Twenty-three-year-old Dominique Pleasant is sitting nearby with her two daughters. They’re all drinking cans of cola. Like more than a quarter of people in the Bronx, Dominique qualifies for food stamps. “Food stamps is free money from the government to purchase food,” she explains. Thanks, Beeb! I couldn’t have illustrated it better myself! But what this is really about is a potential ban on the types of things you can…
…why do so many people claim that they have, when they haven’t? A parents’ group claims members have been denied their freedom of speechafter a school suspended its forum.Forum chairwoman Debbie Woudman said: “I feel like we’ve been chopped off at the knees. We were asked to form this group because the school wanted people to engage and we have tried every which way to do that. “It feels like…
Pupils at Southbroom Infants School in Devizes were astonished to turn up at school to find police had cordoned off their classrooms. They were even more amazed when they were told an alien spacecraft had crashed there and officers needed their help to trace the captain of the extraterrestrial ship. *sigh* Not again? I suppose one saving grace is that at least, real police were’t involved this time. PC Adam…
It appears to be chock full of loons: “3.1 Everyone in, or aspiring to, a position of public responsibility and everyone in a position to influence the public, including entertainers etc, should be asked to sign a voluntary pledge not to take illegal narcotics or consume excessive alcohol, or drive when so affected.3.2 Anyone who fails to sign that pledge, or who signs it and breaches it, should be excluded…
Barbara Ehrenreich on the ‘unfair costs’ faced by the poor: … as Businessweek helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them. Boooo! Eeeeeevil corporations, targeting the people who, errr, can’t pay for their goods! Wait. What? It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. It isn’t? Oh. OK. Just how…
Police forces struggling to make 20 per cent cuts face spiralling costs to pay for caging “devil dogs” under the Government’s crackdown, ministers have admitted. But don’t worry! Our useless government has a plan! Agriculture minister Jim Paice said he hoped the figure would fall to about £1.1million a year as the number of prosecutions dropped. He also claimed the costs would be offset by a £490,000 saving from allowing…
Clearly, it isn’t to ensure someone performs the basics of a civilised society: A dead dog was removed from the River Thames by a distressed volunteer after authorities left it floating for more than two weeks. And this is Kingston! Clearly, twinned with any Third World unsanitary hellhole you care to name… The volunteer for DogLost, a website for lost and found dogs, said she approached the RSPCA, the Environment…
A music producer whose songs have appeared in Hollywood films asked for a £5,000 tree outside his house to be cut down because it was interfering with his solar panels. Ahahahahaha….! But, as with most local news stories, it wasn’t the whole story: Producer and recording artist Steve McIntosh, whose songs have appeared on Sex and the City and Scary Movie 3, listed the reason as among those for removing…
John Low argues against the Polly Toynbee attack on tax relief for charity donation: Culture and the arts enrich our lives and society, but the government is not able to cover the full cost alone. I’d argue that culture and the arts aren’t suitable things for the state to ever involve themselves in, frankly. And if millionaires want to subsidise it, fine! It is, after all, their money… Whatever the…
Richard Stallman on e-books and the restrictions they don’t share with traditional books: I love the novel The Jehovah Contract, and I’d like everyone else to love it, too. I have lent it out at least six times over the years. Printed books let us do that. I couldn’t do it with most commercial ebooks; it’s not allowed. And that’s not the only issue. Many other habits that readers are…
When I saw this report, I had to double-check the date to make sure it wasn’t someone at the ‘Mail’ jumping the gun with an ‘April Fool’: A Government initiative to test school literacy levels will see more than 500,000 six-year-olds asked to read ‘words’ such as jound, terg, fape and snemp. During the summer term, teachers will sit down individually with every Year 1 child and ask them to…
Pupils at primary and secondary schools across Brighton and Hove will be given “early intervention” lessons to prevent abuse. The lessons for boys and girls from six years up will teach them not to hit, to be nice and how to build healthy relationships, as part of a £500,000 council strategy to cut domestic violence in the city. I’d have thought that would be better spent on teaching them to…
A beehive sculpture costing thousands of pounds has been removed from a public park after complaints it looked ‘too rude’. We aren’t shown a ‘before’ photo, but we can imagine… Award-winning sculptor Thompson Dagnall – who was paid around £3,500 for the work – said a Tameside council boss told him the design was too ‘phallic’. *sigh* Mr Dagnall had originally carved an intricate metal bee on a wooden orchid…
…but not surprised: A local newspaper is being investigated by police for allegedly ‘inciting racial hatred’ over a billboard headline about a proposed gypsy camp. *sigh* Here we go again… Officers have handed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) about the Western Mercury’s billboard poster – reading ‘Gypsies could be on your doorstep’ – which had been placed outside newsagents across its circulation area. And who objected? Well,…
Police are teaming up with pubs in Hucknall town centre to refuse entry to anyone found to have traces of drugs on their hands. So, better not handle any money, shake hands with any dodgy people, push open any shop doors…well, not if you want a drink, anyway! The testing works by swabbing the palm of the hand with a piece of card which is placed into a machine and…
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