2007/July    FINAL	Every edition of BFN is compiled in accordance with official 10 Downing Street guidelines on accuracy and veracity.
Smoking is permitted on this website

EDITORIAL MESSAGE

The buzz-word of the moment is CHANGE. Everyone is using it from plastic celebs to . . . well, more plastic celebs. Change there has to be whether or not it is for the better. So, in this spirit of the times, we at BlackFlag News have embraced the spirit of the sincerity behind these pledges of change and changed ourselves beyond recognition.    We hope you enjoy the new look.

BURIED NEWS Single gender signs are nokay in Spain – Official! The looney left council of Fuenlabrada, near Madrid, has ruled that one-half of all road signs and street crossing signs should show a female figure instead of the current male figures and marching men at crossings. BlackFlag News is still waiting to learn which member of the council owns the local sign-making business. Vitamin of the Month : D A large dose a day of Vitamin D will keep you cancer-free. That's the message from a review of research data published over the last 40 years. Vitamin D is advised to enjoy its popularity while it can because there's bound to be a knocking job along in a short while. See below

CHEEKY BUGGER NEWS   A caff in Leeds is offering fish bits – the scraps of batter that fall off when battered chip shop fish is fried – at £2 per bowlful. Healthy eaters are horrified and fish 'n' chips fans are aghast because fish bits should be free. Meanwhile, in Peking, there was a guy selling steamed buns containing 40% fatty meat. To compensate and make them healthier, the other 60% was pork-flavoured shredded and pulped cardboard, which is 100% non-fattening. To the despair of local slimmers, the police have closed the operation down. The Peking police have arrested one Zi Beijia of the Xinhua news agency on a charge of fabricating his hidden camera report on the above story. Mr. Zi is alledged to have concocted the bun mixture himself and hired migrant workers to make the buns while he filmed them.    Which leaves us wondering what Mr. Xi was charged with. Making a hoax news item is hardly a federal offence. No doubt Mr. Xi's lawyer will point this out before he gets a bullet in the back of the neck. Also in China, where 700,000 people die every year due to pollution, shoppers seek out vegetables with insect bites to ensure that they aren't drenched with pesticides. But cheeky bugger grocers and street vendors are now using ticket punches to clip the edges of leaves to make their products seem more desirable.

CLIMATE NEWS   Go west, everyone! The Environment Agency has decided to give up on the east coast of England. Defending it against floods and coastal erosion is too expensive and the future policy for the area will be one of a 'managed retreat' over the next 20-30 years. What's left of the east coast will be uninhabited and 'abandoned to Nature' by 2035, according to the Agency's latest target. Weather warning! It will rain like mad for the rest of the month, but hosepipe bans will be imposed in the usual areas to make it feel like summer. More unintended consequences! Patio heaters installed at pubs for the benefit of smokers shunted outdoors will cancel out 10% of Britain's carbon dioxide emission reduction pledged at Kyoto. Business opportunity grabbed! Heavy rain in China has caused floods which have driven 2 billion mice out of their burrows in central China. Worse, gangs of the displaced mice are eating crops at the rate of a field per day. But local entrepeneurs have found a way to turn a profit. They're rounding up live mice and shiping them south to Guangdong province, where there are rich people with exotic tastes in foodstuffs. And mice at 40p/kilo have the advantage of being both exotic and cheap. Spit the bones out of this! Producing one kilogram of beef; rearing the beef animal by conventional farming, slaughtering it and transporting the meat to the dining table; generates more greenhouse gas than the amount caused by driving around for 3 hours in a gas-guzzler vehicle while leaving all of the lights blazing at home. Or to put it another way, producing one kilogram of beef is the equivalent of leaving a 100 Watt light bulb on for 20 days. Or so a team of Japanese environmentalists reckons. Spit the bones out of this, too! The National Oceanic & Atmosphere Administration has published satellite data on global temperatures, which shows that they levelled out in 1998 and they have fallen to the 1983 level even though atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are still rising. Probably because the Chinese are bringing coal-fired power stations into service at the rate of 1 every 10 days.    All of which begs the question: "What will all the EU's carbon dioxide reduction scams achieve if rising carbon dioxide levels aren't causing global warming?" Apart from shoving more taxpayers' money into the pockets of spivs. Parallel processes – but are they really linked? The UK Met Office has produced figures showing that rainfall over Britain is increasing decade by decade, as is the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Met Office is now assuming that the two are linked.    BlackFlag News would like to point out that house prices have also risen during the period of the study and, as there is no evidence of a greenhouse effect causing the Earth to heat up in the 21st century (after reaching a peak in 1998, the average global temperature has gone down to the 1983 level), we would suggest that rising house prices are a more likely cause of climate change than greenhouse gases which aren't causing a greenhouse effect. All this weather we've been having, and the floods & everything . . . . . . apparently, it's all due to the wrong sort of jetstream.

CRIME NEWS Unintended consequences of bad legislation From the first of this month, police officers are not permitted to enter premises where a crime is being committed if the perpetrator of the crime is smoking. This is just one of the startling Health 'n' Safety consequences of the new ban on smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke in enclosed places. Fact : Goverment statistics are full of spin and downright lies. Fact : The government says that crime levels are down. Conclusion : The government is lying again. She knows now "I know it's wrong now," our new, lightweight, lady Home Sec. said, talking about her drug-taking at university in the 1980s. So is she trying to say that she didn't know that possessing and smoking cannabis was illegal and therefore wrong when she was at uni? If so she's either lying or stupid. Or she thinks the rest of us are stupid if she expects to be believed. Same old labour, same old story "It was yet another labour party whitewash." That was the common reaction to the Can't Prosecute Service's conclusion that everyone involved in selling cash for honours was innocent. Just as no one was to blame for the Millennium Dome fiasco, the lies told to the nation in the run up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, hounding Iraq weapons expert Dr. D. Kelly to his death, the NHS computer system shambles, etc., etc. It has been pointed out that scotch gordon, as the alleged architect of the last labour general election win, faced being dragged into the witness box to explain what he knew about where the party's election funding came from.    As he couldn't frighten the Tories with the prospect of an Autumn election with a court case hanging over his dour head, the CPS received a nod & a wink – no OBEs if the case ever comes to court. And lo! The case for the prosecution evaporated. Meanwhile, in France . . Ex-president J. Chirac has been questioned by a judge over financial corruption back when he was the mayor of Paris. He is alleged to have paid members of his political party with public funds using fictitious jobs to steal the cash. Other charges include paying cronies, who did no work, as advisors; abuse of expenses; running smear campaigns; and participating in a cover-up by the state after the murder of a French judge in Africa.

DEPARTURES George Melly A bright flare of colour on the jazz and broadcasting scenes has been snuffed out at 80. Singer (he called himself a jazz entertainer rather than a musician), raconteur, wit, author, prodigious smoker and heroic drinker, George Melly was also an expert on Surrealism and the Vorticist movement, a TV critic and performer, and the author of the script of the Flook cartoons, which appeared in the Daily Mail in the previous century. He celebrated his varied sex life in a set of successful works of autobiography, and he did his best to live life to the full to the end. He completed his final album at the double shortly before he popped off, and his last live gig was just last month.

DOSH NEWS Cadbury's time bomb blows up Chocolate firm Cadbury's has been fined £1,000,000, plus costs, for playing dice with the health of its customers. The firm used to operate a 'zero salmonella' policy, under which all products contaminated with the bug were destroyed. Then some cowboy decided to ditch that policy and switch to a 'what we can get away with' scheme to save a few bob.    The scam went badly wrong, Cadbury's has had to destory products worth millions and spend more millions on cleaning up its production processes, and the public is buying other chocolate products, hoping they're safer than Cadbury's salmonella specials. Another swindle by banks & building societies exposed Mortgage arrangement fees, which were £300-500 just two years ago, have been shoved up to a stonking £2,00-3,000 this year. As the actual cost to the bank or building society of the work involved has gone down rather than up, customers are being ripped off shamelessly. The country would have been a whole lot better off . . . . . . if the labour party had spent the budget for the Millennium Dome the unworkable NHS mega-computer system the 2003 Iraq war the 2012 Olympics or the cash wasted on gordon brown's shambles of a tax credit system on flood defences and other projects of lasting value to the British taxpayer. Note: this concept excludes building more houses in flood-prone areas, as scotch gordon is keen to do – as long as someone else lives in these houses. The price of greenness A team at Warwick university has built a 'green' car with its plastic body components made from plans and tyres made from potato starch. They reckon it will do 150 mph on fuel made out of wheat and sugar beet.    Another innovation is brake pads made out of resin with ground cashew nuts as a filler. The team reckons that dust from the brakes will not harm the environment.    What they obviously haven't taken into consideration if the potential for people who suffer from a nut allergy sueing the manufacturers and users of such cars for spewing out nut dust and triggering their allergy. A correspondent writes . . . "Tonight at 3.10 am (28th), whilst wasting my time watching BBC News 24 we were informed by a doe-eyed, empty headed 'journalist' that the cost of the flood damage to the UK is approx 7.5 billion DOLLARS. Far be it from me to query this estimate, it's possibly true, but since when did we in the UK estimate our domestic monies in DOLLARS? Does the BBC know somthing we don't?    "Why not tell us next time the damages in yen? Or maybe Matabelie conch shells? Am I missing something or what? Or is the next phase after those (expletive deleted) YELLOW school buses – a 'gradual' move toward green pound notes with Abraham Lincoln on them?"

GOD NEWS The Pope takes a pop at plastic religions Pope Rottweiler I has declared jihad against Protestants, who do not have a 'proper' religion, and who are therefore not entitled to operated a priesthood and churches. Our new prime monster, scotch gordy broon, is believed to be studying the fine print of the papal rant as, if the Pope is right, the Church of England will lose the charitable status and tax exemptions applied to religions and the government will be in line for a windfall of billions of pounds.    Rival religions are looking on in despair as they see Pope Rottweiler trying to drive the Catholic Church back in time about 600-800 years. TV production companies are more optimistic, seeing opportunities for a whole range of new types of reality TV shows if the Pope brings back the Spanish Inquisition, torture and burning at the stake in his quest to suppress rogue elements of Christianity.

HEALTH NEWS Yawning is okay – Official! A team at New York State University had concluded that yawning is beneficial to the person doing it and therefore socially acceptable.    When people yawn, they are just cooling an overheated brain so that it will work better. It's not because they are bored, they are not listening and they were up half the previous night larking about enjoying themselves.    But anyone who offers an unrestricted view of their tonsils, instead of covering up the yawn with a hand (or both hands if the gob is big enough), remains a rude yob. No smoking in enclosed spaced in England from this month . .. . . . but major studies run by the World Health Organization and the American Cancer Society (theirs lasted 40 years!) have shown that 'passive' smoking does not cause a statistically siginificant increase in the risk of developing cancer.    In fact, genuine evidence of a link between cancer and 'passive' smoking is so lacking that the British government and the EU have had to resort to inventing bogus death rates due to 'passive' smoking.    No wonder trust in politicians and political bodies is at an all-time low.

HOME NEWS Under Same Management but with a different name gordon buggins & the knuckledraggers are now in residence at the Westminster Palais. Duffers do well When m. buckett was the minister in charge of DEFRA, the EU withheld £350 million of subsidies to British farmers because she made such a bog of distributing the cash. She response was to impose a huge cut on the budget for flood defences, and she was rewarded with a promotion to Foreign Secretary.    She was succeeded by d. miliband, who decided not to reverse the cuts in the flood defences budget because he believed that global warming would leave us gasping in droughts rather than drowning in floods.    This month begins with large parts of several counties submerged by floods and the environmentally challenged d. miliband promoted to Foreign Sec. Q.E.D. A coincidence, or what? The Sun is 400 times bigger than the Moon. Water is 400 times heavier than air. Discuss. Who's she think she's kidding? The new Home Sec. has told us that Britain will not be intimidated by terrorists bent on destroying our way of life. But what does that mean? If anything? And has she never heard of inertia? A couple of bombs in London & Paisley have had no detectable effect on the rest of the country. Good News : the government's planning to spend £200 million on flood defences. Not So Good News : but not till 2010; it was just to grab a headline. Big Bang! Shares in British explosives manufacturers are soaring in the wake of the terror scares at the start of the month. Police demolition experts are seizing the opportunity to blow up everything in sight to provide the news media with dramatic pictures of controlled explosions. Solitary packages, bags and briefcases, and stray vehicles, are all seen as fair game. brown clunk The people who have been flooded out of their homes due to the labour party's theft of the flood defence budget have discovered that the broon regime can be shamed into giving them a helping hand. The previous management would just have shrugged and told them, "Tough titty, deal with it." But scotch gordon is desperate to be seen to be vaguely human, so there's cash to be had if the embarrassment potential is high enough. After glowering about in Hull, scotch gordon came up with £14 million to help the 'forgotten city'. Which raises the question, where did he get that number? Are we supposed to think he did some massive calculation to come up with a precise figure rather than going for a round number, such as £20 million? Or is he too mean to part with that much?    Whichever, the people of Hull weren't impressed and he had the interesting spectacle of a scrounging Labour council moaning at a Labour government for being stingy.    Around 28,000 homes and 6,000 businesses were flooded out in Yorkshire. The average repair cost is guestimated at £30,000 pre dwelling. £14 million will fix up just 466 and two-thirds homes. The Tories want to raise taxes on alcohol by 10%. So there's a great reason for not voting for them! Government ministers admit . . . . . . most of them are too stoned on cannabis to know what they're doing most of the time. (Or something very similar.) The only turns they do are Ueys! After years of rubbishing the idea, scotch gordon has decided we need a Border Force to keep undesirables out. But when you peel off the spin, all this brilliant outfit turns out to be is existing customs and immigration officers doing the same jobs but in new uniforms. Worse, the police aren't included.    No wonder people keep saying, "If it comes from labour, it's bound to be crap."

ADVERTISEMENT

Have you got change for a gordon? Garbagegate has. Check us out.

SILLY BUGGER NEWS A DIY step too far! Some paupers are so desperate to change their looks that they are resorting to DIY cosmetic surgery. Going beyond pinning sticky-out ears back with superglue, the DIYers have carried out tummy tucks and nose jobs using readily available kitchen implements and carpentry tools. Things we should be told: The failed suicide bombers at Paisley airport slipped up, apparently, because their vehicle was too wide to go through the doorway they chose. Which leaves us wondering if they were as crap at being doctors as they were at being jihadistas.

SPORTS NEWS The wimps are winning In the good old days of the 20th century, running a mile in under 4 minutes was a really big deal. But in the 21st century, this achievement is going into extinction. Why? Because today's wimpy runners can't manage anything more than 1,500 metres or 93% of a mile. A Nightmare Which Won't Go Away After disqualifying last year's winner for having too much testosterone, the Tour de France organizers hoped to avoid a drug scandal this year. They got away with banning the German rider Patrik Sinkewitz for having too much testosterone in a pre-race sample.    They got themselves into a tangle over Michael Rasmussen, who was holding the Yellow Jersey when people started asking why he hadn't been banned for going missing for 2 off-season drug test appointments (missing 3 is the hanging offence). They got away with it because Rasmussen was being tested more or less every day and coming up clean.    The wheels came off when the injured and much-stitched-together hero Vinokourov was found to have received an illegal blood transfusion before winning the second time trial, and Vino and the rest of the Astana team had to be sent back to Kazakhstan in disgrace.    It looks like the testing system is doing a good job but the cheats still think they can beat it. Bring your own bike and join in! This year's Tour de France came close to running out of riders. They were chucked out by the dozen for real and imagined drug offences and as a result, the Tour's organizers found themselves in danger of being unable to provide a sufficiently impressive peloton for the TV cameras.    Their response to this challenge was to ask fit members of the public to join an unclassified team wearing red, white and blue jerseys (the colours of the French flag) to make up the numbers.    The extra riders were unpaid; they were told that they were just there for the honour of making up the numbers. And they were warned that anyone trying to 'win' a stage would be arrested on the spot and persecuted for an imaginary public order offence. So many professional tourists were chucked out, or dropped out of the Tour, that the organizers had to create a second unclassified team wearing the pale blue and white of the United Nations for the final day on the Champs Élysées.

THINGS OF THE MONTH   JOKE The jihadista idiot who set fire to himself while trying to blow up Paisley airport is whinging about his hospital food. He's sick of getting haggis, bashed neep and tatties for every meal.    "What do you expect?" his doctor tells him. "You're in the Burns unit." CONCEPT This month's concept has to be intrinsic cosmic forgetfulness. Redefinition of the Big Bang theory of the universe's origin is a necessary part of the new Big Bounce theory, which postulates a whole series of successive universes, which expand, contract and then Big Bang to form a new universe. ICF is a consequence of the finding that some data from a previous universe doesn't survive a trip through the Big Bounce and that the next universe will never be a perfect replica of the one before.

TRAVEL NEWS "How dare you criminalize our swindles!" Holiday companies and airlines are up in arms because the Office of Fair Trading has threatened to take them to court if they continue to post misleading prices on their websites. Ryanair, for instance, is offering return flights for a tenner on their front page, but when the customer gets to the actual payment page, the price has shot up mysteriously to £160. Thomas Cook is using the same scam to add £110 to its front-page £162 holidays in Turkey. Unexpected spin-off from terror Glasgow airport's management is being taken to court by the Office of Fair Trading and the Advertising Standards Authority for misrepresentation as the airport actually lies to the west of Paisley (which itself lies to the west of Glasgow) and around 8 miles from Glasgow. The airport's management is blaming the prosecution on the publicity arising out of the terrorist attack at the beginning of this month. Boeing unveils new 'green' airliner The 787 'Dreamliner' is made from recycled supermarket plastic bags to provide a hull which is lighter than aluminium. It has larger windows than a conventional airliner by using transparent plastic bags for those areas.    The big problem for Earth-huggers, however, is that the new aircraft has quieter, more fuel-efficient engines, which will lower ticket prices and encourage people to fly more. The quieter engines will also encourage airlines to schedule more night flights. A new Cold War begins . . . If you're thinking of going to Russia for a holiday, now would be a good time for a rethink. scotch gordon and davey boy, his teenage Foreign Sec., are trying to prove how tough they are by getting into an ass-kicking contest with Vlad Putin, Russia's ex-KGB president. And British tourists are bound to end up in the middle of it. At best, they can expect to be ripped off. The 'at worst' doesn't bear thinking about if Russians are involved. Train travel plans for Britain in 2014 The government's recycled plans are offering more trains, longer trains and bigger stations. Oh, yes. and fares will be 34% higher than they are today, making it cheaper to travel by road. Heap big spy in sky? No way! New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission wants to install new $5,000 GPS systems in all of the city's yellow cabs to let passengers make sure that the driver isn't taking them all round the houses. The scheme will also make it possible to pay a fare by credit card as well as offering information on weather and news.    About one-third of the hack drivers, however, are threatening to go on strike because they think their privacy is being invaded. They don't want the TLC to know where they go when they're off duty, and they most certainly don't want the IRS to know how much they're taking in fares.

WORLD NEWS Bring back the other bloke? Süddeutsche Zeitung thinks scotch gordon's pious tosh in response to the car bombs was 'wooden' and 'tired'. They clearly prefer the reverend b. liar's brand of evangelical hysteria and his talent for making people laugh. Big dog bites small dog in Gaza Hamas, the current top-dog gangsters in Gaza, have bought themselves a small amount of goodwill with the release of BBC correspondent Alan Johnson. He was kidnapped on March 12th by a minor Islamic terrorist gang called the Dogmush Clan [No, we didn't make the name up. Ed.], which succumbed to intimidation by Hamas after holding their prisoner for 114 days. To celebrate, Mr. Johnson went for a haircut and ended up with his head naked & polished. South Africa promises an unforgettable experience? South Africa is the world record-holder for murder, car-jackings and residential robberies, crime figures released this month confirmed. BlackFlag News would like to wish 'good luck' to anyone going there in 2010 for the World Cup. A Toot Up Your Snoot . . . Anyone looking for some free coke is advised to go for a sail in the Irish Sea near Ireland's Mizzen Head, where a drug-smuggling gang tried to land 1.5 tonnes of the stuff. The lazy sods overloaded their dinghy, which capsized a mile off shore. Irish coastguards and the navy are doing their best to collect the hundreds of floating packets of coke, but they're bound to miss a few . . . The next big thing in the wine trade? The EU is currently handing £1.5 billion of everyone else's money to the French & the Italians to get rid of vines, which produce undrinkable plonk. There's too much sloshing around at the cheap end of the market, apparently, and things can only get worse when the Chinese get in on the racket. Canton Cabernet, anyone? The equivalent of a £10/bottle French wine for a couple of quid? Wartime allies reunited in a common cause Neo-nazis in Germany are turning to Japanese revisionistas for tips on cleaning up history, which is the policy of the current Japanese government, which is currently writing 20th century nastiness out of its history books.    The right wing in Japan has decided that all slave labour was recruited from conquered peoples by private contractors, not the military, and the death toll in all massacres has been exaggerated shamefully; which lets the SS off the hook.    Everyone sentenced to death by war crimes tribunals, the revisionistas maintain, was subjected to 'victors' justice' and is now entitled to acquittal and historical rehabilitation. Which means that the relatives of executed Nazis are entitled to massive compensation paid out of EU funds, and the relatives of the likes of Rudolf Hess are entitled to compensation for their decades of false imprisonment    The Japanese have also come up with excuses for the forced suicides, which the Japanese military imposed on client nations in the Pacific when the Americans waged their successful island-hopping campaign to Japan. There is no strict parallel to apply to the Nazis, but no doubt the current generation is sufficiently inventive to come up with something good. While Britain is drowning in floods . . . . . . Greece, Hungary, Italy, Romania and the former Jugoslavia are all suffering devastating heat waves with temperatures in the 40s Centigrade. People are dropping like flies, businesses can't operate in the middle of the day and dodgy developers are starting forest fires in search of new land on which to build. The EU is offering aid to them but not to us. And no one is particularly surprised.

	All this crap about floods being God's revenge for our wickedness and not going to church and filling up the collection plate. "I know that the British people will stand together, united, resolute and strong."    the tosh concocted by scotch gordon's demic of a spin doctor in the wake of the failed NHS terrorist bomb plots. scotch gordon pretending he's giving up powers and 'entrusting them to Parliament and the British people' (apart from the small print). The notion that the 'Live Earth' concerts will do anything to 'save the planet'. The notion that a. campbell's dodgy diaries are any more real than his September 2002 and February 2003 dodgy dossier on Iraq's non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. The BBC, which got itself into trouble for toadying up to a. campbell and plugging his latest dodgy diary dossier relentlessly, then got itself into more trouble for fabricating a story, campbell-style, about the Queen storming out of a photo-shoot by showing pictures of Her Maj going into the photo-shoot. Professor M. Lockwood of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, who produced deeply flawed data to 'prove' that the Sun has nothing to do with how the Earth's climate changes. Radio 4's Today programme, which is biased in favour of EU supporters and gives Eurosceptics just 20% of the air-time awarded to Euro-stooges. Vitamin C – as a counterblast to years and years of spin and favourable publicity, tests have shown that Vitamin C is no good for preventing colds and relieving cold symptoms. Housing minister yvette cooper-balls, the woman who gave us the Home Invasion Pack, is now hell-bent on blowing billions of taxpayers' cash on building thousands more homes on flood plains. This useless labour government's record on building and maintaining flood defences.

page top

Created for Romiley Anarchists' League by workers in revolt against oppression. Sole © RAL, 2007.    Free web counters are available from www.digits.com