Black Flag News
 
 2007/March 
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No. 10 Certificate of EndorsementEvery edition of BFN is compiled
in accordance with official 10 Downing Street guidelines on accuracy and veracity.

Presented to Bradford Council, which wasted £10,000 on prosecuting a farmer for damaging the bark of 22 protected beech trees on his land. Mr. David Sunderland was threatened with a fine of around half a million quid after his 80 British Saddleback pigs used the trees as scratching posts. He offered to replace them but the council was hell-bent on dragging him into court.
   5 court hearings later, a report commissioned by Mr. Sunderland took the wind out of the council's sails. An expert found that most of the damage was caused before Mr. Sunderland began keeping pigs in the field. The council's lawyers threw in the towel and Bradford's magistrates awarded costs against them. Nobody on the council's staff has been sacked or disciplined for incompetence.

CARTOGRAPHY NEWS
  Portuguese to claim Australia?

An Aussie journalist is claiming that a map which he found in a Canberra bookshop proves that the Portuguese found his native land 250 years before Captain James Cook came along in the latter half of the 18th century. One slight snag, though – in making the map drawn by Cristovao Mendonca in 1520 look like an actual map of Australia, you have to transform the map on the left below into the one on the right below:

Mendonca map, 1520
Mendonca's map
modern map
Modern map

The transformation can be achieved by cutting the map along the red line, turning both parts anti-clockwise through 80 degrees then turning the top part anti-clockwise through a further 75 degrees. You then end up with the sticky out bit of land at the top of Mendonca's map moved to the bottom, and a new composite which looks fairly similar to the bump in the lower part of Australia's eastern coastline. But the whole manoeuvre is something you'd expect from the gordon brown School of Cartography!

Anyone interested in catching up with Captain Cook's 3 epic voyages of discovery, and his sticky end in Hawaii, should visit the Wordsworth Editions website, which offers a paperback edition at a very reasonable price.

CATCH-UP NEWS
  Scouse fuzz cotton on 20 years later

The Merseyside Police are looking forward to taking delivery of remote-controlled model helicopters, which are fitted with a high-quality CCTV system. Their big idea is to hover them over hotspots, like the crowd at a football match, and get the goods on trouble-makers.
   All of which sounds exactly like something Romiley Literary Circle author Philip Turner came up with in Free Flight, a novel written back in 1981.
   Another of Mr. Turner's books, Night Flowers (1977), is a similarly prophetic account of life in a world where the eco-revolution has taken place, the national parks are full of 'petrol plants' as an alternative to petroleum-based fuels and the issue of control of a nation's Refuse Reclamation Centres sparks off an international war between rival businesses.
   But that's something yet in store for the 'real world'.

CLIMATE NEWS
  A Stealth Tax which will save the planet?

fireThis corrupt government is hell-bent on swindling householders by making refuse collections fortnightly; but costing the same as weekly ones; and charging for refuse removal by weight. But this might just be something which saves the planet from global warming!!!
   When the same scam was tried in Ireland, the result was a massive increase in the number of backyard bonfires, which rushed vast amounts of soot and aerosols into the atmosphere, as enterprising householders sought to side-step the Bin Tax.
   Soot and aerosols are, as any reputable climate scientist will tell you, excellent at reflecting sunlight before it can be absorbed by greenhouse gases. So a Bin Tax in Britain, and the consequent huge surge in backyard bonfires, could just save the planet!

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Crime News
CRIME NEWS
Art theft target big clue for police

A couple of Picassos have taken a walk from his grand-daughter's flat in Paris. The pictures are alleged to be a picture of his daughter Maya and a portrait of Picasso's second wife. They are impossible to sell on the open market and the Fine Art Squad of the Paris police force is now asking itself why anyone would want to steal Picassos when they could acquire something worth stealing for the same outlay. The initial phase of the investigation will be targetted on collectors who are known to be highly eccentric or soft in the head.

squareAttention Fraudsters!
If you're going to rip someone off, make sure it's for no more than £999.99 as the British police are no longer interested in investigating frauds involving less than a grand.

squareSomething else the PC mob have to answer for!
Health and safety regulations imposed by the terminally politically correct mean that security guards transporting cash are not allowed to wear body armour, not allowed to carry batons, not allowed to have cash-boxes chained to themselves and not allowed to resist if someone robs them. As a result, gangs of kids, some as young as 14, are strolling off with thousands of pounds. Some of them do it on the way home from school but most of the young criminals are aged 17-22. Some of them threaten the security guard with a gun or a knife but others know that they don't need to bother with a weapon – the cash is there for the taking.

squareAnother corrupt blair labour swindle
The 2006 Fraud Act contains an April Fool clause. On 2007/04/01, crime involving cheques, debit & credit cards, and online operations will be something which is no longer to be reported to the police. Such crimes must be reported to the victim's bank instead, and the banks will be responsible for spinning fraud figures in future, not the Home Office.

squareAnother official waste of space
The Office of Fair Trading has blinked in its confrontation with the banks over their illegal penalty charges for unauthorized overdrafts, etc. The banks made sinister noises about ending 'free' banking and the OFT decided it needs to spend the next couple of years inquiring instead of leaping into action on the abused customers' behalf.

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DEPARTURES

Lothar-Günther Buchheim

With a surname like that, he had to be a writer; and he was! The author of Das Boot (1973), a hugely successful novel about a German U-boat, has died at 89. Herr Buchheim spent several weeks on U-96 during the autumn of 1941 as part of his wartime service in the German navy. His job involved tours of duty on various naval vessels and then writing propaganda pieces accompanied by his photographs.
   His autobiographical novel enjoyed a second surge of popularity when the film of the same name was released in 1981. Predictably, the volatile Herr Buchheim fell out with the director, who refused to let him write the screenplay. His literary success allowed him to assemble a valuable collection of modern German art 'when it was still cheap', and he wrote a number of other books around his wartime collection of photographs.

John Inman
DEPARTURES

John Inman

The actor who played Mr. "I'm Free!" Humphries in Are You Being Served has died at 71. His outrageously camp menswear salesman helped to win audiences of over 20 million for this TV series, figures which today's programme makers can only dream of, through 12 years and 69 episodes. Mr. Inman was voted TV Personality of the Year in 1976. The series gave him the recognition to see him through the rest of his career, which included many successful seasons as a pantomime dame.

DEPARTURES

Captain Lisa Nowak

NASA has fired a US Navy astronaut, who is awaiting trial for the attempted abduction of her rival for another astronaut's affections. She is the first active astronaut to be charged with a felony and the first to be booted off the programme so publicly.

DEPARTURES

Gareth Hunt

The actor who played Mike Gambit in The New Avengers has died at 65. His role in the revival of the 1960s 'classic' was to do the leaping about, aided by Joanna Lumley, while the ageing Steed character postured between trips to the post office to draw his pension. This exposure in a high-profile TV series set up Gareth Hunt's other major TV part in a lengthy string of adverts for instant coffee. His career started on the stage, travelled through a TV phase and ended full circle back on the stage.

DEPARTURES

HP Sauce

Production of what is alleged to be the nation's favourite brown sauce in Birmingham has ended after 103 years. Heinz has decided to make "Harold's Preference" [One for people who remember the 1960s & 1970s, Ed.] to Holland and put 120 people out of a job. Outraged MPs are now demanding that the DTI orders the removal of the picture of the House of Commons from the sauce bottle's label on the grounds that it would mislead the public over where the sauce comes from.

DEPARTURES

Sally Clark

The solicitor whose life was blighted by one of the great miscarriages of justice of the 20th Century has died. She was wrongly convicted of the murder of 2 baby sons in 1999 and spent 3 years in gaol before the damning evidence provided by the 'expert' in her case, Sir Roy Meadow, was proved to totally wrong. She was a victim of a system and mind-set, which assumed that an unexplained death was bound to be due to murder rather than rare natural causes.

DEPARTURES

Bob Woolmer

A second post-mortem examination has found that the British-born coach of the Pakistan cricket team was murdered. His own playing career, which included 19 Test caps, was cut short by injury but he found new success as a coach, starting at Warwickshire CCC. His job with the Pakistan national side was to have been his last but he was not to be allowed to retire. Mr. Woolmer was found dead in his hotel room in Jamaica on the day after his side's defeat by Ireland in the Cricket World Cup. A murder investigation is in progress.

DEPARTURES

Richard S. Prather

Books by R.S. PratherA prolific, and successful, writer of detective fiction has died at 86. A contemporary of Mickey Spillane, Mr. Prather added a touch of humour to the postwar adventures of his main character, Shell Scott. Naked ladies also featured prominently, e.g. in Strip For Murder (1955), in which the battered detective investigates a murder in a nudist colony.
   This was the 9th in a sequence of books for Gold Medal Books, the leading US publisher of detective paperback, the first being The Case of the Vanishing Beauty (1950). Another feature of Mr. Prather's work was his liking for jokey titles, e.g. Dig That Crazy Grave (1961). Shell Scott featured in 40 books over a period of 36 years and Mr. Prather's sales exceed 40 million.
   He fell out with his publisher in 1975 over making changes to reflect changing times and during a lengthy legal action, he switched careers, successfully, to organic avocado farming. By the time all the trouble was over, the Shell Scott market had dried up and the final 2 novels were published in the 1980s.

DOSH NEWS

The Customer bites back again!

doshBanks which swindled their customers with excessive charges for unplanned overdrafts, etc., retaliated by closing the accounts of some of the customers who complained. Stung into action, the Financial Ombudsman Service has ruled that this practice is not on.
   In a test case, the FOS awarded £200 compensation to a bank customer, who won a refund of £105 and promptly received 30 days' notice of having his account closed. 50 more cases are going through the system and the banks can expect to have to pay out a big chunk of their record profits.
   Something else going in the customer's favour is the exit fee swindle, under which banks make an excessive charge when a customer moves a mortgage or terminates it early. The fees have shot up to a level which bears no relation to the actual cost of the work. But the Financial Services Authority has ruled that exit fees must be charged at the level current when the mortgage was taken out. So that's millions more which the banks have to repay.

squareMore nail-biting at No. 11 Downing Street
Banks are having to pay out so much to customers whom they swindled with excessive charges, or inconvenienced recklessly, that scotch gordon broon's likely take from a windfall tax on their profits is looking more and more meagre. So it looks like the National Lottery is going to get it in the neck even more to pay for the 2013 Olympics.

the muggerThe Budget: A waste of time & money
The mugger's final budget was all about getting headlines for himself. In fact, he did little other than shuffle the deck chairs; and that's where the waste of money comes in.
   All those tax forms and help forms that have to be changed. All those civil servants beavering away to take less cash from one source and more from another. All that money wasted on the mugger's pointless bureaucracy. All that Tax Credit cash not paid out to people who are entitled to it because the mugger has made the process for claiming it too bloody complicated.
   And as the final insult, he stole another £2 billion off the hapless British public.

squareMore labour tax 'n' waste
A government plan to permit casino websites to operate from the UK from September of this year has hit the buffers. The budget's new tax on such operations means that no one is likely to set one up in Britain. Which means that there is a gang of civil servants staffing a regulation agency, who are drawing their wages from the public purse even though they will have no one to regulate. And with a 50% tax on casino profits, Britain looks likely to remain free of the dreaded super-casino, despite all the bungs and favours for new labour's usual suspects.
   This is joined-up government, labour style, and Culture-Vulture Sec. tessa jowell, Britain's Gambling Is Good For You tsar, is reported to be chewing her office carpet in frustration.

squareAnother brown scam in the budget
The mugger failed to mention in his speech that the deadline for filling in a self-assessment tax form (the paper version, not online) for the 2007/08 tax year has been brought forward 3 months from 2009/01/31 to 2008/10/31. This is another illustration of the flaws in this prime minister wannabe's character, as he is obviously hoping to swindle late-returners out of a fine of £100 plus interest on any tax owing.

squareA guy who thinks he's going to live forever!
It is rumoured that an unnamed broker has fixed up a 25-year mortgage for an East Sussex man aged 102. He plans to meet the £958/month interest-only mortgage payments out of rental income and clear the capital via the increase in the value of the property over the next quarter-century. So all he has to do now is live to 127. BFN wishes him the best of luck but we wouldn't put any money on his success.

squareLower power bills? Sure!
Scottish Power is in trouble for misleading advertising over tis claim that a low energy light bulb will save the owner £100 over its lifetime. In your dreams it will!

squareSilly gesture politics
What is the point of fining Network Rail £4 million for the Paddington rail crash? The disaster was caused 7 years ago by the negligence of Thames Trains, the train operator, and Railtrack. And the fine just amounts to moving money from one government pocket to another and making sure it doesn't get spent on improving railway safety.
   The judge said he realized this but he still went along with the fiasco, which doesn't say much about the commonsense and judgement of the aptly named Mr. Justice Bean.

Better Out Than InThe EU to blow a monumental amount of YOUR cash
The European Union gangsters plan to waste £747 billion of taxpayers' cash over the next 14 years. The money will be blown on the scam of cutting the EU's emissions of greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020. This will reduce total human emissions of greenhouse gases by 3%.
   As 99.72% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere comes from natural sources, and only 0.28% comes from human sources, the cut will reduce total atmospheric greenhouse gases by 0.0035% – a totally insignificant amount, which will have no effect at all on the Earth's climate.

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Home News
HOME NEWS
UK FlagDisappearing Britain

It's not just its coastline which Britain is losing; one of its town is in danger of vanishing off the map! The chalk deposits beneath Reading were mined extensively for the brick industry until about 200 years ago.
   By then, some 40 miles of tunnels had been created and the borough council has suddenly realized that it has no record of where most of the tunnels are. But finding out has become a priority as bits of buildings and sections of gardens are prone to disappear suddenly.
   So if Reading's C-Tax shoots up, mapping the tunnels and engineering work to make them safe will get the blame. And, no doubt, the council will take the opportunity to scam some extra cash for other devious purposes.

square"A vote for me is a vote for labour," says Ming the Merciless.
The current honcho of the Trivial-Democrats is so desperate for attention that he is willing to form a coalition with the post blair labour rump if there's a hung parliament after the next general election. Which means that voting Liberal is no longer a way of protesting about what current government is doing, it's a way of opting for more of the corrupt same.

squareThe AG Is Innocent, OK!
The BBC got on its high horse when the Attorney General blocked a story about corrupt blair labour's cash for honours antics. Labour donor Lord Goldsmith said he was acting in response to a request from the police but everyone assumed he was just doing the labour party's bidding, as usual, in an attempt to reduce its embarrassment level.
   Well, it now looks like the email at the root of the story was leaked deliberately by the downing street mafia in the hope of sabotaging the police investigation, and that this evil plan was thwarted by the AG's injunction!
   Lord Goldsmith's big problem is that he got his job because he's tony blair's pal, and he has a track record for doing his master's bidding (e.g. his wobbling on the legality of invading Iraq to accomplish regime change, which was illegal no matter what the AG said), so whatever he does, everyone automatically thinks the worst. But becoming damaged goods seems to be a necessary spin-off from taking the corrupt blair labour shilling.
UpdateThe email in question was about lord cashpoint, a.k.a. lord levy. Apparently, ruth turner, blair's 'director of external relations' is alleged to have accused him to telling her porkies. But now, corrupt blair labour is saying the email was full of inaccuracies, it wasn't real and it wasn't even an email.
   The number of lies coming out of downing street suggests that the information leaked to the Beeb bang on target.

light bulbWarning, start stocking up with light bulbs!

Do this right away if you don't want to be left groping around in semi-darkness in a few years' time. The Carbon Criminals of the EU, principally our passenger prime minister and the German PM, are fixing to ban incandescent bulbs in favour of more expensive and dimmer fluorescent lamps in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
   BFN's Science Editor comments: "Carbon dioxide released by the human race is responsible for 0.117% of the greenhouse effect. The reduction of carbon dioxide emissions due to a ban on incandescent light bulbs will reduce this figure by a very tiny amount, and the ban will make bugger all practical difference."

squareTories will save the planet by taxing fun
If elected, Tory leader Dave Cameron will let his chancellor minion boost taxes to make air travel unaffordable to the masses. The cash raised will then be used to reduce other forms of taxation. Which means that there will be:
1. No nett gain to the exchequer (good)
2. An increase in the amount of taxpayers' cash wasted on bureaucracy (bad)
3. Nothing left over to waste on pointless anti-climate change strategies (good)

squareTories to tax by Disapproval
If elected, Tory leader Dave Cameron will revise the taxation system so that the heaviest taxes fall on things he disapproves of, e.g. flying and motoring. But he proposes to reduce taxes on things he approves off, like people building families, in direct proportion to the amount raised in disapproval taxes.

squareHow stupid can you get?
Swindon Tourist Information Centre goes for the world record

The local author of a book about the first world war has been told by Swindon Borough Council that he can't have it on sale at the Tourist Information Centre if he doesn't stump up £150 for a £5 million public liability insurance policy. The insurance is necessary, the council insists, in case someone is injured by one of the books, which could land on a foot or cause a paper-cut.

squareAnother fine mess . . .
If universities follow the government's bidding and take the educational history and background of a potential student's parents into consideration, they will be operating a discriminatory process in breach of Article 14 of the Human Rights Act. So a rejected student will have grounds to sue for compensation.
   Worse, if the student passes the information on without the parents' consent, that is a breach of the Data Protection Act, which is a criminal offence, for which the student and the university's administrators can be gaoled.

squareAnother fine mess II . . .
The Association of Teachers & Lecturers wants to revamp the school curriculum. Out will go GCSEs and all other tests & exams, and everything to do with academic subjects, which can be trawled off the internet. In their place will come 'life skills' like learning how to walk appropriately for the circumstances; something which demands specialist training, apparently.

The Cold Fire of Madness by Philip H. Turner

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   Read about the Book on the Romiley Literary Circle website

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Category : Crime, set in 1987

MEEJA NEWS

Greedy bastards shoot hole in own foot!

Media NewsThe month began with the disappearance of Sky's base channels from Virgin Media's cable TV service. Sky One, Sky Two, Sky News (the worst news programme on TV) and Sky Sports News are no longer on offer because Sky tried to double the price for them, having reduced the prices for its VM channels to less than one-quarter of the previous rate. So Sky is now looking at losing the cash which it would have got from selling the channels on, and also a big drop in advertising revenue and, as usual, the paying customers are the big losers.
UpdateSky's advertisers are already making threatening noises about the not getting the audiences they've paid for the and the regulator is taking a look at potential abuses of Sky's position as a dominant player in the digital TV market.

squareSky bombarded with complaints over false advertising
The satellite TV company stands accused of failing to include the price of a compulsory BT phone line in its knocking adverts directed at Virgin Media. "The small print is also unusually microscopic," a complainant told BFN, "which is a sure sign there's something extremely dodgy going on in the main body of the advert."

squareCustomers threaten to abandon Virgin Media in droves
"If they can't provide the programmes we want to watch, we're off," is their message. VM's response is to offer a dodgy TV On Demand service, which doesn't include the lost Sky series and, peculiarly, no longer includes the BBC's Life On Mars season 2.

squareVirgin Media's repair department sucks!
A disgruntled VM customer writes:
"Our digital box finally croaked on a Monday morning after giving a lot of trouble. The last time we needed an engineer, when ntl was running the business, we got one the next day. Under VM, we were told we had to do without TV for 4 days. The engineer installed a new box at the end of the following Friday morning. We used it to watch the lunchtime news. After half an hour, the box croaked. We rang the repair number and we were assured that the engineer would be back the same day.
   "Needless to say, the engineer was a no-show and when I phoned again, I got the Indian call centre. The best the bloke there could do was give me another engineer appointment for the following Tuesday. Absolutely bloody brilliant!"

Attn: Sir R. Branson

If your cable customers are no longer getting Sky channels, and Virgin Media is no longer paying for them, WE SHOULD GET A PRICE REDUCTION.
   If you choose to spend the Sky budget on additional content, YOUR CUSTOMERS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DECIDE WHETHER THEY WANT IT.
   We all know what's going to happen if you spend the Sky budget and then do a deal for these channels sometime in the future – the price to your customers will go up.
   This is the sort of sleazy scam we expect from our current government but not something a reputable company should be doing. SHOW SOME HONESTY. Make it easy for your customers to pay only for the services they want.

Sponsored by the Campaign For Media Honesty

Romiley News
ROMILEY NEWS
Lunar total eclipse a great success!

3/4 March lunar eclipseIt's pretty much a rule that if anything interesting is happening in the skies over Romiley, then it will be swallowed up by heavy clouds with optional heavy rain. But the Gods smiled on us for once and we got a good view of an eclipse which began at about half past nine on the first Saturday of the month and lasted until around one-thirty on Sunday morning.
   It's a cliché that the Moon turns blood-red at totality, or at least a copper colour. Most eclipses seen from Romiley are dark ones with the Moon just going dark grey. This month's eclipse, however, was very dark but distinctly reddish. "Probably the reddest ever," a senior member of Romiley Astronomical Society declared.
   Two lots of fairly thick clouds blew over during the Moon's march through the umbra of the Earth's shadow, provoking mutterings of, "Well, that's our bloody lot for tonight," among the cynics, but the sky did clear fairly quickly both times and the clouds stayed away as the Moon passed through the heart of the Earth's shadow and emerged again.
   p.s. Don't believe the pictures in the following Monday morning's newspapers. They showed the Moon redder than a traffic light because someone had been messing about with the brightness of the image. It didn't look like that in real life!

squareLiberals put Stockport's Council Tax up 4.72%
The rate for a Band C house will be £1223.04 for this year – which is pretty close to the average band D rate of £1,258 in London. The rise is well above the national rise of 4.2%, and just about double the Consumer Price Index of 2.8%, which the swindling Chancellor uses when setting the rates of pensions and tax allowances.
   Liberal local government spokesman Andrew Stunell MP said the rise: ". . . will be a heavy blow for pensioners and people on low pay. The council tax is getting increasingly unfair and when it rises above the rate of pay inflation and even more above the rate of pension inflation that clearly puts people in great difficulty."
   So what are Romiley's residents getting out of it? Not a whole hell of a lot, and especially not a whole hell of a lot done about the village's broken pavements. But Cllr. McLay (Liberal) did get a free trip to London on the rates, according to her latest newsletter.

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space news
SPACE NEWS
A spot of sanity in New Mexico

The host of New Mexico state university and the longtime home of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of the Sun's ninth planet, has reaffirmed Pluto's status as a planet and declared March 13th 2007 "Pluto Planet Day" in honour of both the planet and its discoverer. The decision rejects the International Astronomical Union's undemocratic and discredited decision to downgrade Pluto to 'dwarf planet' status at a meeting in August 2006.

squareAtlantis launch scuppered by weather
A Florida storm of golf ball-size hail on February 26th caused so much damage to the foam insulation on the shuttle's external fuel tank that the next launch has been put back 2 months to May. The big problem is the 2,500 'dings' in the foam at the top of the tank, which will take a lot of patching up.
   NASA gave the integrity of the external tank's insulation layer a high priority after a piece of foam shed during the final launch of the shuttle Columbia punctured a wing. 7 astronauts died when the shuttle broke up during re-entry on 2003/02/01.
   The insulation foam is there to prevent the intensely cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in the fuel tank from making moisture in the humid Florida air freeze on the exterior of the tank. Ice breaking off the tank during the launch would be an even greater hazard to the shuttle than pieces of the foam insulation.

travel
TRAVEL NEWS
Over-evolved vehicles go extinct!

Thousands of vehicles filled up with supermarket petrol from Tesco & Morrisons have croaked due to burnt-out oxygen sensors. The engines were okay, and they could have used the fuel without problems, but the failure of the sensors meant that the car's computer shut everything down.
   The owners of the vehicles were all victims of the scam of making cars needlessly complicated in order to boost the profit of motor manufacturers and repair services. So just a minor cock-up on the fuel front cost each of them £400-1,000+ for new oxygen sensors.
   Worse, a shortage of oxygen sensors has put a lot of vehicles off the road, and the owners of cars which have not yet conked out are being advised to have their petrol tank drained by a qualified mechanic (That will be fifty quid, Gov!), just to be on the safe side.
UpdateThe contamination has been blamed on parts per million levels of a silicone additive anti-frothing agent used in fuels other than petrol, e.g. diesel. Tiny amounts of silicon from the silicone are enough to make a modern engine's oxygen sensor croak. Which will cost the supermarkets £10 million or even more. Which they seem willing to pay; but they're not going to stand for rip-offs by fraudsters.

squareGovernment revenge scam exposed!
BlackFlag News has received compelling evidence that corrupt blair labour is behind the fuel contamination scandal, which has hit anything up to half a million motorists. A leaked email shows clearly that a Downing Street think tank came up with the idea of Rogue Petrol as a means of teaching a lesson to the 2 million motorists who dared to sign an on-line petition opposing road pricing.
   Relieving congestion by forcing large numbers of cars off the road was seen as an apt way of punish the revolting motorists for embarrassing our current passenger prime monster. The think tank is already hard at work thinking up another scheme in the confident expectation that it will get away with the Rogue Petrol scam.

squareIf you want to see the world, join the BBC
The organization which is constantly bleating about climate change and disaster ahead spent £15 million on flying its staff 125 million miles around the world in 2005/06. Part of the problem arises from the corporation's policy of sending 3-4 times as many staff as any other news agency on reporting jobs abroad. The travel total includes 17 million miles of air travel in Britain, 14 million miles to and from Europe and 94 million miles for trips to other parts of the world.

squarePayback from Allah?
If you're thinking of going to Tehran, don't! The poisonous smog over the Iranian capital is killing people at a rate of 120 per day; which can be even greater than the rate at which Iranian-backed terrorists are writing off people in Iraq.

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WAR NEWS
Swiss war-mongering comes unstuck

Screw BlairA Swiss attempt to invade neighbouring Liechtenstein has flopped. A force of company strength penetrated almost 2 kilometres into Liechtenstein, which has no army of its own, but they got cold feet when they realized that they had forgotten to draw any ammunition for their assault rifles and retreated.
   The Swiss government is passing this serious diplomatic incursion off as a cock up on the navigation front during a night training exercise.

squareSituation Normal: Still Fukt Up
President Bush has given vice-president blair a good telling off and blair has now abandoned his plan to remove British troops from Iraq in the spring of this year.

Flag of IranCredibility shot – which is what those Iranian pirates bloody well should have been
The big problem for the British naval personnel, who were captured in the Gulf by Iranian pirates while their mother ship looked on and did nothing, is that corrupt blair labour has such a long history of lying that no one can believe anything official spokesmen have to say about where the act of piracy occurred.
UpdateThe Iranians seem to be coming up with a lie a day about where their pirates abducted the British naval personnel, which leads BFN to suspect that President Dinner Jacket has recruited a former Downing Street spin-doctor to invent lies for him.
   BFN would like to suggest that the money would have been better spent on a competent video editor, who could make bogus confessions look at least semi-authentic. A scriptwriter who speaks proper English, and who knows how to make written confessions look like the work of a real person, would also be a valuable addition to President Dinner Jacket's spin-doctoring team.

WEATHER NEWS
Someone had to get it in the neck!

big freezeIt's supposed to be summer in Australia but the east of the continent isn't feeling too cheerful at the moment. Freak weather is adding further misery to the effects of a 6-year drought. Canberra was battered to a standstill by a hail storm, which left ice 3 feet deep in places. The Aussie capital suffered a record 14 thunderstorms last month, and one overnight storm dumped 2.7 inches of rain on the city in an hour.
   Further south, Sydney suffered flash floods and extensive power cuts following a particular savage summer storm. And guess what? They're blaming it on global warming.

world news
WORLD NEWS
Poland in crisis

Poland has a severe shortage of nurses, who are flocking to Britain in search of better pay. Things are even worse on the plumbing front. Most of Poland's plumbers are now here and the ones left behind in the Old Country would be quite happy if they never returned. The few plumbers left in Poland are being worked to death, but they able to charge what they like in a shrinking market.

squareBeer on demand!
An enterprising Aussie had designed a fridge with a built-in catapult and a remote-control. The idea is that the gadget will hurl cans of beer to an idle drinker and save the couch potato the chore of getting off his couch. His next invention will be a flying first-aid kit for boozers who are not very good at catching flying beer cans.

squareSo NOT Sorry
As weirdos of all descriptions; politicians, the archy-bish of Cantab, etc.; queue up to apologize for the slave trade, even though it was nothing to do with them, where are the apologies from the Africans who sold their fellow Africans into slavery? Not to mention all the Arab slave-traders? All this posturing is heavily tainted with the racialist proposition that only white people can be bad guys; which seems to make it okay to the pillocks of political correctness.

Knut the polar bear cubGerman 'animal rights' fascists seek to kill cuddly polar bear cub
Keepers at Berlin zoo decided to hand-rear Knut the polar bear cub when his mother rejected him at birth. Which got the local animal rights fascists up in arms. They demanded that the bear be killed to spare him 'the indignity of life as a domesticated animal'. But no one listened, especially not the zoo's operators, who are enjoying a flood of customers eager to view the new attraction.

squarePope launches new marketing campaign
Pope Rottweiler I is telling potential customers that Hell is very real and they're heading for eternal punishment there if they don't sign up to his product. BFN would like to warn him that if he repeats his message on British soil, he faces arrest and persecution under the Human Rights Act, which guarantees a place in Heaven for everyone, irrespective of race, religious product and conduct.

Better Out Than InThe EU lends its support. Not!
Iran gets 40% of its imports from the European Union, which takes over 25% of Iran's exports. Iran is heavily dependent on the Germans for export guarantees. And wow! Isn't Germany the current rotating president of the EU at the moment?
   If the Germans are serious about the whole EU deal, they should be leaning on the Iranians to get the pirates' captives released. And if they don't, that's something else we can throw at them every time they get uppity about what good Europeans they are and what a sodding brilliant idea the EU is.

This Month's Garbage

The Garbage The Law Lawds, who ruled that an Englishman calling Spaniards 'bloody foreigners' amounts to racial abuse. "The law is sometimes an ass but most often, it falls into disrepute because it is administered by donkeys!"

Suffolk Police, who issued a warning that 3 serial burglars were about to be released from prison but refused to name them to avoid violating their human rights, even if that meant violating the human right not to be burgled of the people paying their wages.

Dave 'knee-jerk' Cameron for sacking ex-colonel Patrick Mercer from his shadow cabinet for imagined racialism and daring to speak the truth. "The only jerk around here is you, Dave."

Lord Justice Phillips (yet again), who thinks murderers spend too long in gaol.

A resident of St. Anne's, near Blackpool, had 7 tons of sand blown from nearby beaches onto his garden. When he tried to return the sand, Fylde Borough Council threatened him with a fine of up to £50,000, 6 months in gaol and confiscation of his wheelbarrow for 'fly-tipping'.

BT's plan to charge everyone who doesn't pay by direct debit an extra £4.50 per quarter; even people who pay their bill online.

Virgin Media, which charges £15/quarter to non-direct-debit bill payers.

The pals of Lord 'Cashpoint' Levy, who are playing the race card to excuse his involvement in our passenger prime monster's corrupt flogging off of honours.

blair's grovelling apology for the slave trade.

The Ministry of Defence's refusal to give the names of soldiers in need of help to charities like the Royal British Legion on bogus data protection grounds.

corrupt blair labour's accounts for the 2013 Olympic Games.

sir ian blair (no relation), head of the Met and corrupt blair labour's favourite copper, who has surrendered to Attention Seeker Disorder. He's trying to make himself more interesting and worm his way into Great Police Events in the capital. Which is why he included himself in the 1975 Balcombe Street siege of IRA terrorists.
   In an interview published in the Grauniad last year, he claimed he was shot at by the terrorists, even though the records of the incident show he was nowhere near Balcombe Street at the time.
   BFN readers are now waiting eagerly to hear what sir ian said to Winston Churchill during the Sydney Street siege.

 
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Created for Romiley Anarchists' League by workers in revolt against oppression.
Sole © RAL, March 2007.