2006/April    FINAL

ROMILEY NEWS Same old Trivial-Democrats Our local Triv-Dems have been attending new labour's masterclasses in the art of shedding blame. Their literature for next month's elections blames the government for the shoddy attempt by Stockport's Triv-Dem controlled council to close Romiley's primary school, and it even takes a pop at the last Tory government, which was shuffled out of office 9 years ago.    At least one of the Triv-Dem candidates has the cheek to claim the credit for saving the school when everyone knows it was the school's staff, parents and local residents who did all the work while our 3 Triv-Dem councillors, not to mention our Triv-Dem MP, sat on their hands and did bugger all.    These are the same Triv-Dems who shoved the rate of Council Tax up to the capping limit (making the charge on a Band D property in Romiley £50 higher than the national average); who overspent wildly through financial incompetence but told the Audit Commission it wasn't their fault; who handed out fancy allowances to their councillors, who have failed to collect £7 million of Council Tax, who would rather spend £500 million on another pointless remake to Stockport town centre than keep Romiley's roads and pavements in good repair, who sacked the Romiley Warden and who are never to blame.    On May 4th, "Vote early, vote often, vote for someone else!" Invasion of the crinklies gordie broon, chancellor & PM-in-waiting, thought there might be some votes in giving free off-peak travel to people of 60 and over right away, and free anytime travel from 2008. The only snag is that he failed to cough up the money to pay for the scheme in this year's budget.    As a result, Romiley's motorists are outraged and up in arms because their Council Tax has gone up to pay for part of the cost of letting bus-pass passengers freeload, and Romiley residents below 60 who have to use public transport are also up in arms over fares going up to bridge the gap.

POLITICAL PICKLE NEWS "Quick! Send for the pantomime horse!" The health sec. is booed off the stage for offering spin and labour lies instead of solutions to the NHS crisis, the home sec. is exposed as an idle incompetent, who sat on his hands for 10 months after his department found out that it hadn't been deporting foreign murderers, rapists, paedophiles and thieves for 7 years, it had been letting them disappear into the British underground instead. What do you do about that?    For the labour party's spin doctors, the solution was obvious – chuck the meeja the juicy bone of the deputy prime minister's affair, which includes entertaining the mistress at taxpayers' expense and using her to help out with the election campaign (which is against the civil service code). A scoundrel's last resort Patriotism is the traditional last refuge of the scoundrel, but in the case of new labour's leader and his would-be successor, that hasn't done them any good. Attempts by blair 'n' broon to rebrand Britain, and themselves as genuine patriots, have attracted loud raspberries from the electorate. So broon is off saving Africa again. And he wants £8,500,000,000 from the British taxpayer for this latest attempt to polish up his dull, broon image. BNP set to sweep polls in May According to recent surveys, up to 75% of the electorate in some places will turn away from the traditional parties at the local government elections next month. BlackFlag News is still waiting for the results of a survey which offers to estimate the percentage of people who lie habitually to opinion pollsters. labour party in cash crisis All the people who lent millions to the party and didn't get honours are demanding their money back – plus interest. All suggestions for new cash-raising scams should be sent to the office of the deputy prime minister, where they will be received gratefully. The labour party would like the present temporary prime minister's missus to replay the £7.7 million she charged it for hairdressing during the 3-week general election campaign in 2005. The French government has chickened out of trying to ban smoking in public buildings. They can't face more riots. It has been revealed that new labour had its shredders on overtime in the run-up to last year's general election. Looks like someone ordered a ruthless purge of compromising material just in case, by some miracle, they lost. Who do you think you're kidding, Triv-Dems? 13 months ago, Romiley's 3 Trivial-Democrat councillors were paying no attention to the wishes of the people of Romiley and taking part in a scheme to close the local school. The suspicion at the time was that the prime site at the heart of the village would be sold off to the council's brother-in-law in a dodgy deal. After intense pressure from Romiley residents, and despite the best efforts of the Triv-Dems running Stockport council, the plan fell through. And now, at least one of Romiley's Triv-Dem councillors is claiming credit for saving the school in his election literature.    Which leaves us asking, "Just how bleedin' thick does this political cowboy think we are?"

Suddenly relevant book of the Month: Allah's Thunder by Henry T. Smith Iran posed a serious threat to the world order at a time when the USA and post-communist Russia sought a new world balance of power. Iranian-backed terrorists believed that they had a divine right to kidnap and kill US citizens. An old Russian submarine crashed in the Arabian Gulf. An Americans salvage operation recovered its nuclear warheads and options for revenge became available.    Neville Sangster's CIA think-tank devised a scheme for assassination by earthquake. On the Russian side, a fruitless search for the lost submarine, an Israeli attempt to steal warheads from the United States and Saint Petersburg Seismic Institute's attempts to forecast an earthquake in the central desert belt focussed the attention of General Pugachyov of the Department of Special Operations on Iran.    General Pugachyov saw himself as a man of great vision who was hampered by his department's watchdog – a traditionalist, who would consider his plan an act of supreme lunacy. General Pugachyov preferred to think of it as the greatest engineering project of all time. Vintage : Late 1980s / Category: Alternate history.

DEPARTURES Gene Pitney The man who taught Rolling Stones Mick Jagger & Keith Richards the basics of song-writing has died, almost on the job, at 65. 1960s star Gene Pitney kept his career going right up to his premature death, and he was on tour in Britain when his personal clock ran out. He will be remembered as the guy who was 24 Hours From Tulsa, but Gene Pitney was a singer/song-writer with a sound business sense, which made sure that he enjoyed a good income from publishing royalties when his performing career went out of fashion temporarily. DEPARTURES Silvio Berlusconi from the job of Italian PM The man who won himself a place in the Guinness Book of Records for holding office for 5 years in a country renown for electing a new government at least once a year, is on his way out, kicking and struggling, at the time of writing. As his rival had a winning margin of just 25,000 votes, Berlusconi was demanding a recount, an investigation of vote-rigging incidents, and reclassification of the 45,000 ballots written off as spoilt. He looks certain to be replaced by Romano Prodi, who spent his term as head of the European Commission not doing anything about reforming this terminally corrupt institution. His coalition is expected to last just a month or two before it crumbles. The number of disputed ballot papers had been reduced dramatically to about 5,000, which means there's no way Berlusconi can win. And even the Pope is telling him to push off. The Italian appeal court had decreed that Euro-deadleg Prodi should be the prime minister, but Berlusconi still ain't going anywhere.

WEATHER NEWS There's been rather a lot of it at the start of this month! The 2nd weekend of the month opened with consecutive nights of violent thunderstorms with brilliant lightning over Romiley. Then we had rain degenerating into hail and sleety snow, none of which stuck around, and the twin 'boating lakes' in our mini-park froze over.    Nearby Manchester had the thrill of a 112 mph tornado, which made off with roof tiles, garage roofs and any loose debris it could find. Further afield, soft Southern bastards in Kent & Sussex started a new week under a thick covering of snow.    So whatever happened to global warming? Blue Sky Days in Peking in 2008 The Chinese government has come up with a brilliant scheme to make the air around Peking almost breatheable during the 2008 Olympics. They plan to ban cars in one of the world's most polluted cities and close factories and building sites well ahead of time. They will also mobilize the People's Air Force to seed clouds to produce rain to wash dust out of the atmosphere. In fact, the Chinese are so serious about the clean-up to make their Olympics a success that they're going to try to stop their citizens from spitting all over the place! Global warming is a scam! We have just had the coldest winter since 1924 and a very late spring. So how does that square with this global bloody warming we're supposed to be getting?

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SPACE NEWS Venus Express reaches its destination Launched into space the early hours of 2005/11/09 on a Russian Soyuz rocket, the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft has entered orbit around the clouded planet. Its instruments include leftovers from the highly successful Mars Express, which entered orbit around the Red Planet on Xmas Day 2003 after releasing the ill-fated Beagle II probe. The primary mission of Venus Express is to study the Venerian atmosphere, which is a product of a runaway greenhouse effect, but it will also be looking for volcanoes and other interesting features on the surface.    Lacking a magnetic field, Venus should have had its atmosphere stripped away by the solar wind; as happened to the Martian atmosphere. But if there are volcanoes spewing out replacement gases, they must be pretty impressive ones. Xena's size confirmed by HST Measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed that our tenth planet, discovered in 2003, is only slightly bigger than Pluto. Ground-based observations made Xena some 30% bigger than Pluto based on its brightness. The HST was able to measure Xena's diameter as 1,490 miles compared 1,422 miles for Pluto. This accurate measurement of Xena's size shows that the new discovery is one of the most highly reflective objects in the Solar System.

Spring Bonus BlackFlag News would like to offer its readers yet another literary adventure in the form of Romiley Literary Circle's Story of the month. When The Change-Winds Blow by Eric Custodian    Read the Story on the Romiley Literary Circle website Sword play, magic, deadly sibling rivalry, invasion, a grand battle, treachery, betrayal -- all the classic elements of a good old legend are present in this novella by Eric Custodian. Category : Heroic Fantasy

HEALTH NEWS WARNING!!! As you sit at your computer reading this, you could be on the way to SORE EYES and a STIFF NECK.    Worse, E-THROMBOSIS could be causing a deep vein thrombosis in your leg WHICH COULD KILL YOU!    Customers are advised to clench their thighs and calf muscles while computing and to drink lots of non-alcoholic fluids. Panic!!! Frying things in cooking oil, particularly in vegetable oil, hurls cancer-causing particles into the air. Deep frying is particularly lethal and the nanny state is advising customers to boil or steam their food instead. Can, should, could, might The latest long-life campaign is filled with weasel words and qualifiers as it tells people they could live 11 years longer if they eat lots of fruit, take exercise and give up smoking. Because the 'experts' can't guarantee that their big ideas will work for a given individual and there's always the possibility you might be run over by a bus tomorrow.    [Or killed by one of the foreign murderers new labour has carelessly thrust onto our streets. Ed.]

CRIMINAL NEWS Wot water shortage? Hosepipe bans and other water restrictions are being imposed on the southern half of England but the nation's police forces are being encouraged to put water cannon vehicles on their shopping lists for this year. When challenged about the wisdom of deploying these crowd-control measures at a time of severe water shortage, a Home Office spokesman indicated that, "alternative operating fluids are under consideration". Attention all criminals! Under new Home office rules, you can commit the following crimes and get off with a caution: arson, burglary, causing minor criminal damage, causing actual bodily harm, common assault, pimping, possession of Class A drugs, possession of a sharp blade, sex with an underage person, taking a vehicle without consent, thefts of over £100, threatening behaviour, threatening to kill, throwing fireworks and throwing missiles at a football ground.    new labour would like to keep its voters among the criminal class out of gaol, and using cautions instead of taking criminals to court lets the police seem to be meeting their arbitrary targets for crime-busting without the inconvenience of actually having to do something – in line with new labour's policy of being all flash and no substance.    p.s. It seems ironic that the Serious Organized Crime Agency is opening for business to tackle big crimes as the police are closing their doors on small ones. Not much 'service' from the police service 40% of the nation's police services, including the Metropolitan police, are not prepared to review CCTV tapes to find out if they show pictures of a crime being committed. "Our officers simply don't have the time to collect and check CCTV tapes," a spokesman for the Met commented. How to avoid speeding fines – register your car at a 'mass-mailing' address so that speeding tickets go to an accommodation address and the police can't track you down at your actual address. "Bung me or you're nicked, mate." Scotland Yard's finest are using the tactics that work on criminal gangs to find out which labour party fixers have been promising honours in return for cash donations and loans. Their methods include arresting suspects with full publicity, which is what happened to Des Smith, who used to recruit sponsors for city academies until he told an undercover reporter that sponsors could expect an OBE, a CBE, a knighthood or even a peerage, depending on the size of the contribution.    Mr. Smith is now being turned into a non-person by new labour's character assassination department. And Lord Levy, a main focus of police interest, is threatening to spill all he knows as a bargaining tactic to force new labour to 'make it all go away'. "We read you loud and clear!" In Iran, where there are no human rights, anyone who sends a text message which mocks the president and/or the regime is harassed by the police. Britain has a Human Rights Act, so the regime doesn't admit that it monitors the SMS, and anyone harassed by the police has to work it out why it's happening for himself or herself. Ikea in Giltbrook, Notts, has put an end to crime in their car park by hiring a team of ex-Gurkhas as security guards. home sec. charlie what's-his-face is believed to be considering following in the footsteps of the Chinese regime, which is killing criminals to order to allow their organs to be sold for transplantation. A similar scheme here could ease the prison over-crowding problems caused by new labour's failure to build more gaols. It could also be used to generate some cash to hand to new labour's supporters – or even cash to be used for state funding of political parties, something which our attorney general and the present temporary prime minister's former flatmate, lord forkbender, is reported to be 'eager to embrace'. The De Montfort University, Leicester has been caught cheating at its exams. It added up to 14% to the scores of a class of first-year pharmacy students to avoid the humiliation of having to fail over half of them. The information emerged under the Freedom of Information Act only after a court battle with the Times Literary Supplement as the university tried to keep its dodgy doings quiet. The Ministry of Defence has found that young criminals who have done gaol time are better recruits for the armed services than the average, undisciplined couch-potato teenager. The home office has released 1,000 foreign prisoners 'into the community' instead of deporting them. The Scotland Yard team investigating peerages for loans is splitting off a unit to investigate allegations that the prisoners won their liberty by bunging the labour party in secret. Full steam ahead all the time! A bloke in Colorado, who found himself eternally 'running late', bought himself a gadget on the Internet to turn his traffic lights green when he approached a junction. The gadget, similar to the ones used by emergency services, served him well for 2 years. Then traffic engineers began to study videotapes after being drowned in complaints about traffic disruption.    They soon spotted Jason Niccum's pickup truck and turned him over to the police. They confiscated his gadget, which cost him $100 on eBay, and he was fined $50 for interfering with traffic signals. Still, $150 for 2 years' delay-free motoring sounds like a pretty good deal.

WAR NEWS Yes, he was lying about the war It's official – our current temporary prime minister was lying when he said invading Iraq in 2003 made us safer. A leaked memo from the Joint Intelligence Committee, which knocked out the infamous Dodgy Dossiers under John Scarlett's dodgy leadership, says that war will leave the British people at risk "for many years to come". And another leak from the Home Office has confirmed that the above war was one of the excuses for the suicide bomb attacks, and attempts, last July. The Ministry of Defence is trying to frighten the widows of servicemen killed in Iraq as a result of the Bush/blair illegal war out of taking the government to court for negligence. The widows are being warned that if they do get compensation for a husband killed as a result of a lack of body armour, or other MoD penny-pinching or incompetence, their pension will be slashed by a corresponding amount. An RAF doctor was sentenced to death for treason after his conviction at a court martial for failing to obey an illegal order to join in the illegal war in Iraq. Luckily, his life was saved when the firing squad refused to obey an illegal order to shoot him.

NOT CRIMINAL NEWS "No copyright on ideas, mate!" The authors of a load of tosh published 20 years ago have blown a huge wad of cash on trying to suggest that the author of the Da Vinci Code, a contemporary load of tosh, stole their big idea. They chose to sue their joint publisher, Random House, rather than the rival author. And in the end, the court blew a huge raspberry in their direction.    "He nicked our idea, M'lud," they complained.    "Not subject to copyright," said the judge. "You lose, next case." The best way to annoy your neighbours . . . . . . is to buy your kids a trampoline. The sight of little heads appearing and disappearing behind a fence or a hedge is guaranteed to drive neighbours to distraction as they try to work out what they're doing that the little blighters are spying on.

LIKE ANYBODY CARES The Song For Europe is a fix! A bloke in Glasgow has analyzed the voting in the Eurovision Song Contest and found there's a lot of cheating and collusion going on. Greece & Cyprus vote for each other and give 'nul points' to Britain. Ireland, Holland, Malta and Croatia is another voting alliance which gave Ireland wins in 1992, 1993 and 1994; to the dismay of the Irish TV authorities, who had to stage the wildly expensive event 3 years on the trot. Britain has kept its hands clean for over 25 years, which comes as something of a surprise, given the generally grubby nature of our government over the last 9 years.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT Crooks In Action As a public service, Jenson Farrago is offering access to his collection of bogus lottery, phishing and other email spam. CLICK HERE to find out what miracles they offer.

HOME NEWS What you see is what you get! Anyone looking at the Scottish Parliament building just knows it's a crap design, despite all the lavish praise heaped on the designers. This point has been driven home by the recent revelation that large areas of most of the windows in the glazed corridors can't be cleaned. Staff can't get near them because of large beams parked in front of them! Forget Polish plumbers – we'll be inundated by Bulgarians and Romanians (the guys responsible for most cash machine robberies) next year as the European Union is planning to let these further pauper nations enjoy the hospitality of the British taxpayer from 2007/01/01. Attention trouble-makers in the South of England! If you want to get even with an obnoxious neighbour, the water companies have made it dead easy. All you have to do is go to the website of a company which has imposed a hosepipe ban and accuse the obnoxious neighbour via an anonymous email. Don't Panic!!! If you see someone in Islamic costume wearing goggles and lurking about on a river or canal bank, don't be alarmed. It's only the Environment Agency patronizing Moslem women and paying them to try out angling. Fallowfield Library in Manchester has had to hire a team of bouncers after local yobs began attacking the building with stones and eggs, and broke more than 50 windows. "A peaceful atmosphere has been restored," a council spokesman reported when the bouncers had been deployed. Quickie Degrees For All Five universities are offering to compress a 3-year degree course into just 2 years. Kent, Leeds Met, Derby, Staffs, and University College Northampton will be running the courses as a trial. CLICK HERE if you want to get a degree in no time at all and with almost no effort. 0870 rip-off to be stopped – eventually Ofcom is to prevent companies, the BBC and government departments from profitting from 0870 phone calls at a 'national rate', which includes 2.5p/minute for the operator of the scam. That's the good news. The bad news is that it won't happen until the beginning of 2008. The latest hobby of yobs in Bristol is scattering bird food in bus lanes in the hope of seeing seagulls and pigeons run over and splatted. blair Broadcasting Company turns blind eye BBC TV informed its viewers about the charlie clark blunderings at the Home Office and the hewitt catastrophe at the Dept. of Health. But is has been very coy about the prescott's sleaze affair. And the breakfast programme on BBC 1 on the last Thursday of the month chickened out of showing the front page of the Daily Mail, which featured the dpm lugging his social secretary around like a sack of spuds!    Apparently, mentioning what prescott had been up to, particularly entertaining his ladyfriend at the taxpayer's expense and getting an allegedly impartial civil servant to help out with last year's election campaign, didn't fit in with the BBC's left-wing political agenda. A similar sort of thing happened when former Home Sec. dave blunk messed up big-time, so no surprise there. Spit the bones out of that! Barnet council in North London incurred the wrath of London Mayor Ken Livingstone by ripping up its speed bumps, widening roads and generally making the borough traffic-friendly, easy to navigate and less likely to kill patients in ambulances. Livingstone cut their budget but the council has been vindicated – road accidents there have fallen by twice the average rate for the rest of London, and Barnet has met its arbitrary target for accident reduction 4 years early!

The Man Who Stole Your Pension The man who is taking £7.3 billion per year out of private pensions can look forward to a personal pension of £100K per year – adjusted upward for inflation when he finally leaves us in peace. To get the same pension in the private sector, he'd need a pension pot of £3 million, which would be taxed at 55%.

DOSH NEWS April Fool Dental Tax On April first, the cost of checkup by an NHS dentist went up from £5.54 to £15.50, which is three times more. The cost of a filling went up fourfold to £42.40 and the price of a gold crown doubled to £189. "Your chequebook is no good, madam!" The ASDA supermarket chain is taking the first steps toward refusing to accept cheques at its tills, a move which Shell made at its petrol stations in September last year. Tesco has announced that it will continue to accept cheques from disgusted former ASDA shoppers. 0870 Rip-Off More and more government departments are using premium rate 0870 phone numbers for their 'help' lines. Callers are charged 10p/minute on landlines, and up to 35p/minute on mobiles, to use these numbers, and as the operator of the premium line gets a slice of the income, it is in their direct interest to mess the caller about for as long as possible. new labour raked in an estimated £18 million from this swindle last year, and more government departments are being switched to premium rate numbers every month. Another happy-time for lawyers Following the Office of Fair Trading's ruling that all penalty charges on credit cards, bank accounts, store cards and mortgages over £12 are an illegal rip-off, the legal profession is rubbing its collective hands over the prospect of plundered customers claiming back the excess over the £12 backdated for 6 years! In the meantime, the OFT is keeping a close eye on the banks to make sure they don't bulk up their illegitimate profits with Stealth Charges and dirty tricks like ending 'free' banking. It's all about the money II Art teacher Susan Storer's attempt to sue Bristol city council and her former school for £1 million for constructive dismissal and sex discrimination (see last month) because she had to sit on a chair which made farting noises has been binned by her employment tribunal, which ruled that she could have got herself another chair as she had the authority to buy a new one without consulting anyone – but she didn't. Banks & building societies running Stealth Charge scam Mortgage providers are reducing their rates to eye-catching levels to persuade people to move their mortgages while applying eye-watering arrangement and exit fees. These fees, which can be up to 75% higher than last year's, remove any financial benefit from a change of mortgage provide, making a mockery of the pretence at competition. "No, not for the money, no way!" dpm prescott's secretary, indignant at the way she was treated and being 'hung out to dry', has sold her story to a Sunday tabloid, probably The News of the Screws. But she did it only to put her side of the story on the record and definitely not for the money.

WORLD NEWS Too much time on their hands? The sneaky sods in the Europe Union are trying to bring back their constitution by the back door, despite ringing rejections by French and Dutch voters. And who's standing on the sidelines cheering them on? None other than the prince of sleaze Peter Mandelson, who seems to be finding the 'demands' of his overpaid post as trade commissioner under-occupying his time. Snappy story? A bloke called Brewer in L.A. (where else?) has been put on probation for 3 years for dumping a 7-foot alligator called Reggie in a park. The beast evaded capture for several months, forcing the city to spend $155K on increasing security to protect park users from being chomped by Reggie. L.A. has decided to sue Mr. Brewer for as much of the cash as it can get, which makes selling the movie rights to his story a matter of urgency for Mr. Brewer. Global Warming scams exposed Professor Carter of James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, is doing his best to puncture the myth that global warming is man-made and something which politicians can control by throwing taxpayers' cash around. His work shows that: • The global climate changes naturally; • We should be more worried about a sudden plunge into Ice Age conditions than about high temperatures; • Periods of warming during spells of intense industrial activity are matched by warm periods in the past with no human cause to blame; and • The global temperature didn't go up between 1998 and 2005, when the shouting was at its loudest. Massive telecom scams exposed A bloke in Malaysia has been landed with a phone bill for £125,000,000,000,000! Yahara Wahad disconnected the phone line after his father died in January of this year. Malaysian Telecom says the bill is for recent calls. The company is not sure if the amount of the bill is a mistake or 'due to illegal use of the phone line'. Assuming 'recent' means within the last couple of months, that means Malaysian Telecom thinks there's a premium rate operator charging at least £142 million per minute. Which says quite a lot about the quality of the people working for the company! "Sorry, our call centre cannot take your call." Moving call centres to India seemed a good way for British companies to save money and annoy their customers. The customers became even more annoyed this month when the system collapsed following the death of an ancient Bollywood star. Thousands of his fans skived off work in Bangalore to join riots in the streets, which left a further 4 people dead. Australia's environment minister is being showered with derision over his decision to ban a 52-turbine wind farm on the grounds that it might just kill one of the region's rare orange-bellied parrots per year. The Swedish equal opportunities ombudswoman wants her national team to drop out of this year's World Cup finals as a protest against the vast number of Swedish prostitutes heading to Germany for a working vacation. Residents of San Francisco are scaring themselves as they remember that the earthquake, which caused the fire the destroyed the city 100 years ago this month, WILL BE REPEATED!!! Gazprom, the gas supplier controlled by the Russian government is threatening to cut off the supply to Western Europe if it is not allowed to buy Centrica, the parent company of British Gas.

YOU COULDN'T MAKE THIS UP, BUT . . . Sick Building Syndrome has been dismissed as rubbish by scientific studies, so it seems fitting that there are people making money out of 'curing' it with acupuncture. The 'expert' checks out the allegedly sick building with a dowsing pendulum or a special meter which reads the building's 'aura', then he/she drives 18-inch spikes into the ground around the building to sort out its problems! The disastrous head of the Metropolitan Police, sir ian blair (no relation) has come up with another brilliant idea. He'd going to question all of his coppers to find out how many homosexualists he has on the payroll. And if the figure is less than 12½%, he's going to target them for recruitment along with ethnic minorities, the disabled, the elderly, the sick and any other minorities he can think of. "What's wrong with me, Doctor?" "What would you like to be wrong with you, Mr. Smith?" The pharmaceutical companies stand accused of 'disease-mongering' – inventing diseases then pushing high-priced drugs to 'cure' them. Restless legs, bad behaviour in children, a crap sex life, lack of self-control – absolutely anything is fair game for a pill-pusher with a profit target to meet. Illegals on the rampage Millions of illegal immigrants to the USA have been holding protest marches about a proposed new law, which will make illegal migration a criminal rather than a civil offence. The INS seems to have been out to lunch while all this was going on. "We regret this flight has been postponed . . ." A flight to Tenerife had to be rescheduled on another aircraft, involving a 4-hour delay, thanks to a mobile phone. The captain had just told the passengers to switch off their mobiles when he dropped his own mobile and it disappeared through an opening in the cockpit floor. The plane was grounded for 'safety reasons' until fitters could take up the floor panels and retrieve the offending phone. "Mumble, mumble." Fat johnny prescott thinks Marlon Brando would be the ideal bloke to play him in a biopic. As Brando is famous for his incoherence, not to mention ballooning to the size of a house, why not? Warning, booze might be bad for you! The government which forced extended pub hours and 24-hour drinking on us is now planning to put health warnings on alcoholic drinks along the likes of the 'Smoking Kills' messages on fag packets. Unlikely bosom buddies new labour and the BNP seem to be on the point of entering an era of co-operation, support and mutual admiration. new labour's contempt for law-abiding citizens, and the party's eagerness to throw cash at non-British infiltrators at the expense of the native population, is persuading its voters that they'd be better off if they switched to the BNP. At the same time, the BNP provides new labour with scary monsters to frighten their less wobbly, wavering supporters in a fine Circle of Doom. How's this for a Euro-swindle! The European Court has ruled that a man, who had operations to make him look like a woman, can start drawing a pension when he reaches 60, even though he is described as male on his birth certificate and he's not eligible for a pension until he hits 65. Art, not terrorism! Honest! A woman with delusions of being an artist has been planting packages in Hammersmith and Shepher's Bush in London. She thought she was creating an installation. The police thought the city was under terrorist attack and cordoned off the areas around the packages for several hours, causing severe disruption to the lives of the people in the area. The 'artist' was duly busted when she admitted her crime.

	Greater Manchester Police hauled a 10-year-old boy into court for calling a schoolmate 'Paki' and 'bin Laden' during playground argy-bargy. The judge stopped the trial to let the Can't Prosecute Service think again. GMP is currently under investigation for bringing anti-racialism laws into disrepute. DEFRA's lackadaisical approach to the arrival of bird flu in Scotland, and the government's secret plan to deny Britons abroad access to antivirals. George Bush's plan to nuke Iran (if he doesn't invade the place) and our temporary prime minister's failure to do anything to discourage Bush's mad ambitions. gordie broon's mission to educate Africa. He keeps failing to grasp is that what Africa really needs (like Britain) is honest government, not self-serving foreign politicians shoving more of their taxpayers' cash into the pockets of dictators and their criminal associates. The RAF doctor who refused to go to Iraq could have been fined instead of sent to gaol for 8 months, but the judge wanted 'to send a message' to others. So instead of handing out the sentence which the accused deserved, he chose to increase its severity. Where's the justice in that? new labour imposed the EU Human Rights Act on Britain then rushed through Parliament, badly drafted anti-terror laws which breach the HRA, in the opinion of some judges. Now, the Home Office can't withdraw the passport of a terror suspect as, apparently, a dotty old judge think having a passport is a human right. new labour health sec. praticia hewitt insists that the NHS deficit is an insignificant fraction of its annual turnover and nothing to worry about. Yet she's not prepared to hand over this 'insignificant fraction' in hard cash to stop NHS staff being sacked and hospital closures. Why? lord forkbender's ban on the word 'homosexual' in matters to do with selecting judges on the grounds of his eccentric belief that homosexualists consider the word derogatory. health sec. pratty hewitt's claim that the NHS is enjoying its best year ever if staff are being sacked and hospitals are closing departments. The jobsworth at West Midlands Police, who slapped a ban on the BNP when they wanted to play Rule Britannia from their election campaign bus. The notion that the weekday edition of the Daily Mail is worth another 5p. "I am responsible for the Home Office's screw-ups but not in the sense of being to blame. Rather, I am responsible for putting them right." – Home Sec. charlie clark, 2006/04/26.

This edition of BlackFlag News was compiled in accordance with official 10 Downing Street guidelines on accuracy and veracity.

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