Category: current affairs

If the Daily Telegraph has always been nicknamed the Torygraph, what will it be known as if the allegiance changes?

Two sad and shocking deaths to record:
Australian batsman David Hookes has died after being assaulted outside a bar in Melbourne. Hookes played 23 Tests for his country, and was coach of the Victoria state team. He was 46.
James Lawrence, guitarist with Chichester band Hope of the States has taken his own life whilst recording at Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld studio near Bath. He was 26. (Thanks to Celine for making me aware of this).

Man’s body found in freezer.
You shouldn’t laugh, I guess, but the fact that there will not be a post-mortem until Friday tickled me. Can’t they stick him in the microwave?

News you might have missed: Enric Bernat Fontlladosa has died, aged 80. Fontlladosa invented the Chupa Chup lollipop in 1958. Startlingly, it is now manufactured in 170 countires, and four billion of the things are sold each year.

Supermarket price war predicted. This is being billed as good news for consumers, resulting in more choice and lower prices. But somehow I’m not so sure. The price war will result in yet greater pressures on suppliers (i.e. farmers and food processors) in order to reduce costs. The producers are already under great pressure to produce highly consistent food at very low costs, driven by the demands of consumers. I feel that increasing that pressure will only lead to more food scares like the one involving salmon we have just seen (although I’ve yet to be convinced of the merit of the claims in that case), and will also improve the odds for mass-produced subsidized food from western multinationals at the expense of food from smaller producers, be they in developing nations or in the next village.

Bad news for less-tall Tube users.

Apparently, Nicholas van Hoogstraten is not sorry about the death of Mohamed Raja, for which he was tried for manslaughter.
Draw your own conclusions.

BBC News – UK passport holders will need visas to enter US. Whatever happened to being granted passage without let or hindrance?

Aside: isn’t English a strange language? The verb to let can mean either "to allow" or "to hinder".

Oh no! I feel another rant coming on over this news. Kilroy is clearly a fool for writing such an ill-conceived and prejudiced article, and the editors of the Express are even more stupid for being foolish enough to print it.
Interestingly, in the Express’s own reporting of this news, they only refer to the peice as a "newspaper article" and don’t mention that it appeared in their own publication. How curious!

In Ghana, there are only six doctors for every 100,000 people.
The NHS in the UK imports doctors from other countries in order to redress the perceived shortage of doctors in this country. Can you guess which is one of the nations targeted by NHS personnel managers?
Fact poached from a trailer for tonight’s Radio 4 programme The Poor Wars.