2008/May    final	Every edition of BFN is compiled in accordance with official 10 Downing Street guidelines on accuracy and veracity.
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SPACE NEWS NASA Dodges Great Martian Gremlin! NASA's Phoenix exploration craft has reached the north polar region of Mars safely after a 9-month trip. It made the first powered landing on the Red Planet for 32 years. The craft slowed itself from 12,000 mph to just 900 mph with atmospheric braking, a parachute cut its descent speed to 120 mph and it fired up 12 thrusters to touch down at a mere 5 mph on a surface free of big rocks.    As a follow-up to the Viking missions of the 1970s, Phoenix will dig into the frozen surface in an attempt to find out if the conditions on Mars were ever right for life to appear. Phoenix came down on level ground, it was able to deploy its solar arrays and it has returned its first pictures of its neighbourhood.    The NASA team is feeling very cheerful after managing to escape the attention of the Great Gremlin, which has gobbled up 50% of the landers sent to Mars. The Phoenix exploration mission is scheduled to last 3 months. In addition to the digging and analysis equipment, the craft carries a Canadian-built meteorological station, which will be used to study the Martian atmosphere.

ELECTION NEWS    Crewe & Nantwich by-election a triumph for brown The labour candidate finished just 8,000 votes behind the Tories, and with 32,000 people withholding their votes in protest against events beyond the government's control, the labour party is dismissing the unfortunate result as a mere glitch.    A somewhat different picture is emerging from the brown bunker at Downing Street, however. An anonymous official seemed to see the Crewe result as an opportunity and applied a quite different spin when she told a BlackFlag News interviewer:    "Really, gordon never wanted to be prime minister but he was bounced into it by that blair bloke so he could go off and make his fortune. Perhaps now, gordon can be allowed to retire from public life to his chosen life's work of glowering at people and picking their pockets."

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CLIMATE NEWS   No reason for them but the swindles continue There has been no nett rise in global temperatures during the last decade and we are back to the same global temperatures observed in 1998. Further, the Leibnitz Institute of Marine Science has worked out that there will be no global warming for the next decade as part of a long-established, natural cycle. But don't expect that to stop scotch gordon and Co. from slapping more 'climate change' stealth taxes on us because governments love the alibi of a good apocalypse story. And just to remind everyone everyone where we are on the temperature map, here it is below: Another labour swindle A study by a professor at King's College, London, has found that Congestion Charging has no effect on reducing air pollution and improving air quality. And reductions in vehicle numbers are offset by the increase in the number of buses on the roads. But then, we always knew it was just another one of scotch gordon's stealth taxes. Biofuel Blight A previously undisclosed hazard of adding biofuel to petrol and diesel is that bacteria can grow in the tanks at a garage, feeding on the bio-component, to produce large, gelatinous blobs, which clog engine filters, increase wear and destroy seals and pipes.    It would appear that the government has a hidden agenda in its biofuel revolution. It plans to reduce vehicle emissions to meet spurious EU targets by putting them off the road awaiting costly repairs. Empty Polticial Posturing The climate changes. Nobody can do anything to influence the direction of change because no one knows how the planet works in sufficient detail. So cosmetic tinkering with carbon dioxide won't make a scrap of difference.    If scotch gordon announces that he has stopped peeing in the swimming pool, it's an empty gesture if 1,100,000,000 Chinese are still doing it. Making the Myth After some miserable weather to start the year, we're now on course for the hottest May on record. Is this a symptom of global warming? Actually, no. We've just had an influx of warm air from the South, which stayed put. It's just normal weather in action. Spit the bones out of this! Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii, have found that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at a record high level of 387 parts per million, which is 40% higher than at the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.    The level has been rising at an average rate of 2.1 ppm/year in the 21st century but the global temperature isn't going up and remains at the 1998 level. Which suggests that there is a whole hell of a lot more to climate change than the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.    p.s. For the benefit of anyone worried about methane: The current atmospheric concentration is 1.8 parts per million, it has remained at this level since 1990, there is no scientific consensus on why this is so, and we don't have to worry about it. "Taxing carbon dioxide just puts money in the hands of corrupt politicians, who can do nothing to stop, or redirect, climate change." Posturing with taxpayers' cash The 3rd World is ripping off the idiots running the 1st World for billions of dollars with bogus carbon reduction schemes. Academics in the United States have taken a close look at the emissions-trading market and found that 3rd World spivs are being paid extra to do things which they would have done anyway, and 1st World governments make no attempt to ensure that the taxpayers' money which they hand out goes on anything planet-saving. EcoWatch says "Beware!" The watchdog, which is keeping an eye on European carbon offsetting and other climate-change related scams, has issued a loud warning about the firms selling 'Eco-lifestyle' products.    "In most cases, they are everything to do with the company's bank balance and nothing at all to do with saving the planet," EcoWatch announced at this month's press conference. "Buying their products has a greater impact on the environment than buying normal, non-eco products, and in many cases, they are just selling relabelled non-eco products.    "One of the worst offenders has to be Bio4Me.web, which is not above using bribery and even blackmail to place its advertising in respectable news organs."

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CRIME NEWS Cops in Conflict? scotch gordon wants to be tougher on cannabis users and dealers. The police say they're going to continue letting them off with a slap on the wrist no matter what the government says. So is scotch going to have to start ordering blunkett Bobby community coppers to arrest real police officers for failing to do their job? Looks like another fine labour mess on the way! It's the way them tell 'em! The labour party refused to do anything about preventing postal voting fraud ahead of the latest round of council elections for a good reason. No, they say, it wasn't to make its worst election day for 40 years look cosmetically better. It was to avoid upsetting the ethnic minorities which do most of the cheating and, just by the way, mostly vote labour. Another brilliant crime-cutting scam Norfolk police officers have been ordered to stop recording acts of criminal damage as crimes to massage their numbers downwards. You couldn't make it up! Not so long ago, usual suspects were sounding off about Britain sleep-walking into a surveillance society. But they failed to make due allowance for good old British cack-handedness.    Surprise! 80% of images captured on CCTV are 'of insufficient quality to be of any use in fighting crime'. So no wonder criminals aren't deterred by the u-bloody-biquitous CCTV cameras. Welcome to brown's Britain The prisons are full again so the inmates are getting out extra early again and the police are being told to delay arresting bad guys so that their records can be lost in the Home Office computer system, making the arrests unnecessary.    Oh, yes. And foreign criminals are being let out of gaol 9 months early, deported and trusted not to return to Britain until the 9 months are up. You couldn't make thisl up, either!

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DEPARTURES Albert Hofmann The man who discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD has died at 102. While looking for new medicinal drugs at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, he identified lysergic acid in an extract from ergot, a fungus which grows on grasses and grains. He made derivatives of the acid for testing; the 25th of them was the diethylamide. Nothing came of the tests and Hofmann moved on. Five years later, however, in 1943, Hofmann resumed work on his own initiative and accidentally exposed himself to a solution of 'LSD-25'.    He experienced the world's first acid trip by accident. Three days later, he gave himself the world's first bad acid trip when he took 250 milligrams of LSD as an experiment. The new drug was tested for possible use in psychiatric treatment, as a truth drug and for mind control in a military context, but was destined to become the fantasy vehicle of hippies, writers and musicians. DEPARTURES Life in Britain under scotch gordon is so bad . . . . . . that illegal immigrants are trying to sneak out of the country because they're upset by the weather and the service they get from the NHS. Perversely, the Home Office, which fails to police our borders to stop them coming in, thinks it should stop them leaving. You couldn't make it up. DEPARTURES Dick Martin The zany star of Rowan & Martin's Laugh In has died at 86. He and his more serious-demeanoured partner spent some 15 years working together in night clubs and on TV shows before their big break in 1967. The Laugh In, with its splendid regular cast, became an American institution, which spawned its own magazine and a film, The Maltese Bippy, which bombed. The show as also a hit in Britain, where it was shown on BBC 2.    When his partnership with Dan Rowan broke up, Dick Martin returned to solo work and reinvented himself as a TV director for the Bob Newhart show and many others. He also took time out from his 20-year directing career to appear in a range of TV show and dramas from Third Rock From The Sun to Baywatch. DEPARTURES Wolfgang Eisenberg (b.k.a. Will Elder) One of the bright stars of the early days of MAD magazine has died at 86. He was an illustrator who loaded his satires & parodies with sight gags, puns and a mass of strange details.    Will Elder served as a map-maker for the US army during World War II, then he moved into the world of comic books with his business partner Harvey Kurtzman. After 4 years with MAD, his long association with Hugh Heffner of Playboy fame began.    Elder & Kurtzman return to MAD briefly in 1986 and Elder retired in 1988. His work has a lasting quality and it lives on in treasured originals and many reprints.

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DOSH NEWS Not taking it on trust! scotch gordon used a battering ram to get david pitt-watson appointed general secretary of the labour party in March. Now, the ingrate had decided he doesn't want the job. Why? Because he's scared that scotch will trick him into becoming personally liable for the party's £20 million of debts. Which just goes to show how much even his own mates trust old scotch these days! Another meddling mess The government's strategy of exposing the Royal Mail to competition from the private sector and closing post offices has produced 'no significant benefits' for consumers, and it has created a 'substantial threat' to the commercial viability of the Royal Mail, an independent survey has found.    Even worse, this happened only because of labour's sheep-like compliance with EU postal directives irrespective of the damage inflicted. Damage which other countries avoid by just ignoring the directives. Cash to burn The European Commission is wasting £1,000,000,000 per year on translating overblown speeches and documents between its 23 different languages. The main supporters of this extravagance are the usual suspects – a hotch-potch of spendthrift socialist, greens and liberals. The poisonous influence of new labour spreads further  • ITV fined £5.7 million for deliberately ripping off viewers for £8 million with premium-rate phone-in scams (So a nice little profit? Ed.)  • The BBC disgraced for hanging on to cash from its major charity multicast and a Eurovision Song Contest scam    The tide of sleaze and demolished standards launched by the blair regime rolls on. The price of maladministration The amount of cash lost to fraud and blunders by scotch gordon's tax credit system over the last 4 years is enough to pay for most of the 2012 Olympic games or give everyone a 5-month Council Tax holiday. "Nurse! She's out of bed again!" Environment minister joan ruddock is insisting that scotch gordon's retrospective doubling of car tax is necessary to save the planet. Don't believe her, she's lying. The cash raised (if there's no rebellion on the labour back benches) will just vanish down the government's Brown Hole at absolutely no benefit to the planet. Hon. Members or Grabbing Bastards? Ashamed of what has come out of their 2nd home expenses claims, which they thought would be kept secret from the public forever, MPs are angling for a 60% pay rise. They want the 2nd home allowance built in to their salary to spare them the embarrassment of having bogus claims exposed. Like scotch gordon being too mean to buy his own TV licence and millionaires claiming £1,600 for having windows cleaned.    Oh, yes. And they also think they're falling behind town clerks in the pay race, and they're feeling taxed to buggery by scotch gordon, so they'd like a top-up to give themselves a nice, round £100K per annum.

HOME NEWS Collapse of brown party A political expert working for a national newspaper has identified what is wrong with the labour party. It's called Colony Collapse Disorder, a disease first observed in bee hives. The only solution is to put down the entire hive and replace it with sound stock from elsewhere. A good reason for kicking the Tories . . . . . . is that their health spokesman, A. Lansley, is in favour of rip-off hospital car parking charges and penalties to raise money for the NHS. A sign of the times? Does it say something about the Conservative party and politics in general after 11 years of new labour, or just the Tories in the Macclesfield area in particular, that they adopted a convicted fraudster as a candidate and got him elected to the new East Cheshire council? Believe us now we're in deep trouble? the labour party says it's going to 'listen and learn' after being hammered in the local council elections. Does that mean we're about to get the promised referendum on the Lisbon treaty now? Or is scotch gordon just lying again? Blame the bloody environment! Why do people go bald? Because of air pollution. A team from the University of London has found that it accelerates the on-set of male-pattern baldness and can block the mechanism which produces hair proteins. So we can expect a flood of polution-zapping products to hit the hair market shortly! Free but you have to pay for it Good News : The BBC and ITV are launching a free HD satellite TV service to contact the parts of Britain that land-based transmitters can't reach. Bad News : The 'free' service will cost you £120 for a Freesat set-top box and £80 for installing a satellite dish. Smug Shredding Why are we not surprised to hear that the details of smug bugger's expenses for his last year in office have been shredded by labour party stooges at 10 Downing Street? We're also not surprised to hear that no one will be sacked for doing it. After blowing £150,000 of taxpayers' cash on trying to keep the details of MPs' expenses concealed, Mr. Speaker, a.k.a. gorbals mick, has thrown in the towel. The campaign to expose the predations of scroungers in public life has won a small victory, but the war is far from won.

HUNTING NEWS    'Tis the season to take pot-shots Grouse don't look forward to August, when toffs starts blasting away at them. The scotch gordon season opened somewhat earlier this year. He has been peppered with the sexed-up dodgy dossiers of Lord Cashpoint, old Two-Jags and Mrs. Cherie Gobb, and he has the teenagers in his Cabinet, and the blairite rejects who were sacked for being so totally useless that it was embarrassing even to new labour, loudly pointing out what a terrible job old scotch is doing.    If it were possible to feel sorry for the old curmudgeon, we would. But as he has spent years insisting he has a God-given right to be prime monster, and he has spent the last 10 months proving how useless he is, it ain't possible to feel sorry for him and we don't. Don't mention the brown (but eyebrows are okay) All mention of our appalling prime monster has been banned by the local labour party in Crewe & Nantwich, which is hoping that the Chancellor will buy them a by-election win with his decision to put the country a further £2,800,000,000 in the red to give some money later in the year to 80% of the victims of the brown 10p tax grab while leaving the other 1,100,000 victims in the lurch. Death by ants! Tiny machine-philic ants are threatening America's ground control stations for its space programme. The ants are just 3 mm long but they congregate in millions when they sense the heat, magnetic fields and sounds made by computers, clogging up fans and other moving parts and shorting out circuit boards.    Millions of ant colonies are conquering new territory in Texas at a rate of half a mile per year, and Mission Control at Houston is in their path. The ants can also set off fire alarms, sabotage pumping stations and sewage works, munch plants and ladybirds, and bite humans. Worse, they are almost indestructible as they can develop rapid immunity to chemical poisons. Comet warning A bloke who paid £800 plus £360 insurance for a TV set at Comet was told 'Tough luck, buy another' when it broke down just 8 months after purchase. He was so incensed that he wiped out fancy TVs worth £5,000 in the Comet store, and received just an 18-month supervision order for causing criminal damage when the court recognized the abuse of his 'uman rights. Going bust big-time Another reason why smug bugger blair baled out is that the labour party has ruined its own finances as well as the nation's. It needs to raise millions to repay loans, but having upset Lord cashpoint big time, that's not going to happen. Which means the party bosses are personally liable for the debts, which raises the spectre of bailiffs hammering on doors in Downing Street, and on the doors of the occupants' second homes, to find out if they've bought anything floggable with their abundant allowances.

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ROMILEY NEWS Polling Day Politics The work to redo the drainage in Romiley Park was supposed to take 6 weeks, which means it should have been completed by the end of March. But the park has been a wasteland since it was wrecked in February – inaccessible and totally abandoned by the council's cowboys.    Not so on polling day! As the park is right next to the polling station at Romiley primary school, it was full of fluorescent jackets on May Day for the voters to see. And deserted again the next day.    But having people standing around, looking as if they might do something, has always been as good as getting the job done, as far as the Triv-Dems running Stockport council are concerned. Despite the flurry of May Day activity, the park still isn't open a week later and it still looks like battleground.

TRAVEL NEWS Rocket-Man Takes Off! Swiss pilot Yves Rossy has taken to the skies again with a new version of his jet-propelled hang glider. The former fighter pilot launched himself from an aircraft at 7,500 feet over the Alps and fired up the 4 jet engines mounted in pairs on his 10-foot rigid wings. He was able to fly at 190 mph and perform some aerobatics before deploying a parachute for his landing.    His earlier test flights include one in June 2004, when the rig had folding wings, which he unfurled in mid-air, and another in September 2006, when he had 2 jet turbines on his rig. His next targets are the English Channel and a flight along the Grand Canyon. Surprise! The reduction of millions of different train fares to just Advance, Any-Time and Off-Peak has taken the predicted turn. The train companies have used the shake-up as an excuse to shove their prices up and some journeys will now cost three times more than they did before 'simplification'. That this swindle was premeditate is evident from the range and scope of the pre-prepared alibis for price rises, which the train companies are trotting out. It's only taxpayers' cash Junkets by ministers and their staff to the Peking Olympics will cost the British taxpayer a cool £250,000.

WAR NEWS When you're stuck, tell a silly story scotch gordon is planning to invade Zimbabwe and turn back the clock to the former colony's Rhodesian incarnation. His battle plans and his dodgy dossier justifying the invasion have all been published in the Mugabe regime's official newspaper.    The only thing that wasn't revealed is where scotch could hope to scare up enough troops for another ill-starred labour party illegal foreign war. Don't you just hate . . . . . . smug messages telling you Windows has successfully recovered from a serious crisis? Wouldn't it be better if Windows didn't keep committing spontaneous suicide and having to resuscitate itself? And forcing the poor old user to waste HOURS putting the pieces back together?

WORLD NEWS 'Dormant' volcano unloads on Chile The volcano Chaitén in Patagonia is supposed to be extinct as there is no record of its having erupted in the last 2,000 years and experts reckon it last blew its top 9,000 years ago.    4,500 people found that the volcano was just lying doggo at the beginning of this month when it sent a vast cloud of ash 20 kilometres into the air. Neighbouring Argentina caught some of the fallout from the ash cloud, which is causing severe pollution of both the air and the local water supply, and closing schools and other public services. Watch out! The European Commission is doing things. The EC thinks it's safe for farmers to feed dead pigs to chickens and vice versa.    The ban on using animal remains in agricultural foods was applied in 1994 at the height of the BSE crisis, which resulted in hundreds of people being infected with variant-CJD through eating contaminated beef. The EC's experts now think the risk of removing the ban is worth the potential human cost as the price of cereal-based animal foods has soared. Dither, Dither, Do It! A week late, Russia has decided that a ticket will serve as a visa for Man U. and Chelsea fans going to the Champions' League final in Moscow. This is something that should have been settled in the week in which Moscow was awarded the event and further proof that the Russian government is a big a bunch of useless ditherers as scotch gordon and his crew! China's Everest gimmick exposed Experts are leaping out of the woodwork to denounce China's pictures of the Olympic torch being taken to the top of Mount Everest as fakes. "If people thought the American Moon landings were shot in a studio, they should check out the Chinese stuff," one such expert told BlackFlag News. "They're not even as good, allowing for the relative technologies, as the stuff the Americans came up with 40 years ago." The lights are going out! Turkey, where cigarettes cost a mere 75p/packet and smoking is considered an essential 'uman right, has fallen victim to the anti-smokists. From this month, smoking will be banned in public buildings, and a ban in cafés, bars, restaurants and all other enclosed spaces will follow in due course. The Turkish government confidently expects to be able to pay off the country's national debt via fines levied on forgetful smokers. Cash for Europe, nothing in return In 2005, smug bugger blair assured us that he had bought a root & branch review of the Common Agricultural Policy's subsidies by surrendering £1 billion/year of the rebate won by Margaret Thatcher.    That 'review' has now been held and nothing is to change. Britain will still pour cash into the EU and get nothing in return, and food prices in Europe will remain 20% higher than world prices to stuff money into the pockets of undeserving French and German farmers. The difference an Olympics makes The totalitarian regime in Burma is quite content to sit back and pretend that this month's cyclone didn't do much damage and killed hardly anyone at all, and everything is under control when it manifestly isn't.    With their Olympics looming, the Chinese regime has been forced to admit that it can't control the forces of Nature and let TV crews in to show pictures of the aftermath of their earthquake. The latest conspiracy theory is that the Chinese deliberately triggered their earthquake to make sure that there would be insufficient strain left to trigger another during their Olympics. Grand Theft Burma The Burmese military regime is demanding $11 billion in cyclone relief from the rest of the world. If the cash is forthcoming, as much as $29 is expected to reach the victims of the cyclone. The rest will be stolen by the government & its cronies, as usual.

	The labour party in the May Day local council elections. The Russian government with its browneque dithering over whether football fans would need a visa (they do) for the Champions' League final in Moscow, the most expensive city in the world. Moscow, for being the most expensive city in the world. Whoever picked Moscow to host the final of a major football tournament. Havant council, which spend 34p on postage, and loads of undeclared money on getting it composed & printed and enveloped, to send a letter to a resident telling them that he could pay a 1p tax bill by instalments. The Rangers fans who wrecked the centre of Manchester and the eager traders who sold them the booze that fuelled the riot. Whoever drew up the rules for MPs' expenses, which let Mrs. Speaker swan around in taxis at the taxpayer's expense. Letting her jaunting be described as "within the rules but excessive" just ain't good enough. The West Midlands police and the Can't Prosecute Service for having a go at Channel 4 for daring to tell the truth about extremist Islamic preachers and wasting £100,000 of taxpayers' money. cherie blair and her alleged embarrassment about her 10 ton truckload of contraceptive equipment; especially as she insisted on telling us about it. The publicity seeking woman who thinks the Yorkshire Ripper should be let out of the looney bin on 'uman rights grounds. The Royal United Hospital, Bath, which has the highest rates of superbug deaths in the country, but which had all the lefty usual suspects leaping to its defence when Lord Mancroft dared to expose its filthy conditions in March. The Oxford, Cambridge & RSA Examinations board, which put the answers to a music GCSE paper in the copyright info on the back! Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the "childrens' tsar", who thinks the police shouldn't be allowed to stop kids and search them for knives in case it antagonizes the little darlings. The notion that scotch gordon phones people, asks them what they think and takes any notice of what they say.

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