Not the Nine O'Clock News

All the news of the past fortnight, for anyone who has been living under a rock. Or inter-railing.

In Britain, all they’ve really been reporting on is the fact that that the country is basically underwater. For the past two weeks. This means that every news broadcast requires that the it place it’s reporters waist-deep in water while they ask a traumatised local if they think the flooding is connected to global warming. Unless you’re Sky News, in which case there’s no way in hell that Kay Burley is standing in flood water after what it’s close relative, The Ice, did to her last winter.

You’re fairly with it regarding the whole Russia/Britain diplomatic spat. While they say it’s been caused by Russia’s refusal to extradite the prime suspect in the Litvenyenko case (ALL things come back to Litvenyenko. For example, the flooding in Britain has been caused by a weather-control device he was sent to Britain to destroy.) the truth is that it all stems from a politico joking that “In Soviet Russia, diplomat expels you!”.

Also making the news repeatedly, Britain-wise, are a number of revelations about TV phone-in/texting competition irregularities, including an awards show on ITV where the public were asked to vote for the winner despite the fact it’d already been chosen (Ant & Dec are said to devastated that the meaning inherent in the first two words of People’s Choice Award are pretty moot as a result), and a number of incidents on the BBC where they used production staff to pretend to be the winners of various competitions. No one has yet answered the question of just what happened with the prizes in these competitions following the fake victories.

On this side of the Irish sea, the three most noteworthy stories have been, in no particular order:
-Bertie and his financial affairs, a matter that no amount of investigators will ever reach the bottom of considering that Mister Ahern’s mentor was one Charles J. Haughey. The man at the top certainly learned from the best when it comes to financial obfuscation and inexplicable memory-loss.
-The Rachel O’Reilly murder case, which caused shockwaves around the country when justice was actually served (despite the trial nearly collapsing at one point when some idiot left documents the jury weren’t meant to see in a room used by the jury) and the murdering bastard got life (i.e. a minimum of 30 years).
-The Rostas family, a clan of over fifty Romanian gyppos, who came over here, not to take our jobs and our wimmen, like most foreigners, but to take our roundabouts. Having set up camp at the Ballymun rang-dabaht (as AA Roadwatch would probably pronounce it) in Dublin, they were deported earlier this week when the Government realised that we had to take tough and decisive action to show these gaijin devils that we will not tolerate the colonisation of our roundabouts. Clearly, we have learned our lesson from the plantations.

Other news in brief:
Plastic bags now cost 22c, cannabis makes you a lot more likely to be psychotic and/or schizophrenic, some twonk at Nasa attempted to sabotage a shuttle for reasons unkown, Jordan has named her new child Princess Tiamii, the Americans dislike Victoria Beckham as much as we do but they kinda like David, phone-masts don’t give you psychic powers OR brain tumours, JK Rowling has begun work on Something New That Is Not Harry Potter, MySpace has purged 29,000 sex offenders from it’s site yet still refuses to do anything about the far worse problem of the emo-kids writing bad poetry and taking pictures of themselves pouting with their eyes obscured by chemically straightened fringes, everyone taking part in the Tour de France is a dope-fiend, the new Mr. Spock is REALLY hot (and a former Hero of the Week to boot), aaaaaaaand President Bush handed power over to Cheney last weekend while he got his ass probed. Again.