported earlier this week.

Vendors said the phones had been manufactured in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, the report said. The Fuzhou trade and commerce bureau was unavailable for comment.

Got to be a lot cheaper than Apple, and they will probably work better.....

And finally:

Dahn Unda

Members of a golf club in Australia have something more to worry about than just their swing - playing on what's thought to be the world's first shark-infested course.

The sharks got onto the Queensland golf course when it flooded some years ago after a river broke its banks.

Golfers often pause during games for a few minutes to see if they can spot the sharks before they head off to the next tee.

The sharks, which are between 8 and 10ft long, have proved quite a hit at corporate events and their fins have even been spotted during wedding ceremonies held on the course.

Half a dozen man-eating Bull sharks live in the lake in the centre of the course where their fins poking through the water have become a regular sight. 

Hope the Japanese don’t read this...

 

That’s it: I’m orf to read the green blueprint. 

And today’s thought: "Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit." - Billy Connolly

 

Angus